The Enterprise Is Cool Again, and Box CEO Aaron Levie Is Loving It

There’s a lot of talk in Silicon Valley about the decline of consumer Internet companies and the rising interest in companies that sell software to enterprises. After all, Zynga and Groupon, the darlings of the consumer wave, have tanked. Facebook's stock collapse robbed the company of some of its sparkle. And suddenly all those boring companies that have been toiling away down on the San Francisco Bay peninsula selling boring software to boring enterprises don’t seem quite so boring anymore — especially after we saw Workday, which sells cloud-based human-resources software to the enterprise, pull off a phenomenal IPO, and when we have investment bankers talking about a trillion-dollar wealth transfer that’s about to take place in the enterprise market. Yes, suddenly the enterprise is cool again. And nobody is loving this more than Aaron Levie, the 27-year-old co-founder and CEO of Box, which sells cloud-based data storage and collaboration software to enterprises. “We’re feeling fortunate,” Levie said when we sat down for a chat at Box’s offices in Los Altos, Calif. A Smart Bet On The Enterprise Five years ago, Levie figured out that the enterprise ultimately would be a better market than consumer products. He focused Box entirely on the enterprise. Back in 2007, that might have seemed like a crazy thing to do. Facebook and Twitter were the hot new things. All the so-called smart money in the valley was chasing consumer stuff. Just two years ago, in 2010, John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins was raving about Zynga, citing it's…