When Did Aaron Levie Drop Out of College?

Aaron Levie dropped out of college in the middle of junior year in 2005, when being 20 and doing a startup was still fairly rare. A few dozen people in Silicon Valley were doing it. He thinks it was prompted probably mostly by Facebook having made dropping out a thing, and it was still a relatively rare event. The number of 20 year olds dropping out is now a standard playbook. How many young people are getting started and jumping straight into building startups is super exciting, and he still feels pretty old.

The playbook is incredibly different. The way startups are being run right now is the most different of any period of technological change he has ever seen. Running Box in 2005 compared with a startup 10 years prior, the 1995 company next to the 2005 version, was not that different. In 2005, a little bit before the cloud wave, they still went to data centers, racked servers, and coded morning and night. Running the company in 2005 compared with 1995 would almost look exactly the same.