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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

#91

Post by droopyEyelids »

adtac wrote: post #61

I'll never understand why a company has to keep growing. Obviously I don't have a degree in economics, but why can't a company do well and then continue being so without having the need to innovate all the time? Sorry if I'm missing something big.

What you're missing is you're looking for too abstract of an answer.

A company has to keep growing because of unique demands on that company. A different company doesn't have to grow because it has a different set of demands.

Most you read about on here have a relatively similar set of demands based on the VC investments they took.

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

#92

Post by jpalomaki »

laurentdc wrote: post #35

I'm failing to see their competitive advantage. Is it the file history? Linux client? Genuinely asking, I pay 7 € / mo for OneDrive (1 TB) and I get a desktop license of Office along with that too.

The thing in Dropbox is the syncing. It works very well and it is very fast.

This does not matter for everybody but if you for example work on multiple computers with same files this can be quite handy.

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

#93

Post by Infernal »

Karunamon wrote: post #24
reverend_gonzo wrote: post #18

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…

For iCloud, you actually can use iCloud Drive via a web interface from other OSes - I think the biggest limitation is actually that you can't share arbitrary files, only certain types of files (Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Notes, Photos).

I could easily go all in on iCloud Drive if I could make arbitrary files available to other users.

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

#94

Post by darkstar999 »

adtac wrote: post #61

I'll never understand why a company has to keep growing. Obviously I don't have a degree in economics, but why can't a company do well and then continue being so without having the need to innovate all the time? Sorry if I'm missing something big.

They took venture capital, the investors want to see as big of a return on their investment as possible.

I think you'd have to look at self-funded companies to find one that is "ok" with stagnant growth.

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

#95

Post by jpttsn »

akulbe wrote: post #2

Why can't regular folks seem to get in on an IPO? (Admittedly, I don't understand how all the stock stuff works. It just seems like only big investment firms are the ones that are able to do initial investments.)

It's like how regular folk can't buy food or clothes at wholesale prices.

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

#96

Post by projproj »

yeukhon wrote: post #29
blowski wrote: 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.

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…

>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...

Might be worth looking into Duplicati [1]. You choose the backend, and it does the other things you mention ("Backup files and folders with strong AES-256 encryption. Save space with incremental backups and data deduplication. Run backups on any machine through the web-based interface or via command line interface. Duplicati has a built-in scheduler and auto-updater.")

[1]: https://www.duplicati.com/

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

#98

Post by 013a »

yeukhon wrote: post #78
crooked-v wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unlimited" space in any online service almost always means "there is a soft cap where we start threatening to shut down your service, but we won't tell you what it is ahead of time".

Actually quite an interesting point. Consider S3. They provide unlimited storage, but their software has to be able to keep up with the insane growth of data, albeit the hardware storage demand as well.

S3's cost to the consumer scales with the amount stored. That's different from Amazon, Dropbox, or Google, who offer enterprise-facing non-developer storage options at a flat rate for "unlimited".

They can do this because these enterprise-facing products offer fewer performance guarantees relative to their developer-facing products. But, ultimately, "unlimited" doesn't mean unlimited, in literally all of these products.

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

#100

Post by rrdharan »

mbesto wrote: post #83
rrdharan wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're free cash-flow positive. Consider that Amazon is also mostly not profitable but has staggering amounts of positive free cash flow.

> They're free cash-flow positive. Do you know that for a fact?

Dropbox's CEO declared it as a fact last year and it has been widely reported:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-14/dropbox-c...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/dropbox-ceo-were-cash-flow-posi...

https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/14/dropbox-says-it-is-cash-fl...

But I have not personally inspected their financial statements and conducted an audit to confirm this with my own two eyes, if that's what you're asking.

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