Every Agent Needs a Box — Aaron Levie, Box

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 Culture

* 56:31 Production Function Secrets

* 01:01:08 Film Roots to Box

* 01:03:38 AI Future of Movies

* 01:06:47 Media DevRel and Engineering

Transcript

Adapting Work for Agents

Aaron Levie: Like you don’t write code, you talk to an agent and it goes and does it for you, and you may be at best review it. That’s even probably like, like largely not even what you’re doing. What’s happening is we are changing our work to make the agents effective. In that model, the agent didn’t really adapt to how we work.

We basically adapted to how the agent works. All of the economy has to go through that exact same evolution. Right now, it’s a huge asset and an advantage for the teams that do it early and that are kinda wired into doing this ‘cause you’ll see compounding returns. But that’s just gonna take a while for most companies to actually go and get this deployed.

swyx: Welcome to the Lane Space Pod. We’re back in the chroma studio with uh, chroma, CEO, Jeff Hoover. Welcome returning guest now guest host.

Aaron Levie: It’s a pleasure. Wow. How’d you get upgraded to, uh, to that?

swyx: Because he’s like the perfect guy to be guest those for you.

Aaron Levie: That makes sense actually, for We love context. We, we both really love context le we really do.

We really do.

swyx: Uh, and we’re here with, uh, Aaron Levy. Welcome.

Aaron Levie: Thank you. Good to, uh, good to be [00:01:00] here.

swyx: Uh, yeah. So we’ve all met offline and like chatted a little bit, but like, it’s always nice to get these things in person and conversation. Yeah. You just started off with so much energy. You’re, you’re super excited about agents.

I love

Aaron Levie: agents.

swyx: Yeah. Open claw. Just got by, got bought by OpenAI. No, not bought, but you know, you know what I mean?

Aaron Levie: Some, some, you know, acquihire. Executive

swyx: hire.

Aaron Levie: Executive hire. Okay. Executive hire. Say,

swyx: hey, that’s my term. Okay. Um, what are you pounding the table on on agents? You have so many insightful tweets.

Why Every Agent Needs a Box

Aaron Levie: Well, the thing that, that we get super excited by that I think is probably, you know, should be relatively obvious is we’ve, we’ve built a platform to help enterprises manage their files and their, their corporate files and the permissions of who has access to those files and the sharing collaboration of those files.

All of those files contain really, really important information for the enterprise. It might have your contracts, it might have your research materials, it might have marketing information, it might have your memos. All that data obviously has, you know, predominantly been used by humans. [00:02:00] But there’s been one really interesting problem, which is that, you know, humans only really work with their files during an active engagement with them, and they kind of go away and you don’t really see them for a long time.

And all of a sudden, uh, with the power of AI and AI agents, all of that data becomes extremely relevant as this ongoing source of, of answers to new questions of data that will transform into, into something else that, that produces value in your organization. It, it contains the answer to the new employee that’s onboarding, that needs to ramp up on a project.

Um, it contains the answer to the right thing to sell a customer when you’re having a conversation to them, with them contains the roadmap information that’s gonna produce the next feature. So all that data. That previously we’ve been just sort of storing and, and you know, occasionally forgetting about, ‘cause we’re only working on the new active stuff.

All of that information becomes valuable to the enterprise and it’s gonna become extremely valuable to end users because now they can have agents go find what they’re looking for and produce new, new [00:03:00] value and new data on that information. And it’s gonna become incredibly valuable to agents because agents can roam around and do a bunch of work and they’re gonna need access to that data as well.

And um, and you know, sometimes that will be an agent that is sort of working on behalf of, of, of you and, and effectively as you as and, and they are kind of accessing all of the same information that you have access to and, and operating as you in the system. And then sometimes there’s gonna be agents that are just.

Effectively autonomous and kind of run on their own and, and you’re gonna collaborate and work with them kind of like you did another person. Open Claw being the most recent and maybe first real sort of, you know, kind of, you know, up updating everybody’s, you know, views of this landscape version of, of what that could look like, which is, okay, I have an agent.

It’s on its own system, it’s on its own computer, it has access to its own tools. I probably don’t give it access to my entire life. I probably communicate with it like I would an assistant or a colleague and then it, it sort of has this sandbox environment. So all of that has massive implications for a platform that manage that [00:04:00] enterprise data.

We think it’s gonna just transform how we work with all of the enterprise content that we work with, and we just have to make sure we’re building the right platform to support that.

swyx: The sort of shorthand I put it is as people build agents, everybody’s just realizing that every agent needs a box. Yes.

And it’s nice to be called box and just give everyone a box.

Aaron Levie: Hey, I if I, you know, if we can make that go viral, uh, like I, I think that that terminology, I, that’s the

swyx: tagline. Every agent

Aaron Levie: needs a box. Every agent needs a box. If we can make that the headline of this, I’m fine with this. And that’s the billboard I wanna like Yeah, exactly.

Every agent needs a box. Um, I like it. Can we ship this? Like,

swyx: okay, let’s do it. Yeah.

Aaron Levie: Uh, my work here is done and I got the value I needed outta this podcast Drinks.

swyx: Yeah.

Agent Governance and Identity

Aaron Levie: But, but, um, but, but, you know, so the thing that we, we kind of think about is, um, is, you know, whether you think the number 10 x or a hundred x or whatever the number is, we’re gonna have some order of magnitude more agents than people.

That’s inevitable. It has to happen. So then the question is, what is the infrastructure that’s needed to make all those agents effecti