Box dropped a bit of a bombshell this afternoon when it announced that long-time Chief Operating Officer Dan Levin would be stepping down from the role and Stephanie Carullo would be taking over.
Carullo comes with stellar credentials over her 25-year career that include management and executive stints with IBM, Telstra, Cisco and Apple, giving her the kind of enterprise experience Box would be looking for. CEO Aaron Levie was especially impressed with her go-to-market background, and said that she will be leading and integrating the global sales, marketing, customer success and business development organizations. Levie will be concentrating on product and co-founder and CFO Dylan Smith will continue to lead the financial part of the organization.
As for Levin, he approached Levie about 18 months ago to let him know he was ready to move on. The two began formulating a plan to bring in a replacement, and in a lengthy process, spent the last year quietly interviewing candidates.
Levin has been with Box since 2010, right about the time it was beginning a transition from a cloud consumer storage play to the much broader enterprise cloud content management platform it is today. He helped raise the company from a pup, with just 50 employees, through its rough IPO process in 2014 to today where it is a public company with 1,600 employees. At its most recent earnings report at the end of May, the company reported that it was free cash-flow positive for the second consecutive quarter.
While Carullo recognizes Levin’s accomplishments, she is ready to make her own mark. “Definitely big shoes to fill, no doubt. Just remarkable last few years of helping Aaron and team get to a sizable organization and market leader. I spent the last 25 years in tech working for really great companies that were part of creating and developing tech that enabled [people] to work differently,” she said.
While her experience wasn’t for a pure cloud company like Box, Carullo spent time over her career building teams and opening new markets, in many cases in an enterprise setting, and she brings all of that to her new job, she said.
Levie says beyond broad industry experience that Carullo brings to the table, it was also important to find someone who would fit culturally at the company and with the executive team. “One of the most important conditions in the search was finding someone who would fit and expand and evolve our culture. We spent a lot of time understanding how we work together. We are collaborative, but we do like to get into healthy arguments on strategy and how we are doing business, and we would have a good time working through those types of issues,” he said.
This was clearly not lost on Carullo. “They have a healthy respect of pushing each other that I think you need, but I’m confident that Aaron and I will quickly get into our own cadence,” she said.
Levin is not leaving altogether — he will keep his board seat and continue to be an advisor to Levie and the executive team, but operations will belong to Carullo now. She says she’s ready to get to work to help steer the company through its next level of growth.
“I like to get my hands dirty and work with customers and when you have the platform and products that Box has developed, there is a tremendous opportunity to build upon that,” she said. That journey begins when Carullo takes the reins officially on August 1st.