Tech Sector IT: Box CIO Ravi Malick Talks Scalability, Agility, and Execution | Technovation 805

Thank you, Peter. I appreciate you having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Box is the leading cloud content management platform. I think north of 70% of Fortune 500 companies use Box to manage their content or unstructured data. I think this is an area where we're seeing the market understanding and education really start to hockey stick in terms of what is it about unstructured data and content that is really important and essential to the enterprise and new companies. For a long time, structured data, big data analytics, all of that has been in the forefront. It's pretty much table stakes now. Unstructured data now is starting to get that kind of hype that the big data used to get, because if you think about how work gets done, it's all around content. Whether it's a memo, a presentation, a spreadsheet. What's really interesting is I think it's something like 58% of companies don't have a really well-baked strategy or understanding of what is in their unstructured data. What's also interesting is we find that structured data has a tendency to migrate into unstructured data as well. Finance people love to download in Excel. You need to look at employee data, you download an Excel. That data, which is some of the most sensitive and private information for a company, is essential. Box is really the platform that allows you to manage that, curate it, continue to leverage it at scale, and integrate into the other applications in your ecosystem.

My role is 50-50. 50% internal, which is doing the things that CIOs do: running IT and security and those kinds of things, developing our worldwide technology strategy to support the growth and scaling of the company. Then the exciting part of my job is the 50% external. I get to be a brand advocate, work with other executives, customers, opportunities, work with our sales and marketing teams on creating and developing go-to-market strategies that enable us to connect with the right folks within an organization and educate them on the power of Box as the cloud content platform.

Scalability is absolutely the theme of what that focus was. What's interesting is, and I know some other folks have said this as well, that technology companies don't necessarily do it better just because they're a technology company. The things that you look at and focus on are where do you have opportunities to scale, where is there friction that is going to prevent that scalability? Is that technology, is that process, is it people, the combination of two, the combination of all three? I think really where the opportunities that I have found coming in are extending the planning horizon. Thinking not 12 months, 18 months, but really like where do we want to be in three years, where do we want to be in five years? Yes, we want to be a $2 billion company, but what does that actually look like? What do the processes look like? What does the technology stack look like? The enemy of scalability can be complexity, but complexity can also be a competitive advantage. You have to find that right balance of where can I simplify, where does it make sense to simplify, and where do I need to keep the complexity because it does give me a competitive advantage. Getting people to understand: 99% of the world does their financials this way, so we should leverage standard processes. Same thing in people and benefits, leverage standard as much as you can. But really focus the energy on the complexity, on the things that make the business different and really give us a competitive edge. That's where we want the complexity, that's where we want to invest in things maybe to be custom and to be more complex. But where we can standardize, where we consolidate, where we can simplify, that not only reduces the cost but also reduces the risk. The more applications that you have in your environment, the more risk you have from a security standpoint and an operational standpoint. So I think that's where we've been focusing a lot of energy: what is the picture three to five years from now, which sometimes is challenging particularly for technology companies because you think technology is changing so fast and you've got to be flexible, you've got to have that agility. I don't disagree with that, but I think you've got to be selective where you have that agility and where you have that flexibility. I think the most important thing is, as you're growing and scaling as a company, is to retain speed of decision-making. Execution, you have to appreciate growth and scale, you have to appreciate a global portfolio, people in different time zones, 2,500 people versus 100 people. Execution is really where you start to see that, but decision-making, being able to make decisions quickly, is critically important. Don't lose that, retain that from the startup culture, but understand that execution becomes more deliberate, it becomes more challenging as you grow as a company.

CIOs, I think it is a small world, the CIO world. A big part of that network and that world orbits around sort of group therapy and understanding what you go through as a CIO and the challenges. There's that commonality, and I think there's a mutual respect for one another in that space that if a CIO reaches out to another CIO, you respond, you have some engagement. That is something that I certainly extend to my CIO peers and colleagues and feel that that same courtesy is extended to me. What I like to talk about is technology, whether it's content management, unstructured data, or just everything technology oriented. Obviously I have a bend towards: how can we make sure that you're maximizing your investment in Box? Here's what other customers do, here's what I've done or what I did as a customer, here's why I think it's important. A lot of it is just education. I'm not there to sell them, I'm there to provide the straight view and the straight talk. How can you do more with the platform? Where do we have challenges? Where is the roadmap going? Why is this important? Why should you be thinking about it and moving it up in the tier of applications or in the tier of prioritization? As you're thinking about what you need to do as a CIO, why is content so important? Why does it need to be secured? Why do you need to know who's accessing it, who's managing it? I spent a lot of time on that, but I also spent a lot of time on just general technology strategy. I love learning and hearing from other CIOs about how they're addressing problems, not just data, but how are they looking to uplevel their interaction with customers? How are they leveraging data? What do they feel is useful, what's not useful? A lot of times we just talk about leadership and how do you be a more effective leader, particularly a more effective technology leader. 10 or 15 years ago it was: I'm a technology leader and I need to understand business. I think it's flipped now to where I'm a business leader with a focus on technology. That migration, that shift, has enabled CIOs to really extend themselves more into the business and be viewed as business leaders, not just a technology leader.

