How Box got Mark Cuban to invest in their startup while still in college — without ever meeting him

Convincing investors to pay attention to a startup is not easy, especially if you’re a college student and you’re trying to attract high-profile investors like Mark Cuban.


BEAM Team

18 Jul, 2017

How Box got Mark Cuban to invest in their startup while still in college — without ever meeting him | BEAMSTART News

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Convincing investors to pay attention to a startup is not easy, especially if you’re a college student and you’re trying to attract high-profile investors like Mark Cuban.

For Aaron Levie, now the CEO of cloud-based file-storage company Box, an early investment came by trying to get press.

Cuban had one of the most popular tech blogs – blogmaverick.com – when Box was founded in a dorm room in 2005. After Levie sent the Dallas Mavericks’ owner a cold email asking him to write about Box on the blog, Cuban decided to do something even better.

Related: You can now raise money on BEAM

“He became interested in investing in the company, and we had never even met, but he did full due diligence, and then our first time meeting him was at a basketball game,” Levie said in an interview for Business Insider’s podcast, “Success! How I Did It.”

Here’s part of the pitch email Levie sent to raise Box’s angel round of financing, which he shared on Twitter.

“10 years ago, these were the “benefits” of investing in Box’s $80,000 angel round. Some of these are obsolete,” Aaron Levie wrote with this portion of his early Box email to investors. Twitter/Levie

The “Shark Tank” star ended up investing a few hundred thousand dollars, according to Levie, which was enough to convince him and his co-founder, Dylan Smith, to drop out of college and focus on the business full-time.


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