There might not have been a better time to be a tech founder in the recent past as now.
That’s the bold assessment from Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of Box, the cloud storage and collaboration giant that went public in 2015. In a recent conversation, Levie painted a picture of an industry that experienced an unexpected creative drought in the latter half of the 2010s—only to be suddenly revitalized by the emergence of artificial intelligence. His perspective offers a unique window into the cyclical nature of tech innovation and why seasoned executives are viewing AI as a fundamental reset of the competitive landscape.
“There was a period between mid-2010s to early 2020s where we were actually in kind of a bit of a lull as an industry,” Levie explained. “The reason for that was we kind of checked off a lot of boxes of the core things that people needed in the world. Once you have Slack, you don’t need five other chat tools. Once you have Zoom, you don’t need five other video conferencing tools. It gets kind of derivative past these kind of core platforms.”
This observation speaks to a broader phenomenon that many in Silicon Valley felt but few articulated so clearly. After the mobile revolution and the maturation of cloud computing, the tech industry found itself in an unusual position: many of the fundamental problems had been solved, at least at a surface level.
“Then what is the 20-year-old founder supposed to work on?” Levie continued. “You have pretty finite opportunities as compared to in the mid-2000s, when the whole world was open. You could start anything because every single category had to be reinvented post-mobile, post-cloud maturity.”
But according to Levie, that creative stagnation is now firmly in the rearview mirror. “So we now have that era in AI, and that is why I’m so unbelievably pumped up. You have a complete reset of the landscape. Now as a startup, you instantly have scale, and so then it’s a distribution game and a lot of these pieces of software can go viral now in a way that wasn’t possible 10 or 15 years ago.”
The Box CEO sees AI as fundamentally altering the startup dynamics that had calcified over the previous decade. “We’ve kind of neutralized a lot of the incumbent advantages, and so thus it’s a ripe opportunity for brand new startups—often people just coming right out of college saying, ‘Hey, it’s my first time building a company.’ They’re crazy enough to not know how hard it is. So they’ll jump right into markets and you’ll just have new startups that actually go and do it and actually produce real companies in these spaces.”
Levie’s analysis aligns with broader trends we’re witnessing across the tech ecosystem. The rapid adoption of generative AI tools like ChatGPT, which reached 100 million users faster than any consumer application in history, demonstrates the viral potential he describes. Meanwhile, AI-native startups like Anthropic, Perplexity, and SSI have achieved massive valuations in record time, often with remarkably small teams. The democratization of AI capabilities through APIs and open-source models has indeed lowered barriers to entry, allowing college dropouts and first-time founders to compete directly with established tech giants. This dynamic mirrors the early days of cloud computing and mobile apps, when nimble startups could outmaneuver incumbents weighed down by legacy systems and thinking. As we move deeper into 2025, Levie’s thesis appears to be playing out in real-time, with AI serving as the great equalizer that’s once again making the impossible seem inevitable for a new generation of entrepreneurs.