Big Technology Podcast - How ChatGPT Changes Tech + The End of Remote Work? — With Aaron Levie

Episode Date: December 7, 2022

Aaron Levie is the CEO of Box. He joins Big Technology Podcast to weigh in on all the big tech headlines: ChatGPT's emergence, Elon Musk's handling of Twitter, the future of Web3 following FTX, and the shakeup at Salesforce. Stay tuned for the second half where we discuss whether the worker empowerment movement is over and what that means for the future of remote work. Please rate ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ on your app of choice. Thank you! Listen to Aaron's last appearance: Web3 And The Future Of The Internet https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/web3-and-the-future-of-the-internet-with-box-ceo-aaron-levie/id1522960417?i=1000547011402 https://open.spotify.com/episode/52xF5S7XjLczW03bu6K8r3?si=Lw5OP-_tTpCMKip_aif0HA Sign up for Big Technology Podcast's LinkedIn newsletter: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/

LinkedIn Presents. Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed, nuanced conversation, of the tech world and beyond. Our guest today is Aaron Levy. He's the CEO of Box and one of our favorite guests here on Big Technology Podcasts. I wanted to speak with Aaron. this week to make sense of the news going on. And man, there is so much news. And I think we need a nuanced voice like Aaron to be able to crack into it. Of course, we're seeing massive innovation with the chatbot chat GPT coming out of OpenAI. I'd like to ask Aaron what's going on

with that, whether that's a new paradigm shift or just another fad. I also want to know what's going on at Twitter, whether Elon's doing good job or not. And I think we should also find out what the status is of the worker empowerment movement, where it seemed like, workers were in control during COVID, maybe not as much now. So that's the conversation. I think you're going to love it. And with that, I want to welcome Aaron to the show. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Good to be here. Thanks for having me. So I want to hit a few current events in the beginning and then go to our main topic, which is going to be about the work from home versus work in the office debate. Okay. Let's start with the big story that everybody's talking about, which is this new bot from OpenAI called Chat, GPT. I've had some people tell me that this is the.

future of technology. Other people talk about how it's a menace, and it's basically not very viable. Can you explain what chat GPT is for those who haven't encountered it before, or maybe those who have and just are interested in hearing your perspective? And what's your take on it? Is it the new thing, the new paradigm? Yes. Well, so starting first, I'd say it definitely is the new thing. And I say that with a high degree of caution around, you know, what I, at least I kind of let myself get really excited about. I actually probably have a little bit of more of a pragmatic, skeptical-oriented approach to new technology. I'm generally optimistic.

I want to be excited. But I also, because we sell enterprise software, like I quickly, you know, leap to what are the use cases, who's going to pay for it, what is it going to do? So with that lens, I'd say chat GPT has been a groundbreaking example of what AI can actually do in the real world. So talk about what it is and what you've done with it so far. Yeah. So it's opening eyes latest evolution of GPT and their large language model where they've just processed an unbelievable amount of information and created a model around being able to interact with any kind of natural language, you know, questioning and then answers. And then the breakthrough probably user interface element was this ability to go back and forth in a chat-like conversation. whereas previously what we've seen from some of the GPT demos

is really just like an interface where you just type text and then it produces results from that text as opposed to a back-and-forth conversation. So that chat interface also is a very meaningful U.S. improvement in letting, you know, I think any type of user kind of come in with in a much more natural way. So the real breakthrough is truly its ability to understand your question, be able to process an insane amount.

amount of information against that question and then come back with results in a matter of, you know, milliseconds or seconds. And then iterate through that conversation as you have follow-ups and it can learn from the full conversation. So you don't have to, you know, each individual, you know, question is not a discrete and separate, you know, element. You can, you can call back to prior parts of the conversation that you've had. So that's a very, you know, exciting idea. I'll give you one example. This is on the trivial side. And then and then I can give you some more exciting examples. I took a random kind of email that I sent the whole company recently and you put it into chat GPT and you say, okay, you know, summarize this

email and it summarizes it really, you know, fine and pretty well. And it's like a long email, five or six paragraphs. And then I said, turn it into a poem. And it turns it into a poem and it's an incredible poem. And then you say, turn it into a poem with rhyming. And then it turns in a poem with rhyming. And then you do it in the form of Shakespeare. And it takes, you know, this very, very, you know, kind of relatively dry business topic about enterprise software, and within, you know, a couple iterations turns it into a Shakespeare poem that is, you know, completely, you know, accurate to the style of both Shakespeare and the substance of the information in the email. So that's just crazy when you just even, you know, try and process how that's

happening. That's a little bit more fun in nature. I think the things that are much more meaningful is just the insane efficiency that we can, you know, get in a bunch of categories of knowledge work. So you can do very basic things like draft up a merger agreement between two corporations and you can set a bunch of terms in that merger agreement and that it'll spit out right now it's more the example of it, but it can basically spit out a full contract. The technology is certainly able to be able to now do that. Or you can do things like, I want to quickly analyze this market. Give me the SWAT analysis or the Porter's Five Forces analysis for a particular company or industry. it will then return a set of results that are, you know, basically 90% accurate.

