A question is can we change the

nature of work? Can we make work

faster? Can we make work simpler?

Can we make work more enjoyable?

Can we get people out of the

challenges that we're so used to,

which is, how hard it is to find

information to collaborate in

real-time, to make decisions

with other people, to get

everybody organized in your

company?

That's Aaron Levie, CEO of Box,

the content management and

collaboration platform that

reaches more than 95,000

businesses around the world.

Aaron started Box out of his

dorm room at USC, and then

dropped out of school to run the

company full-time with his co-

founder and childhood friend,

Dylan Smith. At just 20 years

old, they made the bold move to

cold email, Mark Cuban and

brought him on as their first

angel investor. In 2015, they

took the company public and Box

is now worth more than $3

billion. Aaron was named

Entrepreneur of the Year in 2013

by "Inc. Magazine" and is an

industry veteran with over 2.4

million followers on Twitter.

Aaron's story and mission have

always been an inspiration to me.

It's an honor to sit down with

him and decode his vision for

building products that enable

people to achieve their greatest

ambitions. This is Daniel Saks,

Co-CEO of AppDirect, and it's

time to decode viral enterprise

growth. Welcome to "Decoding

Digital," a podcast for

innovators looking to thrive in

the digital economy. I'm your

host, Daniel Saks. I'll sit down

with other founders, CEOs, and

changemakers to decode the

trends that are transforming the

way we work. Let's decode.

Aaron, welcome.

Hey, thanks, man. Thanks for

having me.

Great to catch up. In a lot of

ways, you have the classic

Silicon Valley founder story.

You started Box in your dorm

room at USC, dropped out of

college, then 10 years, later

took the company public. Looking

back, did you always know that

that was the path you wanted to

take?

We started the company...

It was born out of our own

personal challenges that we were

running into in college around

sharing files and collaborating.

We ended up doing some research

and identified that there was a

much bigger market that we could

go after. This was back in 2004.

If you think all the way back

then, the way that most people

commonly shared their files was

you would email yourself files,

you had USB thumb drives, you

had to set up lots of server

infrastructure to be able to

manage data. We felt like there

had to be a simpler way to be

able to work from anywhere, be

able to access files from

anywhere. We built this

application. Fortunately, it

struck a chord in the market.

People started signing up and

using it more actively. We then

were able to raise some early

angel investment from Mark Cuban,

and that led us dropping out of

college. Then 15 years later,

this is where we're at. The

idea was really, "Let's go and

solve a really big problem," one

that we personally were running

into but ultimately one that

ended up being much bigger than

we even imagined as we were

getting started.

You've been legendary when it

comes to building a brand, Box

is always the SaaS service that

I always called out as being the

leader in building a brand and

driving clarity of purpose for

enterprise software. Can you

explain? Was that done

deliberately? How did you think

about it?

I appreciate that. Maybe it's

working. When we started Box, it

was very early in the evolution

of SaaS -- software as a service --

and cloud computing in general.

What we realized was, we had to

find a way to get enterprises to

rethink what they define as

enterprise software and what the

future of work was going to look

like. We realized that we were

competing against these massive

incumbents and became this that

competing with us was much

greater distribution, much

larger sales teams, a large

incumbency in terms of the

customer-based that they had.

We realized that the only way we

were going to turn that around

was by trying to get people to

imagine a different way that we

could look in the future.

Effectively how we thought about

building our brand was, "Let's

go and redefine what the future

of work looks like, especially

the end users and the business,

not just IT. Let's get the users

excited about what the future

can look like in terms of how

work can become much simpler,

and people can work together and

collaborate much more

effectively." That's where we

built our brand from. Now, we're

excited because there's many

other players in this ecosystem

broadly of companies like Zoom

and Slack. Other companies have

entered the sphere to help

accelerate this message of work

doesn't have to be complicated.

Software doesn't have to suck.

