From: GlobalPost - Google scared this 27-year-old entrepreneur - Matt Lynley March 28, 2012 (edited)
Aaron Lavie, CEO of Box:
In 2004, there were no adequate sharing and storage solutions on the web.
That's why we started Box. It was meant for all use cases and completely all purpose.
It was meant to serve everything from a student to a consumer and for enterprise. We launched the company, we started to get traction.
And then the industry and the market changed.
Rumours of Google Drive started to pop up. It had just been rumored but we realized that these bigger companies could subsidize online storage for consumers to the point it would be free.
That makes sense. If Apple is selling devices, having information stored online makes it easier to sell devices to access it.
With all this competition in the consumer space, it was going to be too difficult for us to differentiate.
But in the enterprise space, competition and customers are sort of defined a little more differently.
There is a much deeper value for innovative solutions, a much larger budget for innovative solutions.
Enterprises want more agnostic systems that work across all platforms and we frankly thought we could build a better collaboration and content management offering.
So we decided to focus our entire company, all our marketing and sales, on the enterprise space.
Even if Google hadn't been getting into online storage, we would have gone into enterprise around the same time anyway.
The market sizes are dramatically different, consumers spend a fraction of a fraction of enterprise spending on software.
If you think about the spend difference and the size of market difference, then enterprise is a really attractive market.