One really fun one was it can actually answer very complicated hypotheticals quite well. So, you know, a fun one was asking it, would Facebook have been successful if they had launched as a desktop software company as opposed to a web-based company when they first launched? Interesting. It reasoned through why it would have been less successful because of how complicated it is to download desktop software and that would have made the product less viral. and it would have been harder to innovate. And, like, that is, that's a thing where, like, you know, 90% of the world population can't actually reason that because they don't have the history of, you know, successful or failed web products. So, Aaron, yeah. The question is that, you know, when we have big technology innovations, they become a platform.

There's something that you can build on top of them. Something like, you know, Amazon, for instance. You can sell through it or Google. It has the entire web. This thing doesn't have the web. Right. And it's not an operating system like an iOS or an Android. So when we want to put into context, like this is what I'm asking, is it the next big paradigm? Because we want to put into context where it fits. It doesn't have that platform side or maybe it does. So how do you think about that when they come together? I think on the most literal basis, chat GPT is probably an applied use case. So that's an application on a platform, which is Open AI. Open AI definitionally is a platform. They have APIs that any one of us can go and build on top of. of. So if you want to be able to send your own email to an open API, you know, open AI API,

you can get back, you know, basically similar responses as to what ChatGPT is doing. ChatGPT, I think, is just showing, whoa, this is actually a form factor user experience-wise that might be a groundbreaking way to interact with an AI agent. But the underlying technology as a model will be available to basically any developer that wants to build on top of it. And that, that you could have infinite use cases. I mean, we could go start a company. It's scary, actually. Extremely scary, yeah. But, you know, scary temporarily and incredibly optimistic over the medium and long way.

Why? Because the way I kind of think about it is, you know, we have this insane amount of information available to us on the Internet. But the problem is that it's not really actually that easy to go parse all that information, connect the dots between multiple data sets. And so you have to be an expert to kind of work through a lot of that information. And so if you can take that expertise and democratize it and make it vastly more available, I just think that that accelerates progress in a whole bunch of different areas. I mean, if you were growing up in X, you know, city and you didn't happen to have friends that were computer programmers, as I had growing up, I got really lucky. I grew up where my friends were computer programmers.

If I didn't have that, how many resources do you have to go to to go in and throw out a business idea or a product idea or ask somebody to go review your code. It is a limited amount of expertise that is available to everybody. So I think the real power of this is democratizing expertise. And then, you know, it's really the responsibility of humans to go apply that expertise and actually turn that into real value, turn that into real productivity. And so I think what we're seeing is a step function change in computing where the past maybe, you know, 70, 80 years of computing from, you know, the mainframe days and, you know, to end the punch card days to now what we have. We are now in a position where we've gone from automating our use of

information to now actually having intelligence on that information in a kind of, you know, very, very transformational way. One of the things I find interesting about this chat GPT is its ability to go much deeper than the first 10 links in Google search, like really good. comb bodies of knowledge and find deeper responses than you would get by, let's say, asking a question to Google and then going to, you know, the first Quora answer or the first forum answer. Like, this thing has them all involved. And, you know, I'm working with kind of a tricky piece of American bureaucracy right now.

I'm not going to get too deep into it. But the thing that this chat bot was able to comb through and propose solutions that I had been searching Google for for a long time and could not find. It's pretty amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Here's a question. Yeah. Why didn't Google release this first? They have Lambda. Well, you know, there's, there's, there is a very interesting innovator's dilemma challenge that you have when you're at the scale of Google or otherwise. You have business model implications. You know, you can imagine in the business model of Google, they benefit from there being more degrees of freedom in the answers because those are going to be advertisers that they can then send you to. That's not bad. That's just their business model.

They have probably sort of, you know, they have a level of kind of, you know, congressional regulatory risks of releasing AI-related capabilities maybe early in their advancement, where a startup is able to kind of calculate the risk reward and maybe a different fashion. And then I think it's just, it's fair to say that the Open AI team at a technical level and AI level is, you know, at the cutting edge of a lot of the work that's happening. But I do think that there's a reason why, there's a reason why Clayton Christensen wrote the book, Innovator's Dilemma.

Like, it's a real dilemma. Like, Google doesn't inherently want you at an inherent level to just get the answer to every problem. Yeah. Because that might reduce the need to then go click around the web, which would then reduce the need for us to go to Google. That's not a bad thing. That's just historically, you know,

how a product manager at Google would kind of be, you know, the way that they see the world. And so I think this is a really interesting tension now to, is this the future of search? Is this something orthogonal to search? And it's a new kind of interface for working with information. Does Google respond by building the same thing at the top of the search results? So many different things can play out here, all of which will be very exciting outcomes. And one of the things that's amazing is that chat cheap PT is its knowledge base ends in 2021. So it's not even dealing with current events. And I wonder what that is. Is it a determination to not get too close to Google right away? Or here's another idea. The thing is very believable. You're talking to it like you would chat with another human. And it presents its answers very confidently. And there's a danger in having that and potentially, like one of the nice things about Google is you search the internet. You know the internet can be wrong in times. So you hit a bunch of links. If a chatbot who's pretty good at telling you the truth or things that are believable presents an entirely wrong answer to you.

