Box, Inc. (BOX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Brian Peterson. I'm the application software analyst here at Raymond James. Very excited to have Aaron Levie, Dylan Smith and the team from Box here to talk through some product-driven slides. But before we go into the presentation, Aaron has a lot of content for us today. We did have some news last week with the investment from KKR. Aaron, we've gotten a lot of inbound questions on that. I'm curious. What does KKR bring to the table in terms of that partnership? And how did that process play out?

Yes. Thanks, Brian, and thanks for having us. And I see investors still showing up. So maybe I'll kind of run the clock for a second as more people join, but do appreciate the time everybody taking today to learn a bit about the Box strategy overall and our vision for the Content Cloud. As Brian mentioned, we had some news last week where KKR led a $500 million investment in the company. And we're very, very excited to have KKR on board, John Park, the lead technology partner at KKR, who leads the tech practice there, is going to be joining our Board of Directors. And really, the context for this is the Board, throughout their kind of winter and spring as we were coming into this year and kind of kicking off into the year, we wanted to really kind of look through our strategic path and make sure that the Board was aligned and really driving forward the vision of the company and making sure that we are very, very focused on driving shareholder value with the path forward as a business. So we took a very open-minded approach around the multiple paths to shareholder value that we could go and create. And as a part of that process, KKR emerged as being very interested in investing in the company and through a public vehicle, so Box remaining as a standalone public entity. And they felt that there was significant upside in the business. And in our time with KKR, we got pretty excited about their vision for the market. They've spent a lot of time in the content management space looking at the content market broadly doing a lot of analysis on the category and the disruption opportunity that's available. So we got pretty excited about the opportunity to partner with KKR. If you look at their history, obviously, as a firm, significant track record of driving shareholder returns, whether that business is in the growth phase or driving more profitability. And in spending time with John Park and the team, the focus of KKR's partnership was really how do we turbocharge growth going forward and as well as making sure that we continue to hit and if not exceed our operating margin and profitability targets as a company. So when we looked at the firm overall, their expertise in driving both growth, both higher degrees of profitability, their expertise in M&A, where, obviously, we're going to take a very disciplined approach to M&A and continuing to build out our platform. But the KKR has a very significant team and operations division that focuses on M&A for their portfolio of companies. So we looked at all of the value across the KKR firm and teams available. John Park specifically, again, having a really, really good level of visibility into the tech sector as leading that tech practice and felt that them leading investment joining the Board would be very, I think, substantially valuable for long-term value creation for shareholders. We didn't need the primary capital. We obviously did the convertible note earlier in the year really to fund some of our very, very disciplined M&A efforts. And we are generating pretty healthy levels of free cash flow. So this was not intended to add primary capital to the business. It was really about getting a very long-term value-added shareholder around the table, a 9-figure investor that is at the Board really, really focused on shareholder returns. And so with substantially all of the proceeds of that investment, we wanted to make sure that we return that back to shareholders in the form of a tender offer that Dylan will maybe talk through in just a second. And so ultimately, our goal was let's make this neutral or accretive to investors and not have this -- have an impact from a shareholder standpoint, except for a positive one, of getting the long-term benefits of KKR around the table, again, driving growth, profitability and the continued disciplined execution that we're driving. So we think this is a huge win for our investors, again, having a large shareholder at the Board that is really looking out for the long-term growth and shareholder returns for all of our investors. We think that's going to be a fantastic add to the team. And then the company gets to leverage the vast kind of benefits of working with KKR. As it relates to -- there's obviously been a lot of questions around the share buyback and some of the mechanics around that. I'll let Dylan maybe talk for a second on how we're contemplating that at this moment.

Sure. So thanks, Aaron. As mentioned, we are definitely happy with the financial terms of this investment, which were in line with similar transactions of this nature and have gotten questions around the thought process of this structure. So to address those, we'd say that while from a pure cost of capital standpoint, this is more expensive than the terms that we secured for a recent convertible debt offering, this recent investment comes with all the benefits of KKR's involvement that Aaron just highlighted. In terms of the mechanics and timing and what you expect, we expect to close this investment from KKR in early May and to execute this buyback in late May, following our Q1 earnings announcement via a Dutch auction tender offer. We will announce the ultimate amount and price range for this tender offer just before we launch it. So we should know the full impact on our share count by early June. And then last thing I'd add just as it relates to capital allocation is that now while we're -- now that we're generating significant cash flow, over time, we may consider additional stock repurchases to return value to stockholders while preserving our strong balance sheet and the flexibility to pursue the growth opportunities that we have in front of us.

Great. That's really good perspective on that. Well, Aaron, I'm going to cede the floor over to you. I know you have some slides that you wanted to go through, and then we might have some time for Q&A at the end.

