Another great week

This week I attended BoxWorks, the first annual customer event held by Box.net. Aaron Levie and his fast growing team are performing brilliantly on their vision and it seems their investors are just as excited as their customers. I’ve been a Box.net customer since 2009 and have observed with delight as their product gets better and better – they listen to customers, respond to ideas and complaints, they fix bug quickly, and they help customers become successful, whatever it takes. They know the path they want to go down, and they understand enterprise vs. consumer needs.

Whitney opened the morning session with a fireside chat with Marc Andreessen, who was eloquent and insightful in his description of “old software” as it is nicely consolidated into 2-3 companies, and rapidly becoming irrelevant. He also spoke encouragingly about “the bubble” and why this one may not be as much of a downturn worry: the stuff works now. He’s right, but that doesn’t prevent an error by the financial system, making too much capital available, causing lending errors that inevitably lead to overvaluations, then a bust. He influences a lot of people, but he can’t control a Wall Street dumb ass who doesn’t understand technology.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon joined Aaron to announce a new collaboration between Okta and Box that will make deeper more meaningful authentication the key to smarter folder sharing and more secure management of share status – great to see these two game-changer companies linking arms to conquer more good stuff together. The investor session was also very useful – the VC partners in the room echoed clearly the message that their investments are performing extremely well and will continue to do so for some time. The combined disruption they’re bringing, is shifting traditional tech companies ever further from relevance and any ability to play catch up: if you have a cash cow, you aren’t going to kill it. So you can’t get your stuff to market quickly  because your delivery method is stuck in the past.

The event had over 300 people I would guess, and the vibe was extremely positive, with most attendees clearly “getting it” though they all came from vastly different organizations. From the CIO of a large CA university to the director of “storage” at an extremely large Fortune 100 company, and everything in-between, all speaking positively about their achievements to date with Box.net and their ambitious plans for the coming few months. I’m very excited to be a customer of several of this new generation of technology providers: they help my company’s IT strategy to come together, providing the glue without which we would have just a bunch of disconnected websites.

I’m also very fortunate to be allowed to be an early adopter in these times: I know several so-called cloud companies that internally made some rather antiquated conservative choices for systems and tools for their employees. It was enlightening to hear the Andreessen Horowitz guys repeat the statement: “none of our portfolio companies run Oracle”. Wow.