Box Expands to Europe, Hires Infrastructure VP Away from LinkedIn
There's always something interesting going on at Box. Last I looked in on it, the fast-growing enterprise cloud service startup had just moved into new headquarters in Los Altos, Calif. though employees there were trying to coin the name “South Palo Alto.”
Context & Ripple Effects
AllThingsD's check-in on Box captures a company in build-out mode: the enterprise cloud service has just settled into new Los Altos headquarters and is now announcing two moves at once — a push into Europe and the hire of an infrastructure VP away from LinkedIn, both confirmed on June 19, 2012.
The story traveled unusually wide for a hiring-plus-expansion item: the Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch, ZDNet, VentureBeat and Pulse2 all carried it the same day, suggesting observers read the pairing of a new market and a new infrastructure chief as one deliberate bet on scale rather than routine growth news.
First-order effects
- Box gains a dedicated executive to build the infrastructure behind its European entry, while LinkedIn loses senior systems leadership to a much smaller company — a signal of where scaled-infrastructure talent sees the interesting problems.
- European enterprise customers evaluating cloud file-sharing now have Box as a direct option, with the company committing to serve that region rather than treating it as a distant market.
Second-order effects
- Rival enterprise collaboration and storage vendors face pressure to match overseas availability or concede multinational accounts where buyers want one vendor across regions.
- The same-day pickup across mainstream and trade outlets raises the stakes publicly: Box's competitors and prospective investors will read the LinkedIn poach as evidence the company is staffing up ahead of aggressive growth.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US enterprise SaaS companies will increasingly staff international build-outs with veterans of large-scale consumer web operations, tightening competition for infrastructure executives who have run systems at true internet scale.
- Opening foreign markets ahead of the revenue they generate points toward heavier capital requirements for enterprise cloud startups, making fundraising cadence a structural feature of the sector's expansion race.
The trend: Enterprise cloud startups are buying international scale directly — hiring infrastructure leaders out of large web companies to open foreign markets while the category is still being contested.