Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box

About this episode

The reception to our recent post on Code Reviews has been strong. Catch up!

Amid a maelstrom of discussion on whether or not AI is killing SaaS, one of the top publicly listed SaaS companies in the world has just reported record revenues, clearing well over $1.1B in ARR for the first time with a 28% margin. As we comment on the pod, Aaron Levie is the rare public company CEO equally at home in both worlds of Silicon Valley and Wall Street/Main Street, by day helping 70% of the Fortune 500 with their Enterprise Advanced Suite, and yet by night is often found in the basements of early startups and tweeting viral insights about the future of agents.

Now that both Cursor, Cloudflare, Perplexity, Anthropic and more have made Filesystems and Sandboxes and various forms of “Just Give the Agent a Box” cool (not just cool; it is now one of the single hottest areas in AI infrastructure growing 100% MoM), we find it a delightfully appropriate time to do the episode with the OG CEO who has been giving humans and computers Boxes since he was a college dropout pitching VCs at a Michael Arrington house party.

Enjoy our special pod, with fan favorite returning guest/guest cohost Jeff Huber!

Note: We didn’t directly discuss the AI vs SaaS debate - Aaron has done many, many, many other podcasts on that, and you should read his definitive essay on it. Most commentators do not understand SaaS businesses because they have never scaled one themselves, and deeply reflected on what the true value proposition of SaaS is.

We also discuss Your Company is a Filesystem:

We also shoutout CTO Ben Kus’ and the AI team, who talked about the technical architecture and will return for AIE WF 2026.

Full Video Episode

Timestamps

* 00:00 Adapting Work for Agents

* 01:29 Why Every Agent Needs a Box

* 04:38 Agent Governance and Identity

* 11:28 Why Coding Agents Took Off First

* 21:42 Context Engineering and Search Limits

* 31:29 Inside Agent Evals

* 33:23 Industries and Datasets

* 35:22 Building the Agent Team

* 38:50 Read Write Agent Workflows

* 41:54 Docs Graphs and Founder Mode

* 55:38 Token FOMO