You might believe that. You're so susceptible to believing that. And I wonder if that's part of the worry and why they stopped at 2021. Why do you think they stopped there? You know, this is above my pay grade. You'll have to call Sam Altman and see what happened. But I think there are probably some reasonable reasons of just saying, here's the snapshot. We're going to learn everything at some kind of demarcation point. And, you know, but I don't know beyond what strategic reason there. Obviously, one of the big problems of it connecting to the internet, which is one of the other limitations, is simply, if it can connect to the internet, then can you kind of start to accidentally perform tasks on the internet through AI? So that'll be the next very, very interesting evolution of this technology. No doubt. And I asked it. I was like, imagine what you could do. And one of the things it said was customer service. I was like, oh, wow. That's interesting. I mean, it's not there yet, but it's a potential use for it. So that's going to be really interesting. So, Aaron, speaking of bots, let's talk about Elon Musk and Twitter. I mean, I feel like we have to touch on this. Do you think he's doing a good job?

So, you know, this one's interesting. You'll have to accept the nuance. So that's what we're here for. Okay, exactly. And I appreciate that. You can't do nuance over tweets. So I think like any individual, there's sort of complexity to them as individuals and what they do. And it was funny because, you know, Reed Hastings was, you know, talking at the New York Times deal books on it.

And his answer was actually probably not far off from maybe my take, which is, you know, there are some approaches that he's taken that are like not like how Peter Drucker would have written a book on business management and leadership. You know, some of the, just the speed at which he executed certain things that involved organizations and, you know, the technical side that are like, like, you know, nobody like wrote the book on that that's the way to do. do it. But Elon does his own thing, and that is the Elon way. And so, like, that is up to him and he owns the asset. So I think there are some things on that dimension that, you know, I'm like, okay, maybe it would be a different way to accomplish that. I think there are some areas where I think it's actually exciting in terms of the pure pace of, at least the goal of the pace of innovation that he's trying to put to it. I think that's exciting. I'm a fan of anything that kind of accelerates innovation and the speed of that innovation,

I think it's actually compelling to have somebody that that is kind of comes from a slightly different maybe, let's say, political perspective operating the platform. And I'm, you know, I'm extremely liberal myself. And I think it's an interesting kind of sort of element to have somebody that actually creates a little bit more of a balancing force on the platform. It might mean that we, I mean, swastika's aside for a second, because that's obviously bad. It, you know, might mean that- Oh, he banned Kanye for that. Yeah, so that was good.

That was good. That was good. So I think it's, I think, you know, I think we may have over-rotated a little bit in the past couple of years of like, okay, like, I mean, I wear a mask, you know, probably more than anybody still. But like, I don't mind people talking about different, you know, COVID views. Like, I don't think that's a bad thing that people can can have different perspectives. And so I think the idea of Twitter being able to be a, you know, a space where you can get a little bit more around the edges supported, I think is probably net positive. And then I think maybe the one area where, and sorry, and it's important that I think only somebody like Elon can do that. I think there's a certain degree of sort of reality distortion, force field that he has where he just is able to pull that off in a way that most people

would not want to deal with the pressure or kind of be able to work through. And then the final thing is, and this is maybe the only part where I'm kind of like disagreeing is, I, I think I'd pursue a different strategy than he was, than he is. I think the real, I think the idea of kind of a consumer paid product is probably less viable for that, that company. I think actually advertising is, is sort of the right approach. I think he's, you know, kind of come back to, to pushing more on the advertising side. But, but I think out of the gate, what I would have done is I would have just kind of been so focused on make, make the experience better, give people more free products and features. Don't sort of try and hype up the paid subscription because I just

think that's like practically speaking, you're not going to get 100 million people to pay for Twitter. So I'd rather see more of the innovation at just kind of the general population. So that's the complex answer. Yeah, it's been interesting to see him light his advertising business on fire, which is 89% of the revenue. And that's also come from part of like the paying for blue thing, right, which is that that's enabled more impersonations than if you're like an Eli Lilly, for instance, and you have a parody account saying insulin's free, you're not going to want to spend on that platform. So he's got to make that subscription thing work. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that he's either got to make the subscription thing work

or the market actually, you know, kind of does its job and says, oh, wait a second. No, no, we can't actually have this. We can't have the fake insulin tweets. You need to like overt that. So, so I think, I just think, you know, it's one of these interesting things. And I forget who put it best, but like you've seen some tweets where I think he came into the Twitter acquisition probably with his own personal set of Twitter use cases. And like, you know, he deals with a lot of spam bots, let's say, and a lot of crypto bots. And he's got his own set of issues. Those aren't necessarily the same issues that, like, the average Twitter user deals with. And so I think he's kind of doing a little bit of, you know, sort of his perspective on the problem of like, okay, you've got to verify everybody

and we'll use $8 as this means of kind of creating a threshold where a bot would not want to pay that. But as you note, like, actually, that can be a very valuable $8 if you were trying to, like, tank a stock price or fish somebody's information. So I think it was a little bit of, like, an erroneous approach to how they were going to, you know, kind of really kind of protect the system.

