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China and India pose ‘real risk’ if U.S. tech can’t grow: Box CEO

Box Co-Founder and CEO Aaron Levie joins 'Influencers with Andy Serwer' to discuss regulation of America's biggest tech companies and how President Trump's immigration policy affects business in Silicon Valley.

Video transcript

AARON LEVIE: There is a question of, should digital platforms continue to be completely unfettered in how they work and how they operate and how they can compete, or should there be some guard rails that are meant to protect consumers as well as ensure fair competition? And I do think that it's a real risk if we don't create an environment where you can build massive companies. Then I do think that China and India will be more significant threats for us.

But again, I think this is something that requires a surgical approach, as opposed to broad-based solutions like let's break up these companies. I don't think that will actually accomplish much. And I think that's more of a distraction than the underlying issue.

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ANDY SERWER: Do you have any idea of how the Biden administration is considering moving forward on this front, both with regard specifically to the tech companies and with regard to that relationship to China?

AARON LEVIE: Well, I think, you know, from the limited interactions that I've had with parts of the team over there, the thing I'm very optimistic about is the thoughtfulness of the approaches that the Biden administration will take. I think we've been in an environment for four years where we've only had these very heavy-handed and, again, kind of blunt force types of solutions to global trade, to internet censorship, to things like immigration.

And when I look at the Biden administration, already the team that has been assembled as well as just, I think, the general thoughtfulness that Biden has as well as Vise President Harris has on these issues, I think we're going to see a very, very different kind of approach, one that is much more nuanced to these topics, one that takes in more feedback and collaboration from the tech industry as well as other industries that are impacted. And I think we'll end up having, again, much better either legislation or policies that are enacted.

If you just take, for example, the immigration issue that we've been facing, the Trump administration has really dealt with immigration in a very, very archaic type of fashion that doesn't really take into account the fact that America needs talent coming in from all around the world to come build amazing companies and to work at our amazing companies. And Trump has set us back many, many years in terms of being able to bring talent into this country.

And that's just an example of these small decisions, seemingly, on the administration side that end up having a massive ripple effect over time, where the next Apple, the next Google, the next Facebook doesn't get created here. It gets created in China or India or another country. And that is going to set our economy back many, many years if we're not able to accelerate some of these solutions.

So again, I have a lot of faith that the Biden and Harris administration will be much more effective at dealing with these issues.