Awesome. Thanks, Brian. And happy to obviously address any further questions on the KKR partnership in the Q&A session. So I'm just going to kind of run through this. I think a lot of investors are pretty familiar with our strategy at this point, but it's good to kind of ground with the total opportunity that we're going after and a bit about some of the strategic updates that we have. So overall, I think maybe the most important message is that the opportunity for Box and our Content Cloud vision is really bigger than ever. We're going after a $55 billion market that is only expanding when you think about adding things like e-signature and additional capabilities into the platform. We have a highly differentiated best-of-breed product that is considered really the leader from the best-of-breed cloud-based platform standpoint in the content management market. We are driving a very repeatable go-to-market engine that is built on land-and-expand, so bring customers in very efficiently and then expanding them over time. One great example of that is over 120 $100,000-plus deals in Q4 that we completed. So very, very high-volume land-and-expand motion that we've been able to drive. And ultimately, we've obviously turned the corner on driving profitable growth. Last year, we're happy to have driven 11% growth. While there were some kind of headwinds and tailwinds from a COVID dynamic standpoint, we're ultimately happy with the results, especially balancing growth and profitability and in particular driving toward our long-term model of mid-teens growth and mid-20s operating margin. Last year, we drove over 15% operating margins across the company. And we think that sets us up for both continued leverage improvement over the next couple of years as well as being able to reinvest back into growth to be able to drive those accelerated growth rates as well. When we look at the opportunity ahead, Box has 67% of the Fortune 500 and over 100,000 customers on the platform. And what's remarkable is really the breadth of use cases that our customers are using us for. Everything from Nike that uses Box to be able to protect their most important mission-critical data as it flows through their supply chain, Morgan Stanley that uses Box to be able to onboard their clients securely, Broadcom that has saved over $10 million in infrastructure costs by being able to move data to the cloud, we have a very, very broad array of ways that customers are using our platform for better productivity, better security, better compliance and ultimately being able to save significant amounts of money. And over 2020, when we look at what has changed about the world, we have an acceleration of megatrends that we've been at the center of for many years, but now we're starting to see the global nature and the impact of these trends across every industry and size of the company. The first is obviously that we're going to be working from anywhere. That is going to include offices, but we're now seeing the power of remote and distributed work as well. And so companies are looking for better technology to be able to help them work anytime, anywhere, any location. The second is digital-first experiences. We know that companies are going to be investing in digital customer experiences, digital partner experiences, digital employee experiences. And every interaction is going to be digital going forward. And then finally, data security, privacy and compliance is mission-critical to how companies collaborate around their information. So everything at work is changing. We're working anywhere. We're going digital first, and data security matters more than ever. And at the center of these megatrends is how companies work with their content. The way that we collaborate with our partners on a new product that we're bringing to market, the way that a financial services entity brings on clients, the way that a drug -- clinical drug trial process is run at a biopharma, to be able to collaborate securely, the way a federal government works with their constituents, all of that works around content. It's financial assets, media content, contracts, project documentation, CAD files, all of that is in the form of content. And when we look at the market, we see a massive opportunity to be able to power the next generation of how companies work with their information and their content management. Going back to the '90s, it was all about on-prem file servers and then it was about document management systems and then EFSS tools like OneDrive and Dropbox and Google Drive. But the future is being able to have a single platform that manages the complete life cycle of content in a single architecture. And that's our vision for cloud content management as a category. And ultimately, we are building out the leading Content Cloud. So our vision for the Content Cloud is how do you power the complete life cycle of content in a single platform from the moment that you ingest large amounts of data. So we've doubled down on our Box Shuttle offering, which is a software and services offering for customers to be able to migrate large amounts of data from things like SharePoint environments, network file shares, document management systems to the cloud. We've obviously built very extensive APIs and technology to integrate with our customers' existing applications, to help them ingest data into Box. We then scan and classify that data using DLP technology with Box Shield. So we protect the files that are coming into the system by ensuring that if we have files that have things like personally identifiable information or health care data in them, the customer can then classify that data and have additional security parameters around that content. We then enable customers to be able to share and collaborate around their information, both inside and outside of the enterprise. We are not built just for sharing within the company, but instead being able to collaborate with your partners, your colleagues and your network that you need to be able to do business with. We've doubled down on our investments in automation. So Box Relay helps ultimately drive workflows around this life cycle of content. So clients that want to do anything from onboarding of their customers and employees to being able to do contract review and approval or digital asset review and approval, that is what our automation engine from Box Relay enables. We just announced just a couple of months ago an acquisition in the e-signature space, one of the leading disruptors in the e-sign market. And that product will be coming to market this summer called Box Sign. So we want to have native e-signature capabilities built into this platform. Throughout 2020 and the pandemic, we've heard from customers, the #1 most requested feature when we asked our customer base of what they would want built on Box natively was e-sign functionality. So we're very excited to be able to bring this to market in a disruptive way. We're working on additional capabilities to help our customers publish their content, so the teams and departments internally. So not just the ad hoc collaboration that happens, but ultimately, the publishing of the R&D specs or the HR policies or the digital assets that have to be shared with brand teams So we're working on additional publishing features. And then ultimately, the ability to govern your content. So if there's a e-discovery process or legal hold functionality necessary, Box Governance helps support that. And then that all comes together with our APIs that let customers extend this functionality and their content into any application that they work on. So that's the vision for the Content Cloud. It is the only platform in the cloud built from the ground up in a multi-tenant architecture that powers the complete life cycle of content again in a single platform. And the way that shows up from a platform architecture standpoint is really 3 layers of innovation. The first is our core infrastructure. So highly scalable infrastructure that abstracts multiple public clouds away from the clients. They don't have to worry about our global infrastructure storing hundreds of petabytes of data and ingesting at a rapid pace. We then have a layer of security and