And I think they recognized that. They obviously paused it, and they're going to have to figure out a new system. But I think, like, net long term, I'm net optimistic. I think it will kind of deal with, with some, you know, twists and turns. And obviously, like, as a user of the platform, I only want good things to happen to it. And I think Elon is still, you know, one of the kind of, you know, strongest entrepreneurs out there, again, doing things a little bit differently than the average approach. Yeah, I do find it interesting how, like, a lot of journalists and analysts have said this is never going to work.

And then a lot of entrepreneurs and CEOs are like, oh, yeah, I definitely see the logic. On which one? Which thing? On Elon. and Elon's at Twitter, just the general, the general movement there. And I do think it's kind of interesting and maybe indicative about how the two different groups think in terms of like people watching the same thing and having such a different perspective on it. Well, well, I think maybe the only, maybe the only slight, I'll try and bridge the reality. So I actually, I probably have the more journalist instinct on some of the like self-owned failures of like, you know, the Eli Lilly thing was just like, oh, come on, that would have been like you could have spent five minutes and you would have known.

that would happen. Like, this is not that hard. So, like, that part, I lean on a particular kind of pattern. And then, and then I think the other part that, that, you know, counterbalances that is, like, I don't think he wants to lose $44 billion. I do think the market is actually a really good forcing function for eventually the right decisions. And Elon historically is a, as a fantastic entrepreneur. So, like, you just combine those things. He's still going to be a good entrepreneur. You know, asterisk's like, I don't know if he's changed. And he doesn't want to lose 44 billion. and the market will will actually be really good at providing feedback as to which features work and don't. So then I think you can kind of like, you can like net bet on the service continuing to

improve. It'll be interesting to see if he gets people willing to work for him. I mean, they're trying to hire now because they cut so many. They want people bought in on this Twitter 2.0 ideal. But maybe this is, well, no, I don't think the press covered this wrong. It was a brutal first few weeks for the Twitter employees. I mean, he's kind of like Dion Sanders who came into Colorado State. I don't know if you saw that, but he came in. So he's the new coach there. And he just came in and he speaks to the current team.

And he goes, listen, he goes, if you're a player here, I just want to let you know, we're going to stop disappointing the fans that come in to see you. So get yourself in the transfer portal. And I got some people coming in. And it does seem like Elon took the exact same approach there. We got a few positions already taking care of because I'm breaking my luggage with me. And it's Louie. Okay.

It ain't going to be no more of the mess that these wonderful fans, the student body, and some of your parents who put up with for probably two decades now. I'm coming. And when I get him, it's going to be changed. That's really funny. Yeah. I think, you know, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the, one of the bowl cases for that approach is, is you very quickly sort of set the flag in the ground of how you're going to run the place. And then it actually is kind of like people select into that or not.

And then what will happen is, you know, there will be a set of people that apply for jobs there that literally know what they're getting into. And that is something that they are signing up for. They want to be a part of. And it's probably way better to do that approach than one where kind of its ambiguous. us and you don't quite understand what's the you know what what what is the you know kind of culture going to be at this organization no doubt and coach prime will field a team at colorado next year we'll just see how they they perform so um speaking of leadership sam bankman freed or lack thereof um

you were here january january 5th uh of this year and we talked a lot about web 3 actually it's one i'll link that in the show notes if i can remember but it was one of uh the best shows we've had here. You really gave this perspective about why you didn't believe Web 3 was all it was made out to be by its boosters. Now we're seeing the crypto industry really collapse. When you've watched it, have you, have you, A, said, aha, this is what I was thinking about? And B, have you said, there's still potential here? So I think my thesis is probably relatively unchanged from January. You know, I think the, you know, as we talked about back then, you know, there's a way, you got to kind of separate the philosophy from the reality.

So the philosophy is this idea of, you know, censorship-resistant technology that's decentralized and we get to kind of own our little bits in the database. And, you know, there's nothing about that philosophy that's like inherently, you know, problematic or wrong or something that, you know, like, that I would, I'd be against. So, so, like, on one hand, you know, philosophically, that's, set of ideas is, it seems non-controversial to me. The reality is when you have, and this is just like, I mean, I don't, I always get confused to how anybody sees it differently, but that's fine. The reality is when you have like a database and you kind of say, the things in that database

are worth something and you can now sell your, you're kind of part of that database to somebody else. And then they say that you can sell that to somebody else. And then they say that you can sell that to somebody else. At some point, somebody's going to realize, like, why am I buying this thing at whatever that final price point is. And then they're going to sell that thing. And then the next person is going to say, well, shoot, I want to sell my thing. And so, you know, unfortunately, there's an element of like what comes up, comes down in if there's not a, it's not like a something fundamentally intrinsically valuable beneath it all. So in the case of FTX, you know, clearly I mean, I would not, I didn't predict like fraud. But like, I mean, if you would say, and I didn't

even understand, I didn't know what was going on with FTT before before the whole collapse. But if you had said, hey, this business has collateral that it uses of a token that it invented, then I would have definitely have been like, okay, well, that's going to fall at some point. So what's that collateral kind of being used against? And then you would look at that asset, and you'd be like, well, that asset's completely screwed. So I just think that to me, it's just like, we just got to get back to like the basics. Like, if I can't just, I can't invent a thing tell you that it's valuable and then have you go tell somebody else it's valuable. and then I have that person go tell somebody else is valuable for that many times

before people then sort of start to step back and they say, well, it's not that valuable, actually. Like, it's literally a database row. Right. I mean, or, you know, it's an update to the blockchain. Like, that's just not that valuable. That's the story of Bitcoin, though. So are you saying Bitcoin is the same thing in that same thing?