You can have simple end-user

experiences. We can make it

easier to get work done in the

enterprise. That was the origin

of the company. It was to try

and bring that kind of consumer-

grade disruption to enterprise

software. It's been exciting to

see that that has taken on a

life of its own at this point.

It's incredible. In 2005, if you

think back to work software, we

were both still young, but it's

clunky and tough. You look at

how many companies have been

built around your ecosystem.

It's truly amazing as well.

It's been fun. I do consider it

very unfair that I'm the only

one that seemed to get gray hair

out of this whole thing, but it

has been a fun journey. It's

great that enterprise software

has gotten so much better for

users. That was the whole intent

of business to begin with. We

consider it mission accomplished

on that dimension. Now, when we

look out at the market, there's

still so much more opportunity,

especially when you look at

things like, unfortunately,

COVID, from a health standpoint,

has been the catalyst for this.

Ultimately, this new era of work

where we know that businesses

are going to be more distributed,

more remote, collaboration's

going to look very different in

the future. Even though we're

15 years into this, we recognize

how early we are in the broad-

scale transformation that's

going to be happening in

businesses.

It's incredible that you've lead

the charge of transformation to

SaaS. With your thoughts around

the future of work, early days,

where in the next 15 years do

you think Box is going to be,

and where do you think SaaS is

going to be?

I'm glad that you're giving me

full credit for all of that.

I'll take as much of it on this

podcast as I can get. Certainly,

we're collectively amongst a

broader ecosystem of players

that have been creating the

landscape that we got to go play

in, like Salesforce and Workday,

others. When we look at the

next 10 or 15 years, if I look

at the past 10 or 15 years in

software, it was much more about

the delivery model of technology

being modernized. What we were

doing is fundamentally bringing

software from on-premises

systems and technologies to the

cloud. If you look at the next 5,

10, 15 years, the delivery model

is now well understood. It's

going to cloud. The question is,

can we change the nature of work?

Can we make work faster? Can we

make work simpler? Can we make

work more enjoyable? Can we get

people out of the challenges

that we're so used to, which is

how hard it is to find

information, to collaborate in

real time, to make decisions

with other people, to get

everybody organized in your

company? The exciting

opportunity is if we can go from

the disruption being about the

delivery model of software to

the disruption being about what

work looks like and how we can

go change it, that's the 6Holy

Grail. We're excited that when

we look out at our product

roadmap, it's very much around,

can we bend the curve of what

work should look like going

forward? When we look out at

the partner ecosystem that we

have, again, when you take into

consideration companies like

Slack, and Zoom, and others,

work is going to look very, very

different in even next 12 months

than it has for the past 20

years. That's what's extremely

exciting for us.

How do you bend the curve of an

industry?

Usually, through the will of the

users and the people. It turns

out, if you go to most companies

and you say, "What still kind of

sucks about work?" I think you'd

get a long list of answers, and

some are very pertinent to a

particular company. In general,

usually what you'll hear are

things like, "It's too slow to

get things done. I'm not

empowered to make decisions. I'm

spending too much time trying to

find information, or recreating

work, or spending too much time

dealing with software." The

question is, can we go and solve

that problem generally across

industries? That could be in a

retailer trying to get new

products out to market faster.

It could be a technology company

trying to innovate in a new

product launch. It could be a

government agency trying to

better serve their citizens. It

could be a life sciences company

trying to go and drive a new

discovery, whether it's

something urgent like responding

to COVID or long-range R&D going

after niche diseases. When you

look across all these different

industries, what is propelling

the world forward? It's

information, it's people

collaborating, it's people that

are making decisions faster on

leveraging data. It's being able

to collaborate across boundaries,

in continents, between

institutions. The potential of

all of that is for software to

get better to go solve those

problems. When you go and talk

to users and you go talk to

people and you say, "What are

the big difficult things in your

way for moving your business

forward?" It usually has to do

with speed, usually has to do

with bureaucracy. It usually has

to do with how the lack of

agility in their company.