compliance for things like permission key -- permission management, personally identifiable information scanning, threat detection, auditability of how content gets accessed, data residency. And then on top of that, we have a content services layer for all of the file and folder management, the collaboration capabilities, the workflow automation and e-sign capabilities. So these are the 3 tiers of our architecture. And then with our platform, we extend this value into any third-party tool like Microsoft Teams or Slack or Salesforce. So we work across all the big mega clouds that are emerging. And then our customers more and more are building custom applications on top of Box that ultimately touch their clients and their partners. So this is the vision for the Box platform and how we've been extending it over time. And what you're going to see from us is continuing to innovate at the individual tiers of this platform. So you're going to see us do more in security and compliance. There's areas around data privacy and discovery that are very exciting to us. There's advancements in Box Shield that will help customers protect their most sensitive content. So a lot of innovation at the security and compliance layer, and then a lot of innovation around content management and collaboration. Again, when we get into workflow or digital publishing or better ways of collaborating in a remote and distributed work environment, these are very exciting areas for us that will continue to expand our TAM and our overall opportunity with customers. So with our expanded TAM, we now address about a $55 billion market. That's broken up in the content management space, the data storage space, data security and compliance and then modern ways of collaborating. And we're expanding this even further by adding e-sign functionality natively into Box. So today, the e-sign market is a couple of billion dollars. When you look at the global spend on e-sign services, we think that's going to go to about $4 billion in the next couple of years. And then, ultimately, the biggest opportunity is actually the unserved or underserved part of the market. So these are the customers that have licenses to an e-sign feature today, but maybe not for their entire enterprise or maybe only in the advanced use cases in their organization. And so by having a native, compliant, highly secure, fully functional e-sign feature built into Box, we believe this is going to dramatically expand the value proposition for our customers, increase stickiness, allow us to go wider within customers. And we're very, very excited for that potential. So we'll talk about that just in a second. So in terms of our product strategy, it's really about adding additional modules on top of the platform. In some cases, these modules are priced independently of the core Box platform. And in some cases, they're folded in to the overall offering. And then with Suites, we bring together all of the value of these capabilities together at once. Box Shield is our fastest-growing product we've ever delivered to market. We wanted to drive advanced data security and compliance use cases for our customers. We had overwhelming feedback over the past 3 to 4 years. That things like threat detection, if you have anomalous activity around files, let's say, an employee is all of a sudden downloading 100 gigabytes of data, you want to be able to alert the security team, and that might be an unusual activity for that particular user. Or you want to be able to scan files coming into the system and be able to classify them with the appropriate security controls for whatever that workflow is. So Box Shield does that natively. It's got the best user experience for security around content. And it's got the most advanced functionality built into a content platform. So you don't have to go out and have a bolt-on security technology around that. So CISOs have been very, I think, elated by this feature, and it's really helped drive our Suite growth and our $100,000-plus deals as well over the past year. Box Sign, as I mentioned, is a slightly different approach we're taking to new product innovation. We will be enabling Box Sign in all of our business pricing tiers. So every Box customer will have access to Box Sign, but there'll be different levels of features depending on what tier a customer is in. If you're in our business edition or if you're in our Enterprise edition or if you're a Suite. If you're a Suites customer, you'll have different levels of functionality or volume of e-signatures that you can do. So for the average end user in the Enterprise, we believe Box Sign natively within any of our business editions is going to be really supporting most of their workflows. We think this is very important because it makes Box stickier. It allows us to go wider within the Enterprise and then obviously gives us another value proposition for customers to be able to use to drive the Content Cloud strategy in their company. But also at the same time, we're going to monetize the higher-end use cases. So if you have a bank that needs to onboard millions of clients or you have an insurance company that has to drive digital workflows, those will be capabilities that we monetize directly and discretely using our platform monetization. So we'll ultimately have a pricing model for the volume of signatures that the client does when you want to have custom workflows and custom API solutions. So this is about disrupting the broader market and making Box Sign available to as many customers and users as possible, while still preserving the ability to drive additional monetization for those high-end use cases where there's significant budget allocated for those use cases. And then overall, our strategy has been to package all of our advanced innovation, things like Box Shield and Governance and Relay into Suite offerings or Suites that allow customers to get the full value of Box all at once. And we're continuing to tweak additional ways to be able to bring the full platform value to all of our customers. So we think the most important strategic effort we have as a company right now is getting the vast majority, if not ultimately, 90-plus percent of our customer base or revenue into all of our add-on products. So they don't really think about it as individual discrete products but instead the full platform that they're buying into. So we're continuing to work on additional levers and mechanics to make sure that the majority of our customer base has the full suite of capabilities from Box. So more to come on that front, but we're continuing to optimize the go-to-market packaging and pricing engine to be able to support that growth. And when you actually translate that into numbers, it's pretty exciting, the uptake that we're seeing across the board. So in Q4 of this year, we had 45% of our $100,000-plus deals have a Suites attached -- a Suite attached to that deal. So it really shows the progress of our Suite offerings that, again, are only 6 quarters old. So this amount of transformation in our larger deal segments is pretty important. And then we are seeing 60% of our $100,000-plus deals have Shield be attached to those deals. So that really shows, again, the growth rate of the Shield offering and how impactful it is to customers. And again, this product wasn't even available until Q3 of FY '20. So really brand new in the market and driving rapid growth across the enterprise. So again, the strategy is really threefold. One, continue to expand the number of seats that we're driving by adding more innovation to our product and letting customers go wider with Box. Two, continuing to drive up price per seat, which translates into higher ACV by driving the add-on product strategy and getting our customers to buy into ultimately all of our Suites. And then, ultimately, three, drive continued stickiness and expansion with our customers. So that ultimately, that translates into our net retention rate, which is incredibly important for us and something that we're very focused on driving. So that's ultimately our multipronged effort to be able to drive growth. From there, I'll hand it over to Dylan to go through a couple of more slides and then we can open up into Q&A.

