Box Reviews

Pros

Working at Box is a dream come true. I don't understand how this company merits less than 5 stars on Glassdoor. It must be people who expected to come in and be respected for not contributing anything. One thing is for sure, Box hires the best, and they expect the best. Now that we are pushing 450+, it is harder and harder to stand out but there are so many motivational factors to put in 110%. We have a lot of VP's, and they are all the brightest most down to earth people I have ever worked with. It is open seating, there are no offices, no cubicles. You might be sitting next to a VP, or the COO. It doesn't matter what your role is, if you have an idea you speak up, and you are listened to, it is truely an amazing place to work.

Free breakfast/lunch/dinner
More snacks and food than you could want
New office is unbelievable - slide, ping pong, pool table, TV's, amazing conference rooms
Nationally recognized rewards - office, product, management, founders
You have the chance to contribute and be listened to by upper management
Free Caltrain pass (pretty sure that alone is a $2k value)
Subsidized gym and cell phone
Random happy hours on Thursday and Friday
Company sponsored events (SF Giants!)

Cons

Everything is constantly changing in flux. When you are hiring at 10x you can't keep the same processes for long. It gets overwhelming sometimes, but you know that everyday won't be the same. Scalable processes still haven't been put into place, but it is up to us to come up with those processes and implement them. Also career track isn't quite established in the sales group, but this could be a good thing for some. Instead of advancing in the sales team, it is possible to move horizontally to a different department

Advice to Senior Management

Keep going 10x. This space is so hot right now, it is ours to lose. We have the most amazing product by far, it is a dream to sell, but once we become complacent we will lose the race. Keep doing what you are doing, the whole company is behind you and the morale is incredibly high

Pros

Free food
New office is better than old
young crowd

Cons

Box has got most reckless management I have ever seen. Management is careless, really tough to tell what they do or understand their non-sensical strategies. Non-managers work their ass off but these middle managers are worthless. They should work for a company that needs them. They are contaminating work environment that Box used to have from early years.

Advice to Senior Management

Dont have any management and the company will do much better. Answer this question: Do you think company is building more things right now or was the company building more things 2 years back? Dont let middle managers fart their thoughts on hard working people. Get rid of them!

Pros

Box is the place to work in Silicon Valley. Google is the new Microsoft, Facebook is the new Google, and Box is the new Facebook. They are experiencing explosive growth fueled by incredible fund raising. And that growth is handled well by most departments. There's still an incredible stock potential for new employees, it's pretty clear they're headed for IPO. Box has a busy and ambitious, yet collaborative and fun environment. I've made more friends and colleagues at Box than any other company.

Cons

The exception is the Marketing Department. Even from the outside looking in, a red flag is the lack of a CMO. Many companies in this space have one, Jive, Egnyte, SugarSync, etc. A CMO sets the vision for Marketing and is crucial for a company that's tripling every year and does cloud based business software. The current marketing leadership lacks the direction and vision to keep pace with the rest of the company and is selfishly focused on their own performance at the sake of the people working for or around them. (As an aside, if you are looking to start at Box in sales note that the Sales department has long out grown Marketing and they only have capacity to provide a relatively small portion of your lead funnel.) The day to day marketing is handled very well by some extremely talented people, but their efforts are largely disjointed and fragmented due to the lack of direction from above. This talent is smart, ambitious, energized, and fun to work with, but unappreciated by the marketing leadership. Many on the team received poor reviews this past year, filled with blatant inaccuracies and mischaracterizations. In actuality, these people successfully tackled some of the most important marketing projects and did so with underfunding and a shortage of resources and management support. Even worse, their hard-work is not championed by the marketing leadership at the executive level and across the organization.

As a consequence, there has been a number of key individuals to leave Marketing recently, 5 in the past 1-2 months and more over the past couple years. Keep in mind the hiring pace for Marketing hasn't kept up with the rest of the company, so the additional backfill of these positions makes the situation worse. Those that still are there are highly frustrated and looking to leave.

Box also has a tendency to hire in at the highest levels, adding more layers in the organization, versus promoting within. At one point there was a VP reporting to a VP who reported to a VP. This forces some of the more knowledgable people further down the organization. A famous quote by the CTO at a company all-hands was 'the people that got us this far aren't the ones that are going to get us where we're going.' While it is true that Box needs the more senior and experienced talent to execute (I even argue above for hiring a CMO), they also need to recognize the extraordinary talent they have and promote from within. If you're looking to climb the ladder, Box is not the place to be.

