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Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

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Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#21
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of user…

> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free

I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems errors when dealing with unmergeable files?"

This is a deceptively challenging space, particularly if you want to do sharing and group work in a reasonably intuitive way. Which is why Dropbox has managed to remain a company instead of simply being eaten up the first quarter that appl/ms/google decided to get into this business. Note that all three have an offering, and at this point I know that OneDrive is actually pretty good, but for years it was kind of an uphill catchup struggle.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#22
post #3

[Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox.] TL;DR: The only actual news here is the new line of credit. The folks involved in securing that line of credit only noted that it was secured since the previous line of credit had expired. There's no real tie to any IPO news here, and the quotes about an IPO come from "potential advisers" and seem to be entirely unrelated to the line of credit news. > While the company hasn't…

Another interesting nugget that I think is material to the conversation:

"For the banks involved, taking on the risk of lending to an unprofitable private company can help them win a role underwriting an eventual IPO."

It's fascinating to watch how we're building the stack of cards this time.

The bankers on SNAP made $85,000,000 in fees on the IPO - which is very high margin activity.

The same bankers provided ~$1.2b in credit to SNAP as part of the courting process (1).

I'm not going to wave the doom and gloom flag, but credit lending on unprofitable companies to secure speculative IPO rights is probably something that will show up in HBR case studies after the next downturn.

(1) http://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/03/snap-ipo-what-wall-street-ban...

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#23

I don't know about Dropbox but for example Twitter is still losing money since 2012. Twitter is way overvalue in the market and has lost around $2 billion since inception. Obviously it's not the same as 2000, these companies have revenue, but some of the are not making even a profit. If they continue to throw tech companies with revenue and losing money as IPOs prepare for the next tech bubble. It will burst.

If you read the article, Dropbox is bringing in a billion a year and is almost profitable.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#24
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of user…

Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation.

Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS.

Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client.

Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux client.

Google Drive: Stories of unreliable syncing behavior, app instability, and so forth. No Linux client. Google history of killing non-core products.

--

Not only did Dropbox get there first, they did it mostly right, to the point where their competitors can be described as also-rans.

The other thing is that Dropbox has "good file sync service" as their entire mission, while every other provider of note has it as some value-add into their other services, meaning it's subject to the whims of what those companies are doing on a particular day.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#25
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of user…

> it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free I worked on SkyDrive/OneDrive for a few years. That's what we thought too. This stuff inevitably starts out with "seriously, how long is it going to take to make essentially a wrapper around rsync" and ends up with "Hey, guess what happens when you cross filesystem errors with distributed systems erro…

Funny, I'm a Linux and Windows 10 user and I prefer OneDrive to Dropbox because I have less problems with it as a user.

rclone is a large contributing factor, however. And on Windows, OneDrive feels like less of a system hog.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of user…

Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation. Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS. Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client. Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux…

rclone serves as a great Linux client for OneDrive. I run it in a cron on my home server and at-will on my laptop.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#27
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation. Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS. Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client. Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux…

rclone serves as a great Linux client for OneDrive. I run it in a cron on my home server and at-will on my laptop.

And that's fine for you and me, but limits its adoption (hence appeal, hence longevity) to people that download unofficial, unsupported third party clients and manually set up cron jobs.

The reason Dropbox is kicking ass is that nobody wants to deal with the manual work. Download a program, put stuff in folder, stuff appears elsewhere. No thought required. Simple.

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem is that, if they wanted to, it shouldn't take Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon too much work to put out a comparable product and offer it for free. As an anecdote, my girlfriend already cancelled her Dropbox account because iCloud provides what she needs at a much cheaper cost. Personally, I require Unix support and also use a large portion of the terabyte of space, but I'd bet that the majority of user…

Nobody can seem to do it very well, despite all of them having one. Every major provider has some sort of cloud drive product, but all of them, save for Dropbox, have some annoying limitation. Apple iCloud Drive: Unusable out of MacOS. Amazon: Unclear storage limits with potentially catastrophic consequences for going over them. No free tier. No Linux client. Microsoft OneDrive: Individual file size limits. No Linux…

I was all in on iCloud Drive, except when I discovered you can't share folders. So I had to go back to Dropbox...

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#29
post #14

One concern about Dropbox I have is its inability to establish itself beyond its File Storage / Syncing software. Salesforce.com, in comparison, has been acquiring companies left and right. Notable acquisitions of Dropbox, like Mailbox, have either shut down, or are nowhere on the impact map. As Dropbox user (albeit a free one), I don't find it useful for anything beyond synced storage (if there is any new addition i…

Why do they need to expand beyond that? Am I idealistic to say a company can survive just by doing something really well. Salesforce is hardly a paragon of a well-executed clear and consistent vision. I pay Dropbox because I can rely on their backups any place at any time, not because their storage is cheap.

I think we need a better storage backup system. I've got data on iCloud and on multiple desktops and laptops. My iCloud doesn't have all the photos because I'd run out of space and be paying dozens of dollars monthly [1]. I was helping my friend to select a disk backup solution a while ago, and not that many really came to my likings. Backblaze[2] is probably the only one I would say pretty good for a monthly backup fee at $5. Dropbox's 1TB was enough for her so I went with that solution, but for my use case I won't be able to benefit from it. Amazon [3] also has a backup offering product, but I don't see any real attractions / news since its launch. I did some work with Box.com and APIs weren't so easy to use (this was back in late 2015, early 2016) and pricing wasn't very competitive for a home user. S3 would be an ideal backup but I'd need to code up the system to manage revision and life cycle, that becomes a job which I might as well create my own Dropbox...

Sync storage is very important when you have a media center PC and a bunch of PCs you own and needs the files around. Not just in the cloud (that's for on-the-go and DR), but I would want a local copy too (using a NAS server). So if Dropbox offers local backup + cloud backup at a reasonable monthly / annual price, I would give that a try.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238

[2]: https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-backup.html

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home

Re: Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

#30
post #23

I don't know about Dropbox but for example Twitter is still losing money since 2012. Twitter is way overvalue in the market and has lost around $2 billion since inception. Obviously it's not the same as 2000, these companies have revenue, but some of the are not making even a profit. If they continue to throw tech companies with revenue and losing money as IPOs prepare for the next tech bubble. It will burst.

If you read the article, Dropbox is bringing in a billion a year and is almost profitable.

Almost profitable is not profitable.
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