When Box filed its long-awaited paperwork to become a public company, it set off discussions about the financial health of the company, and the long-term viability of its business model.

At issue was how much money Box spends- particularly on sales and marketing – compared to its revenue. People began to wonder whether the founder and CEO, Aaron Levie, was a quack or a modern-day genius.

Let me be clear: he’s a genius, and he’s not the only one.

It’s crazy to me that 10 years after the IPO of Salesforce.com as the first public software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, Wall Street still doesn’t seem to understand the subscription – or recurring revenue – business model. The software industry has been on an inevitable path to subscriptions since 1999, when Salesforce was founded.

Yet the recent decline in demand for cloud software technology stocks, causing Box to potentially delay its …