I'll say two things. At the most technical level, that is what Bitcoin is. Like, there's the only kind of two nuances, and this is, I know, come, I don't own any Bitcoin. The only two nuances is one. I think, like, maybe if the world wants one of those, then, then you can kind of, like, do it once. Like, you can kind of, if everybody just says, this is our thing, then, then, okay, that's really weird. I don't understand it. But, like, like, gold to me actually is sort of, like, no different. I know that there's actual practical use case of gold, but, like, gold is, like, is a lot of the value of gold is just

some historical nostalgia. Like, and, and so, like, they, if, If everybody wants to agree that, like, there's a digital Bitcoin thing that has valuable because it's inherently scarce, and I do agree that the scarcity of it, the decentralized nature of it being scarce is the only thing that makes it practical that it even could be digital gold. But that being said, like, it doesn't have, there's no other logic to it other than you're buying it because you think somebody else is going to buy it in the future. And there's not an intrinsic reason. There's not an intrinsic reason why that's happening. So, so I still, I still, you know, hold the same kind of mathematical, you know, belief of that. But, but, like, fine, if everybody wants to do one of them, like, I mean, that's not, I'm not going to, you know, I can't do anything about it. But, but, like, when you get to the 12,000, you know, coin and token, there's just not enough money in the world to make these things sustain their value. Like, it's just not possible.

So, so eventually anything that's built on that as the foundation is going to collapse because it will not be worth. anything when people go back and try and find money for it. Right. Bitcoin was close to $50,000, $47,000 when we spoke around New Year's. It's $17,000 now. You buy? I'm not buying Bitcoin now. Okay. Let's round out this first half with something on the enterprise side. So obviously you work in enterprise technology. One of the biggest, most heavy hitters in the whole space is Salesforce, a few blocks away from you. Brett Taylor is out as the co-CEO. I never really imagined anyone would be able to last that long as co-CEO with Mark Benioff. And now Stuart Butterfield, who is the CEO of Slack, is leaving as well. He tweeted a photo of himself. I think it was

drinking some whiskey. So everyone's kind of speculating what's going on inside Salesforce. What's happening there? I mean, you are in a much better position to find out than I am. Yes. I'll guess. My guess is that it was really nice to be working at that company in a bull market, but now Mark Benioff has to rein the expenses in and the ambition in a little bit. And Brett Taylor says he's leaving to do something more entrepreneurial. Stuart Butterfield is an entrepreneurial person, and they just didn't want to stay in a cost-cutting company. What do you think? I may run with that theory. These are always tricky, right? So Brett and Stewart, so it's, I mean, so Brett Stewart and Mark are, you know, three of the, I think, most successful entrepreneurs of the web and certainly of enterprise software now.

And so, you know, Mark's a fantastic leader, operator, visionary. And Brett and Stewart, I think are equally so. And I think, you know, you always have this challenge of like entrepreneurs. you know, working inside of larger companies, it can always be this tricky situation because it's always this kind of like, you know, risk reward of, of, you know, your own thing. You control 100% of it, you know, in theory, and you can go and execute however you want. And, like, you know, it's just hard to probably have that many entrepreneurs together at all times. Like, it's just like, it's a historical anomaly for that to occur. So whether it was,

today or next year or five years from now. I think it's just a tricky, you know, balance. And, you know, the, but I don't know any of the inner workings other than they're all three great entrepreneurs. And I'm sure they have their own kind of personal reasons for, for why their next chapter makes the most sense for them. Okay. Aaron Levy is with us. He's the CEO of Box, one of our favorite guests here on Big Technology Podcast. We just did a run through the current events. When we come back, we're going to talk a little bit about the work from home versus remote. debate. Aaron, as a CEO of a company, has some perspective on that. And we're also going to talk about the worker empowerment movement. Is this the end? Just a reminder. Next week, we're going to

have two great guests, Stephanie Link from Hightower, talking about the market and Dave Friedberg, one of the all-in podcasts crew. He's going to come and talk more current events and agriculture tech. So stay tuned for those shows next week. And again, please rate us five stars if you can. All right. We'll be back right after this. Hey everyone, let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news.

Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustle Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcasts with Aaron Levy, CEO of Box. Aaron, is the worker empowerment movement over? Like, there was this moment where we're talking about quiet quitting and how basically

the employees were turning the tables on capital, dictating the terms of how they wanted to work, when they wanted to work, where they wanted to work. Is that done? Well, I probably would not be able to perfectly recite the definition of quiet quitting. But the idea that you are not having to work while you're quitting, I don't know if that's worker empowerment as much as just like negligence or something. But it fits in with this whole pie, a great resignation as well. It was all of a sudden, why could you quiet quit?