Great. Thanks, Aaron. So this chart highlights how the revenue attributable to different types of customers has trended over the past year, where customers who have adopted at least 1 add-on products now contribute 59% of our revenue. That's up from 52% a year ago. And additionally, fueled by the Suites momentum that we've been driving that Aaron has been talking about, we now have 36% of our revenue coming from customers who have adopted multiple products, and that's up from 24% a year ago. And then as the dotted portion indicates, especially in the FY '21 bar, you can see that the majority of this multiproduct revenue is coming from customers who were initially using less robust capabilities which demonstrates the momentum that we're seeing in cross-selling our newer products into existing customers. And the reason this matters so much is that these core plus customers or customers who have adopted at least 1 add-on product have significantly better economics than core-only customers from contract values to higher pricing and margins to retention rates. So as we continue to drive this shift, that will create tailwinds to our net retention rate, as Aaron mentioned, and our overall customer economics. And our land-and-expand strategy is having the biggest impact in our largest customers. As you're looking at 6-plus figure customers and $1 million-plus customers, 6-plus figure customers now account for about 60% of our total revenue. And over the past couple of years, we've been growing those large customer counts at a rate in the mid- to high teens, outpacing our overall revenue growth. And in addition to the customer counts growing at a nice clip, the average contract value of these customers has also been steadily growing over this period. As Aaron mentioned, this past year, we significantly improved our profitability, expanding operating margins from 1% in FY '20 to 15% last year in FY '21. And importantly, we've also been laying a strong foundation over the past couple of years to continue driving bottom line improvements while still investing to deliver higher growth. So going left to right, starting with a key focus area that hasn't been as much of a lever or had as much of an impact historically is our workforce and location strategy. Most notably, we started up our first offshore engineering center of excellence in the back half of last year in Warsaw, Poland. We now have a few dozen Boxers in Poland and expect to have a little more than 100 Boxers on the ground there by the end of the year. Another key driver of operating margin expansion will be gross margin improvements, driven both by the optimizations we've been able to make to our hardware and software and by increasing -- increasingly leveraging the strong partnerships in terms that we've secured with leading public cloud providers. And then these last 3 categories are really a continuation of what we've been doing and benefiting from. Starting on the operational excellence side, continue to -- we'll continue to invest in digital channels, systems automation. And then even after we return to an office-based environment, we don't expect COVID-related savings in areas such as T&E facilities and marketing events to return to pre-COVID levels. On the sales productivity side, we delivered a 13% year-over-year improvement in sales force productivity last year, driven primarily by our enterprise sales force. And we are now seeing a recovery in SMB and mid-market as well, which were the segments where we saw some pressure in the middle part of last year on the heels of the pandemic breaking. And then as we continue to differentiate our product, including launching Box Sign this summer, that should benefit sales force productivity across all segments. And so based on a lot of the trends that we're seeing in kind of the underlying demand signals, the way that our more recent cohorts of reps have been performing in particular, we expect to grow our sales force in the low teens in the year ahead while continuing to focus on hiring in our more productive regions. And then finally, as we scale, we should continue to generate business model leverage as customer renewals and customer expansion are much more efficient and profitable sales than landing entirely net new customers. And the way that translates to the numbers, we're committed to delivering significant improvements to our financial profile over the next few years. And based on a lot of the initiatives that I just spoke to, expect to add about 10 points to our operating margin from FY '21 to FY '24, 2 years from now. As we mentioned previously, we remain confident that we will improve our growth rate to the low to mid-teens by that time. And we remain committed to delivering a combined revenue growth rate plus free cash flow margin of 30% this year, 35% next year and then 40% 2 years from now in FY '24.

