AI & Tech
Box CEO turned down half-billion-dollar acquisition offer in his mid-20s
My First Million
The investing hack hiding in your own company
"We were in our mid-20s, so probably 2 of us were like 25, 24, 23. And we don't really talk specifically about the offer, but call it in the half a billion range. That's plastic. Wow."
Aaron Levie and his three co-founders faced a gut-wrenching decision to reject an acquisition offer worth approximately $500 million when they were in their early to mid-20s. They concluded through regret minimization framework that they would regret not continuing to scale Box more than turning down the offer, believing the market was still 100 times larger. At the time, they had limited secondary liquidity and were not taking significant money off the table.
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My First Million