Dozens of cold emails, finally one famous investor bit… and the result was a $4.6 billion company
What started as a dorm-room project quickly turned serious after one investor responded. Within a year, the founders had money, momentum — and their first major disagreement.
“If you were [even] remotely an investor in 2005, you got an email from me,” recalls Aaron Levie, the CEO of cloud storage and file-sharing company Box, now valued at $4.6 billion.
Back then, Levie was a college student at the University of Southern California, working on the idea from his dorm. Desperate to get funding, he sent cold emails to dozens of investors around the world. “If there was any theoretical chance that you could invest in the company, I was probably emailing you,” he told CNBC Make It.
The investor who took the plunge in Box was none other than Shark Tank investor Mark Cuban. The former Dallas Mavericks owner keeps a public email address and says he checks it regularly, though he admits he deletes about 90% of the mails he receives and decides whether he’s interested in just a couple of seconds.
Cuban got back within hours of Levie’s mail hitting his inbox, and before even meeting the start-ups founders in person he’d agreed to invest $350,000.
How did Box convince Mark Cuban to invest?
The pitch was simple: the price of online data storage was falling, internet speeds were rising and people were using more and more internet connected devices, all of which meant people wanted to be able to store their data safely online and access it on any device from wherever they were.
Cuban like the logic and put his money where his mouth was. Once Box had the capital they used it to expand the company, hiring more engineers to build out the product, increased server capacity and invested in marketing.
The end of Cuban’s investment in Box
While Cuban’s investment helped Box get off the ground, their relationship didn’t last long. Just a year later the Box management team and the investor disagreed over a plan to give a free gigabyte of storage to customers to attract more clients.
In 2006, Box raised a new $1.5 million round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Levie used part of the money to buy Cuban out. The 66-year old investor didn’t regret that decision though. When Box went public in an IPO that valued the company at $1.7 billion, Cuban said he’d “combust” if he were responsible for a company where costs were higher than revenue - at that point Box had never made a profit.
That has now changed, with the online storage giant posting profits since 2023, making $129 million in 2024.
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