Aaron Levie: How the Business Model of SaaS Changes Forever & Startups vs Incumbents:Who Wins?|E1155

So we are in now one of these moments with AI, which is a period where we are going to see not only breakthrough technology, but the breakthrough application of those technologies. That is as much going to be an incumbent's game as a startup's game this time around. You're gonna be working nonstop if you're in one of these companies. Like, there is no chance that you should be focused on, on sort of anything other than just pure survival and execution.

Ready to go? Aaron, I am so excited for this. I'm like a big fanboy of your tweets. I go downstairs... People don't know this, it makes me sound really sad. I go downstairs for, like, my evening espresso, which is weird in its own self-

(laughs)

... and I, like, read your tweets from the day on AI and I'm like, "Oh, this is, this is a good one." (laughs) So thank you-

I-

... for tweeting me.

I, uh, happy to provide your evening, uh, entertainment, so...

(laughs) Now I want to start with, one of your tweets mentioned actually you're living through the transition, you know, uh, to cloud. And I just thought, you know, you really had such a front row seat to that. Having the experience that you have in terms of living through that transition, how do you think about what it takes to be successful with this transition in this next wave of AI?

We are clearly in this, this window that is, um, going to be relatively temporary. Um, uh, you know, I don't know if it'll be two years, I don't know if it'll be five years, I don't know if it'll be, if it's already over, but basically you have these windows every, you know, more or less once a decade. There's nothing, you know, kind of particularly specific about the decade part, but we had it in the, the PC boom, so that was basically the '80s. You had it in the web boom in the '90s. You had it in the, the mobile and cloud booms in the kind of mid-2000s and 2010s. And in each one of these moments, there's an architecture shift that happens in tech that creates really the only window of opportunity you have for new kind of platform scale, you know, large franchise kind of companies to emerge, because you need a change in the technology industry for new insurgents to be able to enter, or else basically the incumbents will, will just naturally gobble up all of the market. So we are in now one of these moments with AI, which is a, a, a period where we are going to see not only breakthrough technology, but the breakthrough application of those technologies. That is, um, as much going to be an incumbent's game as a startup's game this time around because the incumbents have a lot of the data and a lot of the workflows, so it's even, it's even sort of more, uh, competitive, I think, than the pri- prior periods of, uh, of these windows. But you will have this moment of, of opportunity where startups will emerge that will be able to figure out a set of use cases or a way that, that they, they should deliver functionality on AI that an incumbent will not be paying attention to, will not may- maybe, maybe go after, and it's the, in these windows where you can build now very large companies. And so we're in one of these windows, and it's sort of, these are the only times when, when you really have that level of, of clear opportunity in front of you. And so now I, I... It was mostly just a call to, you're gonna be working nonstop if you're in one of these companies. Like, there is no chance that, that you should be, you know, focused on, on sort of anything other than just pure survi- survival and execution, uh, as a, uh, as an organization.