Great. So that's the overview of the Box Content Cloud strategy and how that translates into some of the kind of key financials that we care about. So with that, Brian, happy to hand it back to you.

Yes, sure. Thanks, Aaron. Thanks, Dylan. That was great. So just for the investors on the line, you can submit questions through the Q&A app and I'll probably kind of filter the Q&A session here. But just to kind of get started, Aaron, a couple of years ago, I can't remember on the mini trips to Redwood City, I don't remember which one if you asked us, but I'd start with me that you talked about the value for customers of having content in Box is so much more valuable than not having it in Box. And so I'm curious, just with COVID and everything, how has that changed, right? Is there any change in how your customers are approaching this or what they're talking about now even versus maybe kind of 18 months ago?

Yes, thanks. Actually, that's a really key point. We don't talk about it as much, but one of our core product principles that we have is this idea of delivering basically unparalleled value for customers when their data is in our system versus any other system. And so that's -- if there's one major component of the Box flywheel, it is -- we build functionality that enables customers to get more content into our system. The more content they have in the system, then the additional value we can offer on top of that content, which then ultimately drives more content into the system, more users and more usage. So there's a core flywheel that really drives and propels the Box strategy. And so when we think about features that we build out or in some cases that we might acquire, we think about it through the lens of when you have more data in our system, does this capability get more powerful? Does this capability enable companies to want to put more content into our platform? So a couple of great examples. When you have something like Box Shield, what happens is it causes customers to say, "I want to put more and more of my information into Box because it has better security functionality than any other Content Cloud or content management system that I can put my information into." And so once you design your security policies in a way that is specific to or proprietary to Box, it then encourages the customer to put more of their content into our system because we're going to offer you more value from that content being in our platform. So that's one great example. Another big example is our integration on our API strategy. Imagine if you're a CIO and you have 20 or 30 different applications that employees are going to be working from. You don't want to have your content then go to 5 or 10 different places because think about the permutations of integrations you'd have to go and create between 5 or 10 places content might live and 20 applications employees might work from. That becomes an impossible nightmare from just an integration standpoint. So that means the more content in Box, because of our APIs, enables you to get more value across your entire application ecosystem. So we fundamentally look at our strategy from the standpoint of better features, that get more content into the system, that create more value for our customer, that then create more of a flywheel for them to put more information in the system. So over time, just as you kind of think about big areas of investment, think about additional ways to get insights and analytics from your data, think about better ways to ensure data privacy and compliance when more content is in Box, think about better ways to drive workflow automation the more data you have in our system or using machine learning to be able to generate insights and then automated workflows over time. So again, we kind of think about this as how do you make sure the value of Box compounds the more data you have in it because of the functionality that we've delivered.

And so -- all right, so there's a lot of things though with Shield and the security. I think in terms of that functionality, Box has always been really, really differentiated. I'm curious thinking about adding Box on in terms of workflows, but in sort of the processes that you can enable on the platform, like where are you in that evolution? And obviously, there's products going on now, but I'm trying to think about what could be built onto the platform over the next several years.

Yes. So e-sign is actually a great example of opening us up into a whole new set of workflows that previously we were a bit orthogonal to or very -- had very limited involvement in. So if you think about client onboarding or contract review and approval or being able to get an audit process that gets reviewed, we would manage the content previously for that process. But all of the interesting workflow, the e-signature requests, the underlying workflow automation beneath that process usually was handed off to another system. And so what customers were telling us, especially again heightened by the pandemic and distributed work, is we want that workflow to be built on the Box. We don't want to have to have 2 or 3 different technologies, a place to store the content, a place to manage the workflow, a place to get the e-signature in all these different applications because they really are to the customer a single workflow, a single business process. And so over time, we're going to be going deeper and deeper into these business processes. Sometimes they'll be aligned by vertical. Sometimes they'll be aligned by line of business. But you're going to see us go into much more advanced use cases. So I think if you think about Box, we were founded on this vision of make it easy and secure to access and share information from anywhere. But that was really just the kind of core launch-off point for our platform. And now when you look at what we're doing in workflow and data security and information governance and e-signature, we want to power the complete process for how companies work with their information. So the vision in terms of what we want to transform remains the same, but the differentiation and extensiveness of the value we can offer customers is significantly larger today.

So I'm going on and off on mute as I pound notes on the keyboard here. But -- so you did mention some of the platform use cases. I've always thought that was an interesting value proposition on how some of the customers can use the platform. How has that changed? And what have you really seen over the last 12 and 18 months on how customers are using -- they're building on top of the Box platform?

The platform remains -- we have 3 biggest -- we have 3 big differentiators as a company when we go to a customer. The first is the depth of security and compliance. The second is the ease of use around workflow and collaboration and the third is our platform. So the platform remains fundamental to every single customer that we work with. If you just wanted a basic way to store and share files, that's a not particularly differentiated product or capability in the market today. The value of Box is in our platform. The reason we have 1,200 customers paying us over $100,000 a year is because of our platform. And so we see a wide array of ways that customers are using the platform. I was on with a bank 3 days ago. This is a bank that is moving to the cloud fairly rapidly at this point. They are a large investor in -- from an IT standpoint in the sort of big mega clouds you could imagine, Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce. But they need a Content Cloud to be able to work across these different use cases in their enterprise. And so they see Box actually in this particular environment purely as a platform. The end user may only ever experience Box in the -- through the context of another application. But we will be on the back end being the content cloud that manages that information, manages the permissions, manages the security, manages the storage and sharing of that content. And so our platform is really using a pretty horizontal way across really every industry. We had a pretty significant deal that was announced in December in the federal government space, which was a client that was building a custom application using Salesforce on top of our Content Cloud. That was a fairly significant deal. And Box is, again, the back-end document management system that gives this particular agency infinite scalability, complete flexibility in how they develop their application, and then they can plug it into Salesforce for the actual user interface in the workflow. Now imagine trying to do that with an on-premises content management system or imagine doing that with a system that was not built for interoperability and neutrality. So fundamentally, that has to come from an independent platform that can work across any application, which is, again -- remains one of our most significant differentiators.

