Interview 100 People
Levie: Just go interview like 100 people. Walk me through your day. What are all the places where you are less effective, less efficient, having to do repetitive or redundant work?
Don't ask for technology problems. Just listen to where they're spending their time. What processes do they keep repeating over and over again.
Don't ask for technology problems. Just listen to where they're spending their time.
Then Imagine What Software Could Do
Levie: You can start to imagine — how could software attack the problem of meeting scheduling? How could software attack the problem of payroll? Expense reporting? All these things are the drudgery of working inside a big company.
If you haven't worked in one of those big companies, you at least have to get as much information as you can from people that do work in them. Then you start to see patterns — this seems like a really big problem.
How Box Found Its Problem
Levie: If you had interviewed people that worked in big enterprises 15 years ago and said walk me through your day, you would have eventually spotted how much time is wasted when people are working with their documents. Trying to share them. Trying to access them from different devices.
We discovered it because of what we were doing in our personal lives in college. But you would have also discovered it by just understanding where people are spending time in the workplace and saying — wait, technology today could solve that problem way better than what they're getting.
As soon as you find that gap, that's where you know you can build the company.
As soon as you find that gap, that's where you know you can build the company.