We have a Box on Box program. It is run out of IT, but with very deep partnership with our customer service organization and our sales organization. How we use Box and how we maximize the platform and the use cases that we develop and that we enable ourselves is probably one of the best tools that we have to show customers how you get value out of it and why content is important. It's something I'm very passionate about, being customer zero, and providing not only the insight of where we are running into limitations or where we are really pushing the bounds of the product internally, but also folding in what I hear from customers and what they're looking for. Having that direct line into engineering and product to be able to be the first ones to beta test new features is a really fun part about being at a technology company. You get the advanced insight into capabilities and features, and then we figure out what it's going to take to make sure that if we bring somebody in and open up our doors and have them go through that, they can see how we think about security when it comes to content, how we think about it as a single layer across our application stack, the power of the integrations and the automation, and all of the features that a lot of times get lost because you're just thinking about putting your content somewhere. It's really so much more than that.

I'd be remiss if I didn't say AI. The top two by far are AI and cybersecurity. There are other less technology-specific themes that we're seeing. I always think about how I'm managing technology in three dimensions: maximizing value, minimizing risk, and managing cost. How those three work together, sometimes one is more important than the other, but I really do feel like those are the three things when you boil everything else down. Right now what we're seeing is a lot of focus on managing cost and minimizing risk. The challenge there is understanding that those don't have to be mutually exclusive from maximizing value. If you can figure out how to check all three boxes, which is the mental gymnastics that I try and do every day, you're doing the right things as a technology leader. AI and cybersecurity are obviously the topics of the day. Everybody is thinking about AI. Box AI, which we announced earlier, is incredibly meaningful for us. When I was the customer, I was thinking: how do you amplify the value of your content? How do you get more insights? How do you really leverage it and make it reusable? Some of the challenge particularly in this space is that content gets created a lot, and I think it's north of 50% of content that gets created goes unused or is not reused. This is where AI for us can be a game changer in really elevating productivity. As I like to say, it's productivity on steroids when you're not constantly recreating the wheel. You're able to leverage what has already been created and tweak it. Cybersecurity too is very much interrelated. We've always leveraged AI within our product, but it was at a deeper layer. Before the whole ChatGPT thing, AI was there. A lot of companies were thinking about it, a lot of products were incorporating it. If you use Gmail, you got the predictive writing, those kinds of things. But it was maybe two or three layers. Now it's in the hands of every user. The power that I can define and use this in a way that is meaningful just for me but also is meaningful for the enterprise, the power of it is still unrealized. The ability to drive value from the top down, which has traditionally been you implement technology, you define a use case, you get an executive sponsor, that's driven top down with a business case. But now with ChatGPT, you can do that and you can drive it from the bottom up. You have that ability to meet in the middle, which is where the real value to the enterprise is.

The number one thing is know the numbers. I have kind of a different path to the CIO seat. I spent the first half of my career more on the business side, spending time in investment banking and consulting, and then doing software and financial services startups where I was mostly on the business side: sales, marketing, and finance. Understanding that aspect, and particularly finance, I had a mentor very early in my career. I'm basically borrowing his phrase: know the numbers. Know your numbers, and it wasn't just know the numbers, the metrics for your area of the business. Know the financials, know how you tie to the balance sheet, and be able to talk and speak about technology in terms that can be connected financially, because at the end of the day, that's the common language of every company. It's how every company is going to be measured, it's how you determine success. Yes, there are other barometers, but at the end of the day, are you profitable? What's your revenue? What's your retention? It always comes back to financials. Having that foundation was, I wish I could say it was a beautifully and well thought out plan, it just sort of happened. It happened as I moved from business into IT. When I would talk to peers about the value of technology, what it was going to do for the business, not just that this was some new technology that automated process, but here are the things that it's going to influence, here are the needles that it's going to move. I think it fast-tracked and sped up the support, the understanding, and the decision to say yes on a lot of big key initiatives and smaller ones as well.

I've always been fascinated with technology, even as a kid. I taught myself BASIC, Pascal. I was the kid who took things apart, wanted to see how they work, tried to put them back together, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It's just sort of how my mind works, numbers and technology. When I transitioned from investment banking into consulting at PwC, that's where it really got supercharged. At that time, people were still doing big ERP implementations, and the whole space was really starting to accelerate in a major way. That's where I learned enterprise technology and really got the foundation of what it does for the business, how you need to think about designing it, how you need to think about building it, how you need to think about managing it. I loved it. The satisfaction of building something and seeing it work and seeing it run. As I moved on later in my career and got into the startup world and started consulting in that area doing implementations, I eventually figured out that I was not as good a programmer as I thought I was. When you're working with folks from Stanford and MIT, real super brain programmers and developers, you realize very quickly that either you are cut from that cloth or you're not. But I can understand it. I could read the code, I know what's going on, I can understand the technology, how it works together, how it should work together. That just stayed with me throughout my career. Even on the business side, I was always thinking: how do I get people, process, technology working as efficiently as possible, with technology being a big part of that.

Thank you, Peter, and thank you again for having me. I've really enjoyed the conversation.