Because you could do nothing and get fired and then find another job in quiet quit there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd say that's like a third, you know, kind of element of not worker empowerment as much as, like, a different, you know, kind of like capitalistic anomaly. But, no, I don't know. You know, these things always kind of ebb and flow because of, you know, interest rates and, and the job market and, you know, how companies are performing. And so, so I think that, you know, if I think about it as, like, if you're, if you are super, talented, can you still command, you know, competitive salary, work on great things, go out and execute in a team with a strong culture? Like, all those things are very alive and well.

So I think if anything, you know, it's probably just some of the surplus of corporate, which I don't really think of his worker entitlement. It's just, um, or empowerment. It's, it's just like, I think some companies just kind of ran a little bit too wild with like, okay, there's like just too many sushi bars. Like, like, that's not even. Like, it's just like, it's like, like, kind of doesn't make any sense anymore. Like, that's just, it was a, it was an anomaly in, like, small parts of the tech industry that, like, most of the economy, you know, doesn't deal with. Okay. Interesting.

So do you think that the economy now contracting a little bit is starting to put an end to some of that stuff? And, and, you know, where do you see the economy going right now? Because it's, it's this really odd moment where we do have, like, I mean, earnings have been good enough. people are still hiring, but there's this constant specter of, you know, is this thing going to turn over or not? If you kind of step back and you think about just like a couple kind of key ideas of like, okay, companies that accelerated their growth during the pandemic for specific kind of one-time events, because we were literally stuck at home, we had nothing else to do, and you kind of like

revert that back to the mean of what they should have been growing at. If you just take that and you isolate that as one factor, and then you isolate one more factor as probably like a, you know, somewhat of a super bubble of venture capital going into small startups, you isolate those two variables. Those are the two variables that probably have changed and, you know, for the foreseeable future, which means that some companies that accelerated their hiring because they had very, you know, kind of a temporary growth spurt that they didn't know how long that would be extrapolated for. Some of those companies are now dealing with some kind of new economic pressures that they're going to have to kind of contend with. And then the idea that

you are going to, you know, raise venture capital at 50 or 100 X revenue multiple times, even in growth rounds, those days are also largely over. Maybe there'll be exceptions that disprove that, but for the most part, those are over. So if you kind of, you know, remove those two things, I think we're kind of back to actually a little bit of a more normal business environment, which is like companies have to be thinking about about cash flow, about profitability, about their margin structure. They can't spend money on everything. They have to be focused. You know, what we'll see is a pairing back of some of the longer range R&D initiatives, a pairing back of some of the perks that probably just were were a little bit egregious, you know, kind of

given the environment. You know, startups will have to be a bit more resourceful on how they are are spending their dollars. And I think actually it's all, it's, these are all things that are actually kind of like good, um, in terms of for the long term sustainable, sustainability of any company or, or ecosystem. So, um, so I think that's the kind of current state. Now, the X factor in all of this is interest rates and the Fed. And if those like get to, you know, unprecedented levels, then all bets are off because then you start to have a complete economic disruption, um, uh, you know, outside of tech, that then will flow even further into tech at a rate that we have not seen in the modern, you know, kind of tech ecosystem.

You know, one of the interesting things that's happening, though, again, talking about earnings, right? You're out of $1 billion run rate, I think, for the first time or congratulations. Thank you. Appreciate it. But also companies like Amazon and Google and meta, even, are doing pretty well in terms of revenue. Amazon said they're going to hire 150,000 people during the holiday season to the, you

fulfill orders. Google hasn't even cut yet. Mehta cut 10, 11,000. That's one of the biggest cuts so far. However, they went from 48,000 pre-pandemic to 87,000 as of last quarter. And so, let me just ask this one. Sure. And then, you know, feel free to have that it. But I made this point on CNBC on Monday. Finally, external dynamics, return to office, work from home, the way in which some of the

cities in the valley, San Francisco, for example, have changed, some argue not for the better. Do you think that colors all of this right now? Absolutely. I mean, I think companies are starting to say we want to take control back from the worker, right? We had a long period of time where the worker was effectively in charge, right? If you didn't want to work in the office, you didn't have to work in the office for a while, you couldn't work in the office. They were putting unreasonable demands in some cases on employers to remain, you know, working for them. And employers have seen that they, you know, they lost the power. And what we're seeing right now is they're trying to take that power back.

One of the things that I think might be happening is companies are taking the signal that things might eventually go south. They haven't gone yet. And, I mean, of course, the stock prices are down. But using that as a way to claw power back from the worker. What do you think about that? I'm still going to not go with that one. To me, to me, I actually, I just think it's, I think about it more.

I think the only, the only category that maybe I agree on is like, is like, if we agree that like sushi bars are inside of a corporate building are power to the worker. If you kind of isolate that for a second, I think the rest is actually kind of like just boring financial math. Wall Street slash like the world values software companies at a higher rate than everything else in the economy because software companies are supposed to have high gross margin and then thus high operating margin. And so the reason that you love Microsoft as an investor is because these people show up at work. They write software that they can sell at 90% gross margin, and at least historically, and that kind of like flows through the financial statements where you end up getting 30 or 40% profit margin as a result of that. That is why Microsoft gets to be a $2 trillion company and why there's nothing else in history in the economy that gets to do that.

