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Box started out as a class project when its co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie was a sophomore at University of Southern California.
In 2004, the online file-storage business barely existed. While there are many companies that offer to store your files in the cloud today, there were almost none back then. With a few high school friends from Mercer Island, Wash., he built a prototype service they called Box.net, and soon started attracting investors and customers.
How they turned a class project into a $2 billion company that now trades on the New York Stock Exchange will be among the topics Levie will explore onstage at our inaugural Code/Enterprise Series event on April 21 in San Francisco. It will be his first public appearance since Box’s IPO in January.
For all its success, Box competes in a crowded marketplace against rivals including the much larger Dropbox, which has in the last year seriously attacked the enterprise marketplace that is Box’s specialty, as well as Microsoft and Google. And like other cloud software companies, Box is expected to lose money for the foreseeable future. Clearly there will be a lot to talk about.
Levie is one of four speakers we’ve lined up for our first Code/Enterprise event. The others are Josh James, the CEO of the business intelligence startup Domo; Kevin Mandia, the president of security company FireEye; and Diane Bryant, a senior VP at Intel and head of its $15 billion data center business unit.
We’re meeting up on the evening of April 21 at the Dogpatch Wineworks in San Francisco, and we hope to see you there. Tickets are sold out, but you can still get on the waiting list. If you can’t make it, we’re hosting another event in New York on Sept. 29. More details about that coming soon.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
