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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

#151

Post by superflyguy »

gruglife wrote: post #47

I'm hoping someone can help me with this. DropBox is valued at $10b. Their closest competitor, Box, has a market cap of just over $2b. Does Dropbox really offer that much more than Box?

I use Box but Box has some flaws compared to Dropbox. Sync is broken and they don't care. On Dropbox you could have the windows client installed and open a Truecrypt file, make some changes (add/rename/delete/change files within the container) and when you close the Truecrypt file it syncs the changes properly. Do the same on Box and it looks like it's working but it's silently losing your changes; no errors, warnings - nothing. I reported this and they don't care. So you can only trust them with whole files. That's fine, once you know, for a free product, I guess. The version control can be seen as a deletion with no undo too; if you accidentally increment the version number of a file (by uploading a new file of the same name, I think this is what I did) then the earlier version is there but you can't get at it with the free service. Not even by deleting the newer one and reverting. So be very careful what you do. Still, it's better than nothing as a free secondary backup.

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

#152

Post by dboreham »

nicoburns wrote: post #53
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A company with a modest valuation can survive by doing one thing and doing it well. A company with a very large valuation needs either very large sales figures OR large growth potential. Dropbox is squarely in the second category, which is why they need to keep expanding.

Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?

In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, where N >> 1) at some point.

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

#153

Post by rogerbinns »

brightball wrote: post #143
rogerbinns wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The place where Dropbox is spectacularly bad is multiple account support. Google does a good job of multiple account support - you log in to the relevant multiple accounts and things work. Dropbox expects you to pseudo-merge exactly one personal account with exactly one business account. You end up with a mess. It gets even worse when trying to unmerge them. And is not useful should you have more accounts than exactl…

I could see that. I'm _only_ using it for personal so I haven't really run into the issues that you're talking about. I think for Dropbox to operate in a pure filesystem-native-first experience they're probably approaching it from the 1 computer = 1 person standpoint (or one logged in user on the computer at least).

I've got one colleague who mistakenly let Dropbox psuedo-merge his personal and business accounts several years ago. He still hasn't completely fixed it!

I was around when they introduced the "multi account" support, and it was very easy to see how/why they did it. Instead of updating their clients to support multiple accounts (which they should have done), the client just keeps supporting only one account. Then on their back end they return "merged" content to the client. You can easily see how this can create chaos, because other people can also be updating your personal and business content, and untangling it all is a mess.

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

#154

Post by superflyguy »

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.

If you start a company and you break even then you're free to not grow. As long as you're happy with the money you're making and you can pay stuff, rent, insurance, equipment, services, surprises etc then you don't need to.

But if you can do it, someone else can do it, and if they are criminally inclined, sly, lucky, or are prepared to pay people less or provide a lower quality product, or they have money to burn or are backed by people with money to burn then they can take you on and, until they are caught/run out of money/lose business due to their business practices catching up with them, they can take your business. Companies which are set up with other people's money and/or which go public are going to have to answer to the people who "own" them about why they're not making more money this year than last year and the people notionally running the company will be out of a job if they can't explain this.

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

#155

Post by matt_wulfeck »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #139
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 agree with you about doing one thing really well. A little off topic, but: I think DropBox is missing a revenue opportunity by not having a yearly package for something like $20/year, for perhaps 20 or 30 gigabytes. I am not a paying customer because my use is well within the free tier, but I would pay for a smaller package if it was available.

I'm also frustrated by their tiers. I think they're worried that casual tiers would eat into their profits, so they only offer "slightly not enough" or "way too much".

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

#156

Post by kilroy123 »

microtonal wrote: post #111
kilroy123 wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I'm a paying dropbox customer, but I plan to switch in a month before my annual subscription renews. Amazon drive offers more space for only $60 USD a year. Plus google apps offers more space than dropboxes business plan.

I tried to switch quite many times. Problems are typically: refusal to sync some files, excessive memory and CPU use (last time I tried OneDrive it used ~700MB RAM when storage was nearly empty), no LAN sync (speeds up things considerably when sharing with family/colleagues), no block-level sync (touch a small part of a 300MB file and it gets completely resynced), no Linux client.

No I feel you, I do agree their sync tech is the best. I switched back to Mac so I no longer care about the linux support.

I've really gotten into photography. Shooting in raw means I easily add 10-30 GB of data a week. Just want a cheaper option for more than 1 TB.

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

#157

Post by zasz »

vecter wrote: post #148
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the c…

If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.

Plenty of investors are risking other people's money, though. Venture capitalists themselves are prime examples of this.

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

#158

Post by russdpale »

vecter wrote: post #148
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically people jumped on Dropbox to make money out of Dropbox's success. If Dropbox remain conservative and just continue to do remote storage/syncing well then those people won't get [as much] free money. Those people aren't investing they're speculating. They're not there primarily to see Dropbox succeed they're shareholders because they want to get rich from other people's work. So yes that's a problem for the c…

If investors have to risk money in order to [potentially] earn money, that doesn't sound so "free" to me.

Free as in no time or labor spent by themselves. At least that is what I think he meant

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

#160

Post by Retric »

dboreham wrote: post #152
nicoburns wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely if the company isn't "living up to it's valuation" that's a problem for the people who erroneously valued it at that level, not for the company?

In the abstract yes. But if the company essentially borrowed money from people on the basis of that high valuation, then its a problem. And that's what they've done. Actually, they literally did just borrow money, according to the headline, although I was thinking more of the equity raise process where although there isn't a literal loan, the investors have an expectation that they will get their money back (*N, wher…

That's not how investing works. People don't invest because they think a company is worth X, they invest because they think it will be worth X at some point in the future adjusted for the risk of not being worth X. Further, they don't necessarily buy stock from the company.

In other words startups have a small chance of being worth a much larger X, and Exxon has a very large chance of being worth a slightly larger X. If you need zero risk buy government bonds not stock.

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