It's like we write software that we can go sell to it. a billion or two billion people and you only write the code once and it's very differentiated and it's very sticky and then that becomes very profitable because you didn't have to spend that much money on a kind of incremental basis. That's why software is super valuable. We in the tech industry kind of somewhat forgot about that. Like basically we forgot that the reason that Microsoft gets to trade at two and a half trillion dollars or two trillion dollars and ten times revenue or eight times revenue at their scale, which is literally unprecedented, is because of their margin structure and their business model. So then when you go and translate that all the way down

to a company that maybe is doing a 50 million in revenue or 100 million revenue, and they're going to spend the next 10 years burning cash to ever even generate a dollar of profit, that is sort of just like the math doesn't work in a market where we have all been reminded of that excess. And interest rates probably drove it, the lack of stimulus, and that kind of winding down drove it. But I really think it's actually, it can be far simpler, which is just these companies have, in some cases, either over-hired or over-invested in new things, thinking that the pandemic kind of accelerant was somehow going to be something you could just kind of continue to scale out on a spreadsheet. And that just didn't happen. And so now you have to kind of revert back,

you know, to like, we just got to go back to like, okay, 2019 or 2020 investment levels, as opposed to 2021 or 2019 investment level. So that's at least what's happening at like the Wall Street level and the board conversations. Maybe there's some other subtler elements of people trying to like, you know, add in a little bit of the employer thing or employee thing. But for the most part, like I think about this as pretty simple, just financial math of businesses have gotten in some cases, in some markets based on the pandemic, they've gotten ahead of themselves. And now they have to kind of rationalize that. Right. Okay. And so let's talk again about Elon. I mean, I feel like he factors into every single one of these conversations.

CEOs seem to be a fan of the slash and burn that he did at Twitter. And look, Twitter made it through the World Cup and it didn't die despite all the predictions that, you know, with no infrastructure engineers, a thing was done. What's going on in your CEO group text? Like, are people seeing this cutting of like what, 60% of Twitter employees and saying, okay, well, they're still functioning. So, you know, maybe. that's something that we can do too? Or is it something that people are kind of looking at and saying, if we need a cut, we're going to, you know, maybe cut, but do it in a little bit more of a thoughtful manner? Yeah, I have not been in a group conversation where it has been proposed to follow that methodology. Right. I think, you know, I think honestly it's a testament to the prior teams at Twitter in infrastructure and engineering that they've continued to scale and remain resilient at all you know, ostensibly all-time traffic levels.

And so that's, that's fantastic. I think, but you're not seeing, you don't see, like, you know, a broad follow in tech. Like, there's all these CEOs that have been praising him either overtly or behind closed doors in terms of his ability to cut. But that's maybe more of like the think fluencers than the builders themselves. Yeah, I think other than like, other than people being like, wow, like, I wonder how much, you know, like how many features can you build if, you know, on a per, on a, on, on every kind of individual team,

could we get more features, you know, kind of built faster? Nobody that I've, you know, had reasonable conversations with, you know, thinks this is anything other than like an experiment to watch. And then I think, you know, again, I think there's probably optimistic enthusiasm for the idea of, like,

let's get back to some of the, you know, slightly more kind of hardcore bust through walls, kind of days of what startups, you know, have traditionally always been about. And frankly, I think a lot of companies executed that way through the pandemic. And I have no opinion about Twitter's culture previously. Don't, you know,

don't know enough employees to have a sense of it. But I think, like, in general, like historically, people have looked up, including myself, to Alon, as somebody who's just like, you know what, we're going to freaking build that car in like an amount of time that seems completely

unbelievably fast. And And that's exciting. I think having, I think having examples of that in the industry are, you know, generally positive. And I think it's actually totally appropriate that people have completely different opinions about the method to the madness as well. Like, it's like that's what's, you know, like, that's what's fun about the internet as we get to debate all these different approaches.

Where does that leave us then with the work from home versus remote? Because it's sort of the nexus of all these conversations where, or sorry, work from home versus the office. It's the nexus of all these conversations. It's the management saying we need you in the office. You're not going to be productive at home. It's the worker saying we still have some power. And maybe this is the right way to get things done and residual COVID nervousness in some cases.

Where do you view that discussion going and where are most of your peers starting to fall on the line of let's do this hybrid or, you know, or remote, total remote or in the office type of. of a plan in terms of where people work. Yeah, I think most people are not in the category of like fully in office. And I think actually there's, you know, even even tying back to the Elon thing, like you have to remember most of his businesses are very, very physical in nature. Right. And kind of anybody you talk to in the manufacturing world, like if you just go down south into San Jose and you go to like the chip companies, most of those companies are fully

back in the office because they literally make. make computer chips. And they've set the tone that if we're going to have people in factories working on building computer chips, we're going to also be in the office, designing them and collaborating together. So, like, so, you know, Elon comes from that world and kind of is grafting that onto Twitter, which is actually like totally makes sense that that would be his perspective. I think probably the, maybe the middle ground that I'm probably seeing the highest volume of is some mix of, you know, a few days. a week in the office is going to be the strategy. We will have greater flexibility than we did

pre-pandemic around just the life, you know, kind of dynamics that people deal with. I'm not seeing, you know, that many companies make kind of like remote only or remote first statements as much as they were in the kind of peak of the pandemic. And probably, if anything, we're starting to see a slight veering back to kind of more of a hybrid approach than not. Yeah, it's funny. I got the scoop that Twitter was going to work from home forever. And I wrote that story when I was still at BuzzFeed. And it blew up, of course, because it was like still when companies were trying to figure out whether they were remote or in person. And I learned something.

