Aaron Levie Quotes

In general, you don't want competitors to understand your business outside of telling people your revenue and profitability numbers.

There are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.

That doesn't mean you have to have the lowest costs in the industry to succeed. But you need to make sure the activities and product attributes that increase your costs above the other guy bring in at least that much more in revenue, and hopefully more.

There's not many businesses where someone can come in and offer to cut the price in half and somebody doesn't think about shifting. But that's the nature of the ratings business.

Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.

It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.

A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.

If we look at pricing holistically, we'll create a more solid business.

It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy. The other side of it is that you can't cut enough costs to save your way to prosperity.

Cutting prices or putting things on sale is not sustainable business strategy.

If your goal is to provide a service at terms your customers can afford, you have to figure out how to offer your services at price points such that your aggregated costs are lower than your aggregated revenues.

I trust that McDonald's can find a way to sell all-natural chicken without raising their prices; we did that at Shake Shack. It is more expensive, and we took a slight margin hit, but we did it. And if we can do it, I know that much bigger companies can.

When you start losing market share, it's really tough to gain it back; you need the product portfolio and presence in many markets.

The studios basically, besides developing some material, their strength is distribution. Distribution in any other business is a cost that you incur. You know, in a trucking business, you eat it. In a film business, distribution is a profit center.

When we look at investing, we always think about 'how defensible is this, how likely is it that somebody is going to copy this.' E-commerce tends to be something easy to copy because it's execution.

The same products, services or technologies can fail or succeed depending on the business model you choose. Exploring the possibilities is critical to finding a successful business model. Settling on first ideas risks the possibility of missing potential that can only be discovered by prototyping and testing different alternatives.

The most interesting information I can have about a competitor is the cost.

The digital business is a fantastic business to be in. The only thing you have to do is build a cost structure for a declining business, which is different from the structure for a growing business.

To bring out a new technology for consumers first, you just had a very long road to go down to try to find people who actually would pay money for something.

The closest thing to a law of nature in business is that form has an affinity for expense, while substance has an affinity for income.

There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.

If you make a really good product that people want and are willing to pay for, money will come.

And so if your competitors aren't growing, if there isn't a competitive reason to grow, and you want focus and discipline to add customers to existing stores, you adjust your strategy.

I think in just about any business the low cost competitor is always going to have an advantage.