That's where we think the big

opportunity is, can software go

solve those types of problems?

That is ultimately what bends

that curve is people looking for

better, faster, simpler, cheaper

ways to do things, and then

bringing software in that can go

and power that.

Now, there's so much software

everywhere that it's hard to

decide what is going to make

sense for your business and how

do you adopt it. You talked

about the challenges around

bureaucracy. How does a person

inside a business choose the

right software and ultimately

use that for more agility and

speed?

The great thing is, certainly,

for both of us, there is so much

more innovation, so much more

software in the world that

people are leveraging. It's

interesting, because if you look

back 10 or 15 years ago, there

maybe was, I don't know, 20 or

30 SaaS companies that you could

list if you were forced to,

maybe 20 at best. Today, if you

sat down with a piece of paper,

you could probably remember a

couple hundred. Then, as soon as

you start to look in any

category of software, you'll

instantly find that there's

thousands of software companies

today, all effectively working

on your behalf to try and make

your company, or your business

process, or your team, or your

particular function more

efficient. That's what's

amazing is 15 years ago, when

you said, "OK, I want my finance

team to be more efficient,"

maybe you could build some

macros inside of Excel. Maybe

you could get them onto the new

version of Oracle or NetSuite,

and there was maybe 5 or 10

pieces of software you could use.

Today, if you said, "I want to

get my finance team more

efficient," you have to ask the

question, what part do you want

more efficient? Do you want

procurement more efficient? Do

you want financial planning more

efficient? Do you want M&A

transactions to be more

efficient? Do you want how you

transact with your customers and

collect their revenue more

efficient? What's amazing is

that you have software that has

been created for every single

function of every single role in

every single organization in

every single industry. On one

hand, that's a lot of software.

That means you have a lot of

work to do to navigate in an IT

organization, be the arbiter of

what software should come in and

out and deciding what makes

sense for your industry and your

business. The amazing thing is

that you have thousands and

thousands of companies that are

all working to try and make your

organization move faster,

generate more revenue, save

money, automate more of the

business, and that's an

incredible thing. Now, it's all

about making great judgment

decisions of what software you

bring into your enterprise and

having the right kind of tools

available to your employees.

When you speak to your power

users, is there certain things

that you recognize that makes an

incredible user or adopter of

software versus someone who

hasn't? A lot of people botch

the adoption of software, and

the people who get it right can

effectively transform their

industries. Those who get it

wrong can fail. What do you

think?

I totally agree. Most of this, I

put the blame on the vendor's

side. Software vendors make it

harder than necessary a lot of

the time. I still think most

software is harder to use than

it should be. We still have a

wholesale industry problem that

enterprise software could be

made simpler, it could be made

more delightful. While I think

we all generally agree that

software should all look like

the best consumer technology in

the enterprise, not all software

is there yet. We all, as an

industry, have more work to do

on that front. The best way to

create power users, the best way

to enable users to adopt

technology is making it simple,

making it easy to bring in, easy

to solve immediate problems.

This whole idea of training, and

change management, and all of

those kind of things, in a

perfect world, we should all be

building software that doesn't

require training. That doesn't

require change management,

because it's either so dead

simple, so delightful, or so

obviously necessary that it's a

better way to do things that we

want to adopt it right away.

That's the Holy Grail I think we

all are striving to get to.

You've always, obviously, done a

lot, in terms of virality in

your product, in your business,

scaled users. I remember in the

early days, you used to have

billboards talking about how you

power a percentage of the

Fortune 500. From the outsider's

perspective of Box, I've always

seen you've had this viral magic.

Was that intentional, and how do

you create that virality?

We've definitely tried to make

our software be able to spread

as easily as possible. Part of

this is just the nature of the

product category when we build

software that makes it easy to

share files and collaborate.

