"Video Lecture _ Lecture 12 Building for the Enterprise”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFVDjrvQJdw

  In this blog post, I'm going to discuss the main ideas that a speaker Aaron Levie brought during his lecture about 'How to Build the Enterprise '. Couple words about the lecturer Aaron Levie: he is an American entrepreneur, the co-founder, and CEO of the enterprise cloud company 'Box'. The product 'Box' (formerly 'Box.net'), based in Redwood City, California, is a cloud content management and file sharing service for businesses. He mentioned that basically every company in the world use technology, the great thing about being at Stanford is that they study the technology. Moreover, they think of the technology industry as an industry. However, in reality, what is happening is every industry is going to have a technology component of what they do. Enterprises are not going to be able to survive in the future if they do not get good at technology.

  In this lecture, Aaron Levie is going to talk about Background of 'Box', major factors that have changed in the enterprise today, and patterns to recognize to build a startup. Let's start with the background of 'Box'. The concept was devised back in the year 2004 and one year later the company was launched (in 2005).  The main way that he came up with the idea is that he noticed that it was difficult to share files. Back then, it was either really expensive or really tough to move data around through corporate companies. Moreover, they noticed lots of factors immediately changing in the software world. First, of all, cost of storage dropped dramatically. Thus they thought to open up the product for free. There were more powerful browsers and networks also, more locations and people to share with. Therefore, they had to choose between two paths, consumer, and enterprise. The path for the enterprise was slow, expensive, complex. Even though it was challenging, they decided to take this path. As the enterprise is a difficult mechanism that is changing over time it made their work harder. Thus, here are the primary factors that have changed in enterprise nowadays: 

·         Most application companies are moving to Cloud,

·         Cheaper, on-demand computing from a world of expensive computing,

·         The more standardized platform,

·         Able to sell to every business, user-led IT model

It is not a secret that every company in the world needs better technology to work smarter, faster and more securely. Therefore to satisfy these points enterprises need new technologies game up their business model. Therefore, they increase multi-platform commerce, try to make better technology to deliver various healthcare experiences and create and distribute global media. What are the patterns to build a startup?

·         Spot technology disruptions

·         Start small

·         Find asymmetries

·         Find the almost crazy outliers

·         Listen to your customers

·         Modularize, not customize

·         Focus on the user

·         Your product should sell itself

  All these points have their definition and benefits. Therefore, beginning from tech disruption: attempt to get new empowering technologies that create a wide gap between how things have been done and how things can be done. You want to discover the wedge that is natural that you can create a product that will slip in the gaps of other existing products. Same time something that you think over time expands to be a more valuable product of the enterprise structure. Moreover, you should think about things that officials can’t or won’t do because either the economics don’t make sense for them, the economics are so unusual, or because technically they can’t. After this, you need to find the customers/users that are at the edge of the business, their business model, their industry and find the uncommon features of those customers. Look for the customers who use technology to get advanced. So, use technology for performance improvements and go work with them to see how your product can develop.  As a conclusion, following above mentioned points and also trying to be aware of changes in the enterprise will help you to build a startup and have balanced customer flow.