Tom and I are up in Palo Alto for a couple of days talking to LP’s and seeing founders.

Today I am a keynote at a fintech event of the Plug n Play program.

Last night I was grabbing a late bite with Tom and Aaron Levie, the founder and CEO of Box.com walked by.

I waved Aaron over as I had not seen him in a few years. Aaron was one of the first people I ever met in the valley. It was 2006 and Tom and I had just invested in Golfnow.com and I had just started Wallstrip. I knew nothing about technology or the industry and s a lot of people did back then, we filled Michael Arrington’s house (founder of TechCrunch) for one of his parties to network.

I was 40 and Aaron was 23. I remember asking Aaron what he did and he starting telling me about his company Box and file storage in the cloud and I had no idea what the hell he was talking about. But Aaron was so goddamn charismatic and confident about what he was setting out to do.

Today Box is a $2.9 billon public company and Aaron is just as friendly, charismatic and funny as the night I met him 13 years ago. This time we chatted about investing, kids (he has one on the way), college (I did not know that Aaron dropped out of USC after his first year – but he does NOT recommend others should), Robinhood (he was an early investor as well) and of course the old days surrounding the conversation we had in 2006.

Palo Alto (the Valley) is a special place.