It's almost by definition,

you're using our product to

spread information to other

people. We do think that the

virality of software is very

important. Beyond making a

simple product that's easy to

spread between teams and

organizations, the rest is the

demand of the market and trying

to follow that demand.

In the early days, you were

visionary about competition and

ensuring that you can beat

SharePoint, beat Dropbox. You're

probably one of the people that

I've seen that's faced a lot of

competition but also had a

unique approach to it. How do

you live in the world of

competition, and what lessons

would you have learned along the

way?

I prefer to not have any

competition. I haven't yet been

lucky enough to choose a market

that is lacking competition.

It's also probably a sign of how

big the market you're in, based

on how much competition you're

going to be dealing with. In

general, we want to try and do

things that we don't think our

competition can do, and so we've

attempted to build a strategy

that we don't think is easily

replicable by another company.

Our investment in data security,

our investment in simple user

experiences, our investment in

really, really powerful software

that helps our customers with

their workflows and manage

unlimited amounts of data inside

of their organization. Our job

is if we can build something

that the competition can't build,

not because we somehow have all

the world's best engineers. We

know that we're going to compete

with great engineering teams,

but because the decisions we

make are hopefully going to be

decisions that are in the best

interest of the customer, in the

best interest of either long-

term data architecture and

technical architecture. We are

very, very religious about how

we design our software to ensure

that we don't introduce any

complexity into the technology.

When you add all that up, we

think that's the sustainable

approach to how we're going to

be able to outcompete in a very,

very competitive landscape.

That's always been our approach

and we'll be maintaining that

going forward.

What's the code, the rigorous

approach to easy design and

interface? What do you do at Box

specifically that gives you and

the company the focus on

rigorous design and easy user

interface?

We just put the time into it,

frankly. Unfortunately, every

time I try and describe design

processes, it ends up sounding

more inane than it's meant to.

The reality is that it's very

straightforward of what to do.

The reason why companies don't

do it is because you end up

making compromises and trade-

offs that prevent you from doing

it right. The kind of

compromises that tend to happen

is you start out with a simple,

amazing design. Everybody loves

it, it's great. Then, you go ask

customers about it and they say, "

Well, could you add this button

or this feature? Or can you move

this thing around? Can you add

this capability?" You start to

say yes, and yes, and yes, and

yes. Over time, you end up

having scope creep in the

software that at some point, the

software becomes too difficult

to use. A simple example is like

if you look at Microsoft Excel,

or Word, or PowerPoint, that's

25 years of features getting

added. Nothing getting

subtracted, just getting baked

into that technology. It's no

wonder that when you look at the

next generation of employees or

students, they're like, "Hey, I

just want to use a Google Doc,

because it's instantaneous, it

has just the base features that

I need, and it's easy to

collaborate with others." It's

a classic challenge that any

company has to deal with, which

is you almost know too much

about your customers, so you're

packing too many of the features

that you suspect they need into

your technology. Making it more

and more complicated and not

having the discipline to hold

the line of what, ultimately,

you're going to deliver, what

you're going to make available

to your customers, what you're

going to say no to. The reality

is the only way that I know, at

least, to build simple software

is to be hyperfocused, saying no

to more things than you say yes

to, and then hold the line when

you start to see that you're

losing that focus or that

simplicity. What can happen

sometimes in organizations is --

I've heard this line within Box,

but I think it happens a lot

everywhere -- you end up having

your own internal employees --

product managers, engineers, or

whatever -- effectively

rationalize the complexity that

they've introduced. You'll

start to hear things like, "Well,

this is what the customer asked

for." Or, "It's not that hard to

use." Or, "People will get used

to it." Or, "If they just do

this training experience,

they'll understand it." The

moment you start to hear those

types of things, you know that

you've effectively lost the plot,

and you got to go back to basics

and really rethink, "Are you

building the right kind of

simple experience?" That can be

painful because it can take

longer. You have to be much more

intentional about the software

you're building, but that's the

only lessons I know from doing

that.

