Aaron Levie

Aaron Levie
Levie at a speaking engagement in 2011
Born	Aaron Winsor Levie 32–33 Boulder, Colorado, U.S.
Residence	Los Altos, California, U.S.
Alma mater	University of Southern California
Occupation	CEO at Box
Known for	Co-founder of Enterprise Cloud Software Box
Website	www.box.com

Aaron Winsor Levie (pronounced /ˈærən ˈlɛvi/) is an American entrepreneur. He is the co-founder and CEO of the enterprise cloud company Box.

Aaron Levie was born to Ben and Karyn Levie and is from Mercer Island, Washington, a small suburb of Seattle. Levie attended the University of Southern California before taking a leave of absence in 2005 to start cloud storage company Box.

The idea for Box originated as a college business project that Levie was working on in 2004. The project examined cloud storage options for businesses and after contacting several organizations to ask how they are storing their content and data, Levie came to the conclusion that the market was fragmented. Levie saw an opportunity to build an online file storage business as a way for individuals to access and store documents and files.

In December 2005, during his junior year at USC, Levie took a leave of absence to launch Box (originally called box.net) with his friend and Box CFO, Dylan Smith who was attending Duke University. At the time, Box was a storage service where users could pay to store their files in the cloud.

Levie and Smith incorporated Box in April 2005 while operating the company out of Smith’s parents’ house on Mercer Island. Soon after, they moved the company to Berkeley, California. Levie and Smith first secured angel investment for Box from Texas billionaire Mark Cuban after a cold e-mail.