Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dropbox Secures $600M Credit Line Ahead of Expected IPO

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 215 posts

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

#171

Post by madiathomas »

weston wrote: post #15

Lots of negativity in here, but I'll say I really enjoy how incredibly simple Dropbox is and has remained since it launched. It's so easy to explain how it works to my non-techie parents ("It's just another folder on your computer, except it backs up your data automatically"). I hope Dropbox continues to thrive.

Hacker News has always been negative towards Dropbox. Dropbox was dismissed since day one around here. Still they continue to grow in leaps and bounds. At some stage, we must just admit that we don't understand Dropbox as a business. They are solving a problem that we take for granted because we are techies. I also wish they continue to succeed.

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

#172

Post by aeorgnoieang »

rogerbinns wrote: post #136
brightball wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To this point, Dropbox does an excellent job of what they set out to do. I haven't seen anybody do it better and I'm a happy paid user. Being able to pay $10 / month for 1TB of fast, instantly synced and versioned online storage integrated directly into the filesystem is hard to beat.

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…

Huh. I have a personal account and a business account but I'm glad I've never tried to pseudo-merge them. I just shared a folder from one account to the other for the one set of files I wanted to share.

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

#173

Post by clairity »

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.

dropbox is a startup and investors invest in startups to generate outsized returns (with commensurate risk). outsized returns require outsized growth (specifically in free cash flows, but many proxy metrics are used to forecast free cash flows, aka future profits).

so the growth rate of a company is one of the biggest factors in its valuation, and higher valuation means more wealth generated for investors, including employee-shareholders.

in DCF (discounted cash flows, a fundamental valuation method), revenue growth rate is typically an estimated input, and the model is highly sensitive to it. the outputs of the model are the present value of future free cash flows, otherwise known as the valuation of the company.

(see the growth rate in the DCF sensitivity chart on this example of DCF analysis on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discounted_cash_flow#/media/Fi... )

higher growth rate => higher valuation, all other things being equal. investors are looking for the largest delta between initial valuation and final valuation they can get, and growth is one of the most reliable ways to achieve that.

companies that don't grow can generate nice returns for the current owners, but they don't generate outsized returns over time because as growth rate goes to zero, valuation becomes a constant, i.e., no delta in initial vs final valuation (all other things being equal).

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

#174

Post by krrrh »

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…

Arq is a well-supported piece of commercial software. It's a one time $50 license, but works with a half dozen different cloud services. Another commenter mentioned the open source Duplicati, which sounds similar. I haven't looked into it, but probably would if I wasn't already set up with a decent solution.

Folks often end up with a tonne of excess space either on a paid Dropbox account, or Google Suite via their university or company. You can also get unlimited space on ACD for $60/a (some people on /r/datahoarder claim to have uploaded over a petabyte), and Glacier is quite affordable on a per GB basis. It's pretty easy to get reliable versioned encrypted cloud backups on different providers that run overnight without requiring a lot of attention from an end user.

The biggest gap I have left is that most of my photos are on iCloud and if you don't have space on your Mac to store local copies to back up to somewhere else, it's easy to end up with only one copy of vital data.

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

#175

Post by ssalazar »

protomyth wrote: post #80
Afton wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.

Stock git explodes when dealing with binary files that are above a certain size or are changing frequently. So forget about photo collections, shared Photoshop files, or any other non-text document formats. The workarounds had a lot of pain points for a while (that maybe are fixed now in 2017, haven't explored that recently).

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

#176

Post by protomyth »

ssalazar wrote: post #175
protomyth wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious, why would you go into the project thinking rsync and not git? It seemed to me most of these syncing folders are really a special case of source code control.

Stock git explodes when dealing with binary files that are above a certain size or are changing frequently. So forget about photo collections, shared Photoshop files, or any other non-text document formats. The workarounds had a lot of pain points for a while (that maybe are fixed now in 2017, haven't explored that recently).

I was more thinking the concept of source code control than the specific, but used a specific since a specific file transfer program was mentioned. Some source code control programs handle binaries just fine.

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

#178

Post by Retric »

dboreham wrote: post #165
Retric wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Um, it certainly is how investing works. They think the company will be worth >X in the future ( >>X in the case of pre-IPO investing).

Stock and Bonds are very different things. A bond is an agreement with a company to hand back X amount of money at time Y. Stock is an agreement to share in future profits.

Importantly, when you buy stock from a someone other than the company then the price you pay has little to do with the company. But, again my point is risk is an inherent part of the process. If you invest in a startup and they use all of that money to buy government bonds and then fold in five years you would be pissed because they avoided risking your capital.

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

#179

Post by [deleted] »

Retric wrote: post #160
dboreham wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

[deleted]

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

#180

Post by krrrh »

kilroy123 wrote: post #156
microtonal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

rclone plus Amazon Cloud Drive might be an option. They do seem to have no limit when it comes to uploading data, but you can apparently run into soft caps if you try to download it all at once. Apparently Amazon has a lot of spare downstream capacity at their datacenters.
Post reply on HN