Whose role is that in the

organization?

Hopefully, it's everybody's role.

Now, at some point, what ends up

happening is you do get to a

point where there might have to

be effectively tradeoffs or

somebody has to make that

ultimate vote one way or another.

Ideally, product managers,

designers, engineers are able to

get to that conclusion

themselves. Occasionally,

that's not possible.

Occasionally, you need to be

able to, in some cases, give

permission to those teams.

There have been situations where

a team has said, "We want to

build the software like this,

but the market is giving us

feedback that they really need X,

Y, Z features." It might take

somebody like the CEO or head of

product to basically say, "You

know what? In the best interest

of our broader user base over

the long arc of our business,

we're going to say no to the

customer for now, and we're

going to do it the simple way.

That is going to be actually

what we go and drive." We've

had to make those decisions

occasionally. It can be annoying,

because you might have a

customer that's like, "I really

will pay you more money if you

just build this one thing," and

you're having to say no to that

customer. That can be super

difficult.

We met, you cold emailed me, it

was like 2:35 AM or something

like that. It was maybe a two-

liner being like, "Hey, I'm

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box. I want

to chat about this." Is that a

strategy you use a lot,

and who do you cold email?

That sounds like me, 2:30 in the

morning. I'd say that's

authentic email that you got. As

we were both very early in this

industry, it was important to

find peers and colleagues that

we're similarly scaling

businesses, ways of partnering

and working together on growing

the industry. What's been

exciting about the software and

tech space is that there's so

much innovation, so many

different companies having lots

of approaches that you can

benefit by partnering up with

companies, learning from each

other's experiences. Figuring

out different distribution

models, different partnership

approaches, different ways to

grow. This industry is rich

with those types of experiences.

That was certainly how we got to

know each other early on, and

what's been so exciting about

the cloud industry.

When you do outreach to people,

it seems like you have this

great network. You angel invest

a lot, you've built a great

ecosystem of partners. What

drives that? To wake up in the

morning and say, "Who am I going

to reach out to today? Who do I

want to meet?"

Certainly, since the pandemic,

I've been a little bit less

focused on expanding the network.

There's been not enough hours in

the day to even do the basics,

but in general, there's just so

much exciting innovation

happening. Some of that draws

me in from an investor

standpoint, where you see an

interesting trend or a company

emerge that might have a

disruptive approach to a

particular industry or category.

That's exciting to go and get

involved in. Again, the

industry is great because of how

hyperconnected. Everybody is

online 24/7, and so that makes

it easier to be able to stay

connected with peers and friends,

and that's just always been my

approach.

One of the things I found really

hard is you have to manage your

own psychology and running a

company. There's times when

you've been here on the cover

magazine, other times when

people probably are giving you a

hard time. How do you deal with

that personally?

We've been through every roller

coaster there is. We've had

funding rounds that fell through.

We had to get bridge rounds from

investors. We've been through

now to economic crises. We had

an IPO that was delayed. You

are constantly hearing bad news

about lost a deal or an employee

going off to do something

different. This is not a

business for the faint of heart.

In terms of the kind of stuff

that we run into, it's a very

fast moving, very dynamic

industry. The only thing I

found that gets me through any

of those difficult moments or

challenges is trying to step

back, but the current situation

and perspective, and really

remember the long arc of the

strategy and the vision the

mission that we're on. That's

helped me get through most

difficult events was you step

back and you said, "OK, that was

brutal news. We just lost this

deal. We're spending a lot of

time on it. That really sucks.

That would have been game

changing for this industry or

whatnot." Then, you zoom out,

you say, "OK. 5 years from now

or 10 years from now, if you

look at our what our mission is

to go out and do, is this really

going to be the defining moment

of the company?" You setback,

you realize, "No, we're going to

be able to get through this.

