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When you have that opportunity where something you believe
in should be possible and the technology is enabling that,
that's a pretty good way to start a business.
And that's how we got started with Box.
There was a major new macro factor that let us realize
this was different than if we had started back in 2000,
when a bunch of the other companies that
were doing this went out of business.
First is, there is 8X storage and efficiency.
Everyone is probably familiar with Moore's Law;
if not, you should be.
But every single 18 months and now even sooner in a lot of cases,
there's a doubling of performance and
efficiency in how we do our computing. And storage was no exception.
So, when we started the company in 2005,
we could store eight times the amount of information
and the same amount of space for the same amount
of cost than you could have five years ago.
And so, this was a great opportunity for us to start the company
with much lower cost and a much sort of easier way to scale up.
And there was also globalization,
sort of remote workforce starting to emerge.
People wanted to work from anywhere.
They wanted to be able to share information with anyone.
And we were experiencing this firsthand at school.
But we sort of had the suspicion that
other people had this problem as well.
You had Ajax. You had modern browsers.
Firefox was just starting to come out.
And you had much better bandwidth.
You couldn't have done this back in 2000
because we had much slower Internet.
It was much harder to share information.
You can't really share the data at 56 kilobytes a second.
But with broadband, that really made it possible.
And so, we had these new macro factors
that made Box a better reality today.
So, we decided to commercialize the cloud.
Let's take something that's very French,
something that some of the geeks and some of the other
people will do on the edge of the market and really bring
that to the masses and that was a pretty good lesson.