And so you kind of hit on this a little bit there, Aaron. But in terms of the COVID impact, in terms of how people are looking at the cloud and content management, what are you hearing from customers? Early days, it was kind of like an oh c*** moment. We just got to kind of figure this out. We're kind of lapping COVID maybe a year in the past now or a year maybe what we're hearing. What's changed from your perspective?

Yes. Well, we -- I think last year was marked by a couple of different trends that we saw in our business. One, we had a lot of customers that were doing sort of rapid triage mode. They needed seat licenses to be able to expand remote work, so as that first pillar of work from anywhere. And that was a great positive tailwind for the business. At the same time, we also saw some headwinds. We had certain SMBs that couldn't expand at the same rate. We had some IT departments that weren't thinking as maybe long term or strategically because they were in cost-cutting mode given the industry they're in. But as we move to more Q4 and certainly Q1, as we noted on the earnings call, the pipeline for much more long-term digital transformation initiatives started to expand at a really, really healthy clip. That led to record billings in Q4. It led to a record number of $100,000-plus deals and Suites transactions. And again, going into Q1, as we noted on the last earnings call, we had healthy pipeline coming into Q1 and healthy momentum. And so what we've seen is a shift really from what I would say last year being the crisis mode of IT, enable remote work, get people on video conferencing, help them with maybe VDI environments, help them with data security. That was last year. Coming into this year, we're now having much more strategic long-term conversations with CIOs. Those conversations really resemble where does the business need to go in the next 3 or 5 years? How do they want to transform their enterprise and their client experiences and being able to onboard customers and being able to collaborate with their broad employee and supply chain? And so these are transactions that really resemble 3- to 5-year types of IT transformation initiatives. It's about filling in a part of the architecture over that long run. And so again, I've been on the phone with banks, government agencies, major Fortune 500 biopharmas, defense contractors, all in the past month that are really thinking about long-term digital transformation and how content is one of the final things they need to care about across their application stack. So they're moving from things like Documentum or network file shares or on-prem data storage, and they need to be able to move to the cloud in a much more rapid pace. And again, that's also why we invested even further in Box Shuttle, which is our data migration technology. And that was really important to kick off the year with to help our customers actually go and drive migration into the cloud. Just yesterday, I was with a major insurance client. And it was amazing because the -- all of the IT transformation they've driven from a cloud standpoint, they still have significant investments in on-premises, network file shares and document management systems. So for as much as the business has gone to the cloud, they still have a tremendous amount of content that remains on-prem. And so that is our opportunity. It's all of the environments globally that still need to drive digital transformation around how they manage their content, how they manage the workflows and the security around that content, and we are in the right place to be able to go and drive that adoption.

And maybe talk about Box Shuttle, because it doesn't actually come up in my investor conversations a lot. I mean is that something that you really feel like can enable a lot of that? Is that change? I mean, I'm just curious to get maybe double put on that a bit.

Yes. I think that's more of an enabling feature, frankly. I wouldn't expect it to show up that much for investors. We do monetize it because it often comes with professional services hours. So you want to -- we want to come in and we kind of dive in and we say, "Okay, here's how to take an existing 200-terabyte environment in your enterprise, and here's how we map that to Box." And we run the migration process for that client. But it really is an enabling technology and service offering. It's -- but it really helps, again, customers be able to accelerate their migration at ease without worrying about the friction of doing so.

Okay. Got it. And I want to -- to Dylan I haven't asked anything yet. So just kind of the commitment to the growth and the margin. Obviously, we've seen the margin expansion step up pretty significantly over the last few years. But thinking about driving accelerating revenue growth, and you did hit on some of the levers, but I think I get inbound questions on, well, how do you expand margins and accelerate revenue growth. So what do you really see as kind of the big 1 or 2 key factors that enabled you to get to that profile by fiscal year '24?

Sure. So I would say a lot of this is building on some of the decisions we made and what we executed against really over the past 12, 18 months to kind of lay that foundation to generate that leverage doing things that don't come at the expense of growth. And so that was everything from really focusing on kind of revamping the sales kind of org structure and where we are most focused to be able to make those sales productivity improvements that I mentioned, to doing a lot of the work that set the stage for gross margin improvements that are kind of baked in based on what we've been doing versus having to make significant investments there that take away from growth and things like that. I mean also a lot of the investments we made in our digital channels drive sales efficiencies growth at a much lower cost. So I would say that the combination of those things and then adding on the location strategy that I spoke to earlier is really a lot of the ways we've kind of fundamentally changed the cost structure and in certain areas, just kind of the operating model to be able to drive those continued productivity improvements. And because of the success we've seen, after some of those changes, that's really what gave us the confidence to grow the sales force at a much faster clip this year that we just recently kicked off. As mentioned, growing that sales force in the low teens, some of which will have an impact at the tail end of this year, but really more about setting us up for kind of continued growth for next year. And then if you think about the big kind of drivers and what gives us the confidence in that -- those growth rate improvements, there's really 3 that I'd call out. The first is just the overall impact of the add-on product momentum we've been talking about. And as mentioned, not only do we see that result in larger deals, higher close rates when you get to these more differentiated use cases and all of that, but also leads to just better customer economics and more profitability downstream without actually changing the kind of the nature of the actual sales cycle or investments. The second one, just I mentioned this earlier, but it's really the sales force productivity improvements. And while we do have more modest expectations going forward in terms of the rate of improvement versus the 13% that we demonstrated last year, as we think about that continued impact of those add-on products, the continued focus on our higher-performing regions and geographies and other things like that, we feel confident that we'll continue to be able to improve sales force productivity. And then finally, and it's more of a -- I don't know if you call it an optical thing, but kind of as we get through the impact of the different COVID dynamics that we've talked about, some of the things that are kind of showing up as headwinds in our growth rate today should normalize as we move through the pandemic and back to a more normal environment.

