This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Give Aaron Levie a few minutes, and he will convince you of almost anything -- even that cloud storage is sexy. His ten-year-old startup, Box, showed revenues of $124 million (£79m) in the last financial year (though it is not yet profitable), and has a 27-million-strong customer base, which includes nearly every Fortune 500 company; they use the platform to upload files, collaborate and share data. "We had to convince people they needed us," says Levie, 28. "People just said,

'I'll just email myself files,' or 'I'll use a pen drive'. Now it's a given that you should get your files from anywhere." On the brink of filing for an IPO, he talks to WIRED about Box's big plans and the future of data storage.

WIRED: Why did you drop out of the University of Southern California in 2005 to build a product no one thought they needed?

Aaron Levie: Well, my grades were declining rapidly, so it was pretty clear that I had a short window of time before they were just going to kick me out. It was some mix of not really wanting to ever get a real job and getting lucky where Box started to pick up steam. We would be in class on our BlackBerrys answering customer-support emails and we had people calling us because they couldn't get into their Box account -- we'd have to step out of class to help them because they were paying us $2.99 a month. Then we got an initial angel investment from Mark Cuban and that really did it.

How did you manage all that from your college dorm room?

We just emailed him. It turns out that he's actually fairly responsive on his emails and so he got back pretty quickly and was interested in the company. He ended up doing a pretty sizeable angel investment for us at the time. So that led us to build our confidence, drop out of college and move to Palo Alto to build up the business.

What was the turning point, when you finally found a major market in the enterprise world?

When we were raising our series B funding [in January 2008], most investors said there's no way that a small startup with 20 employees is going to be able to compete against Microsoft, EMC, Oracle and the tech industry's big incumbents. Now it makes complete sense, but back then 20 people versus 50,000 employees was a ridiculous idea. But what happened then, and we were the beneficiaries of this, was the iphoness and the ipads emerged, so you started to have all of these new platforms in the enterprise that the legacy players didn't respond to fast enough.

So they basically created this window of opportunity for new startups to emerge. We really tried to build something for a mobiles world, where you were going to be way more collaborative, where any individual could download the software as opposed to you having to get your IT manager to install it, and buying servers and doing all the maintenance on it. It liberated technology for anyone within the organisation to be able to access these tools.

How is Box trying to differentiate itself from its many competitors?

The next chapter is not about just storing data, but what you can do with it. We are diving into individual ecosystems. The way that a life sciences firm is going to collaborate and share data for a drug discovery or a drug trial is going to be very interesting. We recently bought a company called MedXT. We are helping take patients' medical images and documentation and move it to the cloud. For instance, if you're a doctor, and you really need to quickly pull up an MRI, there are very few solutions that will let you do it directly in a browser with no software. But this technology lets a doctor instantly pull up all the medical images for any patient that they are working with. It can be shared with the patient, other doctors and potentially even with the research community.

What's the next big opportunity in data storage?

We built our platform for a world where you were going to have a laptop, a desktop and a mobiles device. And then all of a sudden you have drones, you have Google Glass, you have GoPros, you have satellites, you have new kinds of sensors that are all going to be generating massive amounts of data. When you use drones in an agriculture business, an oil and gas business, a construction company, just think of the amount of new data that can be generated. The next trillion files are going to come from those platforms. So we're trying to build our technology and our APIs to be able to take in data from any of those tools. We barely know what that's going to look like in scale, but it's something that I pay a lot of attention to.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK