Why the Journey Has Only Begun for Box

This post originally appeared on Medium.

Box co-founders Aaron Levie and Dylan Smith today reached a milestone all startups dream of, but few achieve, going public on the NYSE.

What an amazing decade long journey it has been for this amazing, dynamic, young duo and COO Dan Levin. Knowing their ambitions, it is only the beginning. Our journey as investors with Box began in 2010 and it has been a wild ride for the last 5 years. We knew we wanted to be partners in their mission: to build frictionless content and collaboration enterprise cloud apps for business professionals around the globe. Beyond the vision though, at the time we invested it was their disruptive freemium model that intrigued us, having grown their business 3X year over year through mostly inbound leads and a limited inside sales staff. Today, the organization stands 1,000 strong with some of the most talented, enterprise sales and marketing talent in the world. As Marc Benioff of Salesforce fame once stated, “You can’t fight a war without an army”. Aaron has built his army and with this IPO raised the ammunition to win the war for one of the biggest battles in the cloud: The place we store and share our most important and valuable corporate content.

Box has grown into the enterprise cloud collaboration leader with great ambition, passion, fearlessness, determination, and humor — traits we look for and deeply admire in the entrepreneurs and companies we back. We were proud to recognize Box as our portfolio company of the year in 2014. We congratulate the entire team at Box for this significant milestone but more importantly can’t wait to see what they achieve over the next decade.