Nothing is forever. Yeah. Forever Asterton-Till-Elon biser company. Yeah. So how are you handling it at Box? Yeah. So we're kind of in that category that I described, at least I'm starting to see some convergence on. So, you know, we had remote-based, you know, we had remote-based, you know,

hiring pre-pandemic. We certainly increase that during the pandemic for a variety of reasons. We also have, you know, I don't know, 10 some odd office hubs in many places that we do business. And for a lot of the folks near office hubs, we have a kind of a two, you know, plus day a week sort of approach to people coming in as a sort of a norm that we're establishing. We still have no mandate, partly because I can't, I can't quite figure out, like, the idea of mandating, you know, something that has so many caveats and, and, and, and, and it's just easier for me to kind of think about it as, listen, I see, I personally see a lot of value in, in, in, people coming together in person. It's helpful for trust building. It's helpful for relationship building.

It's helpful for collaboration. And, and I don't think that that has to be a five-day-a-week thing. But I also think it's probably something that's better than, than more than just like monthly offsite if you can pull it off. And so I'd like to get into a strong rhythm of a few days a week in the office with way greater flexibility. You know, if somebody's got to deal with a parenting thing at 3 p.m., go for it. Who cares? And then all of that gets stitched together through digital technologies. And that is something that is clearly not going to ever, we're never going to go back from that. Every meeting that I've been in the office, I work five days a week in the office, every meeting I'm in, it's going to be on Zoom, no matter what. There's going to be,

there's going to be people that are remote. We will not have a only in office, you know, kind of meeting probably, you know, until the end of time at this point. I think that's a good thing because we can get more talent. We can work more collaboratively in a distributed fashion, but I think we can also have some accelerated benefits of when we can work together in person as well. Yeah. And it's also, it's cool now that like you can just, it has become normal to just hop on a Zoom when needed, especially like if it's a business meeting and usually you'd, you know, plan it a month out. Now you can just have it a couple days later. Totally. Get stuff done quicker. It's pretty cool. It's a huge product. It's a huge moon. And that's the thing. It's like,

like to me, all the evidence points to that remote or distributed or digital work is actually more productive. If I measured that in terms of just like sheer output of stuff that you can do in a company that is more knowledge worker oriented. But actually, I think that, that there's a different dimension of culture, of alignment, of kind of collaboration that in-person equally kind of creates and fosters. And so merging those things together, I think, is the ideal outcome. Okay. So, Aaron, we're getting close to the end of the show, but also the end of the year. This year, holy crap, man, we've had so much go on between Elon buying Twitter, the FTX and multiple other crypto collapses. And then, of course, this new stuff with generative

AI. So let's say we do a podcast again around this time next year. What's your one prediction of the crazy thing that's going to happen in 2023 that we're not anticipating? Or is it going to be a totally normal year where there won't be anything that goes. I think we need one of the, I think we need a normal year. Like we need like a 2019 again. We're just like we don't, we're not in for anything. It's all, it's all pretty fine. It's a good economy. Like I want a 2018, 2019. So, Those were the days. Hard to predict any, like, obviously, Black Swan events. You know, Elon, I'm sure we'll buy another company and we'll be dealing with some version of this yet again. But I think you can do one thing that I would be willing to fully get conviction around is this will be a year of kind of compounding AI innovation.

You know, we saw some early phases in the early 2010s of what this wave would look like. things kind of slowed down a little bit, and I think they're back, and I think they're going to be back in an increasing fashion. And so I'm pretty excited for what the potential is there. Aaron Levy, thanks for coming on. Thanks, man. Good to see you. Good to see you, too. All right, that will do it for us here on Big Technology Podcast.

Thank you so much, Aaron Levy, for joining. Always great to have you. Thank you, Nate Goatni, our esteemed audio editor, for putting this together. Thank you to LinkedIn for having me as part of your podcast network. Here we go. We're rounding out the end of 2022, and, man, it's been a fun year. And, of course, I want to thank all of you, the listeners. If you're here, again, please rate us five stars.

If you can, we're so close to hitting 100 on Spotify, and we're blasting ahead on Apple Podcasts. Five stars takes a second. I mean a lot. And that will just do it for us here. So again, as I mentioned, we have an all-star week coming up. Dave Freeberg from the All-In podcast, he's going to be joining. And Stephanie Link will also be here. a frequent CNBC contributor and also from Hightower investments breaking down the market.

Well, this has been fun. Again, always great to have Aaron. Always great to have you. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.