Advice to Senior Management

Make the tough decision in Marketing you know you have to make, hire a CMO. And do it now, it will only get harder the longer you wait. The current marketing leadership is inadequate for what Box has become, and has been for many months. They need to go. And while there are others in the company suitable to be CMO, they are too enterprise focused and lack the vision and the technical and analytical capacity for marketing a truly universal cloud product. Have the COO step in ASAP and run Marketing temporarily while conducting an external search for a CMO. And look outside the enterprise software and cloud spaces to find that person.

Pros

free food(lunch/dinner)
free parking
gym subsidy
young college age crowd

Cons

long commute from san francisco, think thrice about this if you live in city

people work too hard. only sales people appreciate each other, rest of the company is in a different world altogether

Really long hours at office(very early mornings or beyond midnights depending on your dept), dont bother applying if you are not comfortable with it. this is a strong reason you will find young crowd here at box

company is now 400+ and does have a lot of problems to manage chaos internally and keep external investors happy. its not a startup!

Advice to Senior Management

hire more people or stop making/maintaining things that do not generate revenue

ask other companies who have gone through such a time period and how they managed to sail through

Pros

Actually want to hang out w/ coworkers.
New building is amazing (love the slide!)
So much happening! Lots of opportunities

Cons

Quality of all the newbies is solid, but w/ company growing quickly, hard to keep up!

Pros

+ great industry and lots of excitement about cloud
+ Incentives and great working environment
+ friendly and driven coworkers, and a really fun culture
+ brand new office with major expansion already and continued growth expected ( there is a slide from the 2nd to 1st floor) Even better than the amenities at the office, the team environment and general energy at Box is very positive.
+ lots of opportunities for growth within the company, hard work and results are rewarded and recognized

Cons

- depending on your role you may work longer hours
- I would not point to any other downsides, the company is extermely focused on maintaining company culture during this hyper growth, and keeping staff motivated and happy.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to incentivize employees, great culture, great rewards and overall fun place to work. I look forward to continued growth at Box.

Pros

Box is a great company! Growing fast with lots of opportunity to advance in your career path. They are always looking to maximize the talents they have in-house already.

Cons

Pay is at start-up rates. No matter how much experience, skills, and success you have achieved in past positions....their pay is below comparable market rates. Negotiate heavily upfront and get all comp/terms on the offer letter.

Advice to Senior Management

If you want to acquire top talent....you need to be able to pay for it!

Pros

Box has a fun and youthful workforce that's given an opportunity to take on challenges and demonstrate their ability to own greater responsibility than they would have at other companies.

Cons

Things move very fast here, and it's easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of hyper-growth. Employees need to be careful not to let the excitement of the place interfere with their work-life balance.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't let your foot off of the gas! The time is now to take the company to the next level.

Pros

-Free food (all kinds)
-Beautiful and young crowd, average age here would be 25-26.
-Laptop to everyone.

Cons

-You will find yourself working 12X7 or 16X5 i.e. >80 hours week. I think it is ok even if you work hard couple of days in a week but working hard all time without any appreciation is not cool. It is almost as if working long hours is made an expectation out of everyone.
-Extremely tight market with a new cloud storage company opening up almost every week. My bet is that it is going to be race to reduce the price till one day some giant will come and start giving unlimited cloud storage for free and shut down business of box, dropbox, etc. etc. It is very risky to join a company like box in a dicey industry.
-Money is burnt on billboards and campaigns which is unusual for a private funded startup and really whacky for my senses.
-New office in Los Altos will not be close to public transportation making difficult for people using Caltrain to commute.

Advice to Senior Management

-Free dinner policy enticing people to stay late does not necessarily mean more work getting done. I think people will be stressed out if they stay too much time in office just to have free food and will not be able to come up with new ideas because they are not living a life outside. You know what: when people work with a plan of getting things done within 8 hours of day, they work more efficiently compared to what they will do when they think they have got whole day and night and weekend to do the job.
-Use money sparingly, you never know when it will stop coming.
-Try to develop a culture towards work-life balance for your employees so that they have a happy family life outside.

Pros

- people are outstanding, diverse individuals
- great benefits / perks / culture
- great leadership team and product vision

Cons

-no end to amount of work to be done ;)