We're going to be able to charge

through this one," and that

recharges me think about the

future. The cool thing about

this industry is that because

we're in the new third or fourth

cycle of the industry itself,

there's great lessons in history

that you can learn from a wide

range of companies. The thing

that's always exciting -- and

obviously you can tell these

stories for yourself -- to the

point of becoming delusional,

but you have companies like

Oracle, where they were quarters

away, maybe even sooner from

bankruptcy in the early '90s.

This is a company that has,

depending on the day, worth $200

billion. They could have gone

bankrupt because of a massive

business and financial

restatement issue that they had

to deal with. You look at Apple.

They lost maybe 5 to 10 years of

relevance, where they were not

considered to be the future of

technology, the future software,

the future of hardware, and a

very, very niche, small player

in the technology industry. Low,

low, low single digits in market

share in the '90s from all of

their products. Now, it's the

world's largest company. It's

like holy crap, in this industry,

if you have the patience and you

have, hopefully, the vision, you

can ultimately get through

almost any difficulty that

you're dealing with. Probably,

the only difficulty that we've

seen to be fairly unrecoverable

is if you create a toxic culture,

if your company blows up from

internal issues. For the most

part, the external environment,

even though it's

hypercompetitive, even though

it's hyperdynamic, doesn't tend

to ever be the final factor for

most companies. You can usually

pull off being able to reinvent

yourself or build something for

the future, assuming you've got

a strong culture and a strong

vision of where things are going.

What do you do to protect your

culture?

We spend a lot of time owning it.

We spend a lot of time making

sure to reinforce our company's

values, reinforce what we want

our company to continue to look

like going forward, invest in

the internal community itself as

well as the external community.

It means you have to ensure that

you're continuing to live by

your values, which means that

any time that something is an

affront to whatever the core

values are of the organization,

you have to make sure that

you're either firing people that

maybe are not living up to those

values, or, doing your best to

hire people that fit that mould

but can continue to shape the

culture in positive directions

going forward. It is something

that the moment you stop paying

attention to your culture for

even a month, you can see a

degradation of decision-making,

of talent, of community, of

alignment. We spend a lot of

time on that.

Who are some of the tech leaders

or business leaders that you

look up to?

The cool thing is that there's a

plurality of cultures that are

in the tech community. There's

one of everything in this

industry. There's a hyper-

secretive approach to building a

business, and that's Apple.

There's a hyper-transparent, and

I'd say relatively collaborative

approach, which is Google.

There's a hyperdata decision-

oriented type of culture like

Amazon. There's a very values-

driven-oriented culture like at

Salesforce. You try and pick

and pull different parts of

those cultures that you respect

for you that you think align to

who you are as an organization.

We've learned a lot over the

years from Marc Benioff or Tim

Cook on the value-oriented

nature of building a business.

We try and live up to having a

culture that cares, again, about

the values of the employees and

of the organization. At the

same time, we probably are not

as hyperdata-driven as Amazon.

We're probably a bit more like a

Facebook or a Google, where

we'll make a bet on a market and

we're going to go and drive to

build the best product or

experience in that market.

You're always trying to connect

the dots between different types

of cultures and different types

of business models to create

something that works for your

organization.

I remember I visited you at your

office a few years back, and

there was such a feeling of this

being the headquarters. It's the

center of Silicon Valley. I

remember you said, "I'd never go

up to the city. This my spot."

Now, we have this remote,

diverse world. How did your

culture evolve through that?

I don't think I could've been

less remote-oriented as a

founder. My ultimate dream was

if you could have a gigantic

warehouse as an office, where it

was completely flat. You could

see everybody get to everybody,

talk to everybody, having

hundreds of thousands of people

in that type of setup. That

would've been my dream state.

Now, we're in the exact opposite,

where you're on a computer all

day long. You don't leave your

little room and you're on Zoom

calls all day. We've had to

adapt. We've been like everybody

else, that this has been a

curveball that was thrown on us.

Two things that prepared us -- I

think well, I don't know if

better than most, but certainly,

well -- one is the way that we

operate as a business was well

set up for this. Everybody's on

Slack. Everybody's on Zoom.

Everybody already works in this

type of modern way. We have a

culture that is built on

collaboration, is built on being

agile and responding dynamically

to events in the market. It's

been fairly smooth in unleashing

the energy of the organization,

pointing it in the right

direction, and going out and

executing on our mission, even

though we've had to adapt to

this environment. I don't

totally love the remote-only

nature of this situation. I

would much more prefer that

there's more of a hybrid

approach, and that's ultimately

what we think the future looks

like. One where you'll go back

to the office for certain things,

but you'll have more flexibility

to work remotely when you so

choose. For now, obviously,

we're heads down, trying to get

through the health pandemic.

If you were to close your eyes

and visualize 15 years out

future of work with a day in the

life of the average worker, 15

years out, how's it different?

I'd say that 15 years exceeds my

ability to predict these things

because it could either be

everything looks exactly the

same, or we're all wearing VR

goggles and looking at it at AI

dashboards with augmented

reality. Let's say timeline

aside, post-health pandemic,

what we do imagine is that

offices are still going to be a

pervasive part of workplace

culture. People want to get

together. They want to work with

their colleagues in person. They

want to see their colleagues and

be able to work on projects or

get mentorship. Even just

frankly, it's a social fabric

that a lot of people are

attached to. I don't think the

office goes away, but I do think

that remote has shown us is that

you can be very productive. You

can be incredibly effective as

an organization with a

distributed workforce. There are

some companies that have always

done that. Now, the rest of the

economy, let's say, the 90

percent of companies that didn't

operate that way previously are

now realizing, "Oh, wow, this is

actually an effective way that

we can run our business." I do

think that we're going to enter

a hybrid world. Maybe you come

in for three or four days a week.

Maybe you're able to work

remotely. You have longer

weekends. You have more flexible

hours. I probably think that

things don't change as much as

we're picturing, because right

now, the way that we're working

is so much more catalyzed by

necessity as opposed to it being

voluntary. Once it's voluntary

and not being unnecessary, it'll

be interesting to see where

things settle out on a rolling

basis.

You're like a Twitter power user

extraordinaire. Do you think

that's critical as part of the

work fabric in the future? How

do you think that platform will

change?

No, I do not think it's critical

to that in the future. Twitter

is a fantastic medium for being

able to get your message out.

I've had a lot of fun with it as

a platform. It's questionable

for our democracy. I think it

has some challenges. We've seen

how it can be exploited for

negative outcomes. I consider

Twitter to be almost entirely a

personal use case.

What other personal things you

try to do for fun?

I don't have a long list of

hobbies, but I do have 18-month-

old kid that we're having a lot

of fun with. That's where most

of my discretionary time is

going into. That's been a blast

at this point. Other than just

working and trying to grow the

business, I'm not doing too much

else right now.

How's your magic coming?

I'd say that there's

been fewer audiences for magic

during a pandemic. I've sold out

in my skill level.

Do you have audio-only magic

tricks?

I don't. I'm not a big fan of

number. I guess you can have

somebody guess a word or

something, but I don't think I

can pull it off right now.

Nice. Aaron, this is fantastic.

I really appreciate you spending

the time discussing the future

of work and sharing your passion.

Thanks so much, man.

Awesome. Thank you.

On the next episode of "Decoding

Digital."

Anybody can be a change maker.

It's really remarkable when you

see the power of the individual,

the impact that an individual

can make on the planet in their

community. You can be a

changemaker that uplifts you,

uplifts people around you, and

build a better society, a better

community.

CEO of LightSpeed, one of the

fastest growing commerce

companies, Dax Dasilva. Thanks

for listening to Decoding

Digital. Make sure you never

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visit decodingdigital.com. Until