Yes. And just thinking about the go-to-market. I know you mentioned adding some capacity there. How do you think about as you add more products to the platform, and they're really enabling all of your people to kind of say, "Hey, started as kind of a 1 product company." I know that's way back in the day, and now you're adding more. So how do you enable your sales reps to kind of go and sell the full value of the platform at least on the initial deals, right, versus the installed base but going out and trying to attack those new customers?

Sure. Yes. So this is actually -- it's interesting. This is part of our journey, I think, of the evolution of the go-to-market model. When we started as a kind of 1 product company, and then we added additional products like governance and platform API licensing, we treated these as discrete offerings when we went back to the customer and we said, "Hey, we now have a governance module or we have APIs that you can use or we have KeySafe for encryption key management." And what ended up happening is as we introduced each new feature, it was causing, I think, a fairly high calorie sales motion back into the customer because we would do a one-off sale of discrete products on top of the core platform. And so we step back and we said, okay, this is really not going to allow us to kind of get to the promised land of customers buying into the full suite. It will just be -- take too long and be too expensive from a go-to-market standpoint. And that's really when we introduced Suites into our pricing and packaging. And Suites have been a complete unqualified success where we are seeing just tremendous growth because we can go to a customer and we can say, "Buy into our platform. Don't buy into 1 individual feature." And that allows us to have a much more efficient sales cycle. And importantly, it actually better differentiates us. So we're not going to the customer and having a storage and sharing conversation and then a data governance conversation and a workflow conversation. We're having a platform conversation with our customers. And this vision for the Content Cloud, I think, just takes that even further. So now we're showing up to the customer and saying, "Okay, in your architecture as an enterprise, you're probably going to have a sales cloud. You're probably going to have a marketing cloud, probably going to have a data cloud. You might have a productivity cloud with things like Slack or Teams. But you're going to want a Content Cloud to work across all those different applications. You don't want your content trapped in just a single silo that makes it impossible to work with that incredibly valuable information across different systems, different geographies, be able to collaborate securely." And so that vision is really coming across the customers. But again, what's important is to come to the customer and be able to sell the full value of that platform all at once. So I think, again, throughout this year, you're going to see even additional ways that we're tuning our go-to-market motion all incrementally in all -- all just as a -- from a positive momentum standpoint to be able to get the full value of our platform in front of customers. One other small thing that I'll just note, and we're only in Q1, so we obviously can't comment yet on the overall kind of effectiveness. But we have additionally driven comp and incentives to really focus on both suites and the multiproduct strategy. So again, moving away from individual product sales. We are making sure that the sales force is not focused on one-off product sales, but instead focused on selling the full suite and the full platform to our customers. So we think that's going to be very strategic as well over time.

And just remind me -- and I think you hit on this a little bit, but how does Box Sign fit into that, right? Is this going to be something that's enabled? And then I guess I just want to make sure I understand, there's different functionalities for tiers, but how is that going to work in terms of the sales reps and the pricing in terms of getting that out in front of customers?

Yes. So we expected to launch this summer. It will be GA-ed this summer, and it's really, really simple by design. All of our business customers will have access to Box Sign. Depending on what pricing tier you're in, you'll get different levels of functionality or different volume of e-signatures. And when we surveyed the market, we kind of saw a bit of a sort of a bimodal distribution of use cases. You had, on one hand, a percentage of customers that had really, really advanced characteristics. They needed APIs. They had a high volume of transactions. They needed a lot of volume of kind of features to go and help with those workflows. And for those customers, we figured out that price sensitivity wasn't really an issue. So we wanted to go and monetize the Box Sign functionality with that set of customers. Then we had another set of customers where they saw e-signature really as something that is like running water. You just want to have it for your enterprise. You don't want to -- it's not particularly strategic. It's just necessary for employees to be able to do an e-signature. Maybe you're doing 1 or 2 e-signatures a month or a quarter. That's not something that you want to spend a fairly premium on enabling that for your enterprise. And so for that set of customers, we figured that actually driving greater stickiness and differentiation of our platform would be the most important value characteristic. And that feedback has been overwhelming from customers. When we released it, I don't think I've ever seen as much of a resounding response from CIOs in our customer community of a new feature than when we announced that we were getting into the e-signature space with a very disruptive business model. I had dozens and dozens of CIOs reaching out to me saying, "This is fantastic. We've only deployed e-signature functionality to a small percentage of our workforce. We want to roll it out more broadly." In some cases, people were still exploring which type of platform to choose. And so we have immense respect for the current e-signature vendors in the market. We don't see this as a kind of head-to-head battle as much as that this market is still very, very early. We see that the market should probably be 5 to 10x larger as you think about all of the paper-based or manual workflows that will be digitized. And we want to just make sure that we've got a very, very strong tender in that space to be able to capture a significant portion of the future spend that's going to be going into this category.

