SAN FRANCISCO — Some technology-savvy venture capitalists are making a big bet on a promising Internet company run by a 26-year-old college dropout in Palo Alto, Calif. Only this time, the object of their financial affection isn’t Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.
It’s , a startup that offers online storage lockers for personal and corporate information. The privately held company is getting $48 million from a group of investors and financiers, which include two of Facebook’s major shareholders: venture capital firms Meritech Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
The similarities don’t end there.
Box is based in Palo Alto, as Facebook has been for nearly seven years. Its chief executive, Aaron Levie, is 26 years old, like Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard University in 2004 and moved to Silicon Valley to build Facebook.
Levie dropped out of the University of Southern California in 2005 to think outside the box with Box.
