One of the hardest challenges of a startup or any software project is staying true to your vision, while also dealing with complex trade-offs and opportunities that come along the way. Yet ultimately, uncompromising strategies are usually the ones that scale. A little story… When Box first pivoted into the enterprise in 2007, cloud was still in its infancy in large corporate environments. Salesforce had done amazing work getting enterprises to adopt cloud apps, but cloud infra was still in the early days with AWS only launching a couple years prior.

The vision of web3 is that we get all the same innovation of today’s web, but with the new benefit that we can “own” our data in a public and immutable blockchain, using this data across multiple apps. It’s a great vision, but might be harder than we think. Why? Because data nearly always works in the context of an app. Twitter social graph, YouTube channels, Spotify playlists, Airbnb listings, Shopify stores: these develop over *years* within the context of a product and APIs that moved quickly to build value and trust over time.

For products to work at scale they need sustainable business models and networks. Would love to see more discourse in web3 about the complex financial incentives conflicts that we’re going to see if the movement goes beyond DeFi/trading-related use cases. A few examples👇 Users becoming “owners” of a product sounds epic, but misaligned incentives complicates things. Users should want more value at lower prices, shareholders should want ROI. With these mixed, are you building for users with their customer hat *or* shareholder hat on? Crazy tension.

Congress is writing a bill right now to make it harder for big tech companies to buy startups. Ironically they want to promote competition, but this will inevitably hurt innovation and competition for some very obvious reasons: 1. Let’s say a new startup called WhatsUp launches and Meta decides it’s a very important market. Now, instead of Meta even considering that they should acquire WhatsUp and dramatically benefit WhatsUp’s investors and employees financially, this law forces them to copy the app.

One of the most fun parts of enterprise software is the relationship between tech innovation and how work happens. The process generally goes like this… 1. Some characteristic of how we work is inefficient or filled with friction. Maybe it’s how we collaborate, process orders, close the books, or manage inventory. Usually there’s existing technology involved (but not always) but that tech hasn’t caught up with the real process.

There’s an entire category of software disruption that’s possible just by building user experiences that only became possible to deliver in the browser in the past few years. Amazing what was once too expensive performance-wise is now utterly trivial today. We’re building Box Sign, a native esignature product in Box, and can get away with infinitely better and faster UX than what was possible if we had started 10 years ago due to browser improvements and faster computers.

Market sizes are often artificially constrained by legacy participants or architectures. When we started Box, most investors could only see how large other players had gotten, as a way of evaluating the market size. But what was missed was that the cloud changed everything. 1. The cloud made software delivery more efficient, 10Xing demand. No longer did you have to install, upgrade, patch, and integrate software and hardware. That decrease in complexity meant any SMB could use enterprise tools, and any enterprise could support more vendors.