Well, it sounds like I won't need any more pens in my office or at least that's the use case longer term. So...

Well. You're still -- pens are alive and well, so...

Yes. Well, it's good. It's an evolution. But well, look, it's just on the M&A strategy, right? So I think obviously, this is an interesting one. It sounds like at least the early feedback from customers or potential customers is positive. What else would you potentially look at? Just thinking about adjacencies, there's a lot of areas if you're talking about workflows. Like where could you ultimately take this?

Yes. So this is a very, I think, exciting area for us. And the SignRequest acquisition we did, we hope suggests a little bit of a road map for us, at least within the investor community of we're going to take a very disciplined approach to M&A. We will use M&A as a tool for accelerating our product strategy and vision. But we use it judiciously when we see that there's an opportunity to accelerate our product strategy. So I'll just give you an example. Last year, in kind of the Q2, Q3, Q4 time frame, spanning that kind of 3 months plus or minus period, we identified that we wanted to enter the e-signature space. We did a sort of a build-buy partner review. We realize that obviously, we already knew this going in, but we obviously knew how much functionality was necessary in the space to be competitive. So buy and partner remain the only 2 kind of logical options. And this became something that we felt like had to be core to our differentiation. So partner was -- we still want to have great integrations with the leading players, but we didn't want to be in a position of sort of white labeling a technology. We wanted to make sure that we had it on platform and able to be delivered to all of our customers. So we did an extensive review of the market. We identified an incredible team that was actually one of the highest-ranked products by end users, if you go to G2 Crowd, as well as having the most advanced enterprise functionality that they built out in this space. And so we think we did a very, very strategic acquisition, but not one that was significant or material from an investor standpoint. So it allows us to accelerate our product strategy, get into a massive market with leading technology and then helps us accelerate in this space. And I think you're going to see that type of disciplined approach as we look at the broader landscape of M&A. What M&A can we use to accelerate growth that we can do in a very disciplined fashion, that makes sense as a kind of core adjacencies of the Box platform and the Content Cloud. So I'll just give you kind of some topical areas. If you think about data privacy, additional ways of doing compliance or data governance, these are big markets that continue to have significant spend associated with them. The future of collaboration is sort of creating really interesting ways that people want to work with their content going forward. So we get pretty excited about some areas of that market as well. And of course, we're going to continue to just invest in data security. So we're going to go deeper and deeper in the security space. So some of those will be areas that M&A can help us accelerate innovation, in some will be just areas that we continue to double down from an organic investment standpoint. Innovation is kind of core to our blood at -- and our DNA at Box. So we will always be driving significant innovation now even more efficiently with our Poland operation, but we're always going to drive innovation within our platform, and then we'll use M&A strategically to accelerate entry into markets or expansion into markets as appropriate.

Always bamboozled by that mute button. Sorry, it gets me every time. So last one for me. I did get an inbound from an investor on this. And the question was just kind of relates to the KKR partnership and more to the timing, just kind of why now in terms of that? And I think it speaks to maybe, look, the margin improvement initiatives over the last few years have been impressive, right. And the growth has held relatively steady here in the double digits. We saw the stock price move up in the fourth quarter. So I guess the question from the investor is why, in your perspective, was this the time to kind of enter into this partnership?

Yes. I think as we came into this year and at the start of the year and maybe this -- maybe my intro question was missed on this one, we wanted to do a pretty thoughtful and open-minded strategic review of the business and consider the multiple paths for shareholder value creation. As we reviewed that, KKR emerged as a pretty compelling partner for the long term of the business. So as we thought about a multiyear view of shareholder value and creation growth on the top line, improvements on the bottom line as well as, in some cases, via M&A where appropriate and in a disciplined way, KKR has tremendous unparalleled experience across those dimensions. So having a 9-figure shareholder on the Board as we go through this path forward as a company to be able to drive significant shareholder value, we thought would be strategic. As to the day or the week or the month I think is maybe a little bit less important. But again, I think having a strong investor around the table that is very, very aligned to all of our public market investors and wants to see significant appreciation in the stock as the purpose of the investment we think is hopefully a strong sign of endorsement. You can imagine the kind of work KKR does in these types of deals. John Park is -- leads the tech practice at KKR. He's very scarce time and limited Boards he can join. So by joining the Box Board, you can kind of see the firm is behind the investment and the partnership. So we think this is going to be a very good thing for shareholders. And again, from a pure share count standpoint, we expect it to be -- or anticipate it to be neutral to accretive on that dimension. So we think that's also positive as well.

Great. Aaron, Dylan, Elaine, Chris, we'll stop it there. Thanks so much, everybody, for listening in.

Thanks, Brian. I appreciate the time.

Thank you, Brian. Take care.