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Dropbox S-1

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Re: Dropbox S-1

#141

Post by teej »

swrobel wrote: post #82
teej wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find juicy information in the S1 that doesn't get reported on right away. Off the top of my head: * Reliance and risks of Zynga in the Facebook S-1 * Customer acquisition costs in the Blue Apron S-1 * Growth specifics and positioning of algorithms in the StitchFix S-1 * Infrastructure costs in the Snapchat S-1 Besides, an S-1 filing is not written in legalease, it's written in plain language. One of the targ…

Give us the dirt on this one!

There's nothing shocking and I think that bodes very very well for Dropbox. It looks like a solid foundation with great growth.

The standouts to me were -

* They cut costs on an absolute and relative basis for the last two years. This is fantastic and I hope the trend continues.

* I don't understand how the $112 ARPU number foots with their pricing. They are telling a story that "teams" is driving growth but on the surface that's not reflected in the ARPU number. There's some sort of promotional discounting that's happening that isn't exposed here. I hope that they are aggressively managing their promo strategy internally because unchecked it can tank a whole company (see GAP).

* No idea where they expect new users to come from given they have 500M accounts. Presumably people have 2+ dropbox accounts (personal + work). I'm interested to know how many unique active users dropbox has.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#143

Post by nostromo »

pilingual wrote: post #126
habosa wrote: post #23

I believe this is the first ever YC company to go public? If so congrats to YC as well as the team at Dropbox.

A few years back (2015?) pg was on a panel and asked if YC made any mistakes on the application process. He acknowledged they did — Robert Morris gave a low score and wrote “spam” in the comments section of the application of a particular company that started looking successful, so they refined their process. It seemed clear he was talking about SendGrid which went through TechStars and went public in late 2017. I do…

Wasn't Dropbox also one of their solo founders? I wonder if YC ever rethought that filter given their success.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#144

Post by blfr »

wmeredith wrote: post #39
wonder_bread wrote: post #22

Seems like the move away from AWS to it's own infrastrucutre is starting to pay dividends. 33% GM to 67% in two years is certainly impressive!

Friendly heads up: "its" is possessive (like his or hers) whereas "it's" is a contraction of "it" and "is".

English is my second language and I barely notice most mistakes but this and the death of proper use of "whose" really, really bother me for some reason.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#145

Post by secfirstmd »

matthewmcg wrote: post #112
mankash666 wrote: post #30

Just curious - how's a raw SEC filing preferable to a reliable article summarizing it in non-legalese, providing context with the competition, etc. Other than lawyers and economists, does anyone ACTUALLY prefer this raw filing? EDIT: Adding my preferred link: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/23/dropbox-ipo-form-s-1-prospec...

Lots of others have chimed in with examples of interesting tidbits to be found in "raw" securities filings that don't get included in press summaries. My personal favorite is the "efficient factoring" risk factor from an old RSA Security, Inc. 10-K[1]: The Company’s cryptographic systems depend in part on the application of certain mathematical principles. The security afforded by the Company’s encryption products is…

Any mention of the NSA paying them to keep a dodgy RNG in there?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-nsa-rsa/excl...

Re: Dropbox S-1

#146

Post by toomuchtodo »

sonaltr wrote: post #136
toomuchtodo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideal cost is as low as possible without sacrificing future scaling needs or development velocity. At some point, you'll start to experience diminishing returns. It usually goes POC->Cloud provider->Your own gear

apart from the bigger companies (like Fb), have there been any major SaaS companies (esp. B2B but I guess that's trying to be too narrow so B2B & B2C) that have moved from Cloud to their own Data Center? (I know Etsy comes to mind...but apart from them?).

Dropbox: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/15/why-dropbox-decided-to-dro...

Github: https://githubengineering.com/evolution-of-our-data-centers/

Backblaze: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/our-secret-data-center/

Twitter: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc...

LinkedIn: http://www.datacenterdynamics.com/content-tracks/design-buil...

FastMail: https://www.fastmail.com/help/ourservice/security.html

Stack Overflow: http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/7/21/stackoverflow-upda...

Wikipedia: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

OpenStreetMap: https://blog.openstreetmap.org/tag/infrastructure/

The Internet Archive: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/16/head_like_a_memory_...

Gitlab tried, but didn't have the necessary in-house experience before they made the attempt: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/02/why-we-are-not-leaving-t...

Instagram was migrated from AWS onto Facebook's infrastructure: https://www.wired.com/2014/06/facebook-instagram/

WhatsApp was migrated from IBM to Facebook infrastructure: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/07/facebook-planning-to-move-wh...

Hacker News and Pinboard (acq. Delicious) run on a single server.

It's not hard, but you do need to know what you're doing and have resources to do it (most orgs rent colo space in someone else's datacenter, they don't build their own). There's a reason AWS margins are so high (which leaves a lot of cost savings to be had when your workload isn't highly variable). Any questions, email is in my profile. I spent ~16 years building data centers, hosting environments, infrastructure, etc.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#147

Post by dpweb »

teej wrote: post #105
ddorian43 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why infrastructure costs in Snapchat ? Doesn't look special ?

SNAP's infrastructure story in the S-1 filing was a mess. They had 2016 revenue of $404M with a cost of revenue of $451M. A 5 year, $2 billion dollar vendor lock-in to Google. They basically admitted that Google has them completely by the balls and it costs them $3 per user per year to keep the servers on. Both of these independently are very very bad, together it's a disaster. Facebook was at $1/user/year in their S…

Note that the modern gospel is any net business dont give a crap about costs, only growth and the ability to raise money.

This has been explicity stated by the saas business ‘gurus’

So even at 3$ per user that goes lower pretty quickly.

Plus they get alliance w/goog. Aws is a force but if i had a choice id have goog as a best friend over amazon.

Preferably id build my own data center and keep those assets.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#148

Post by teej »

defen wrote: post #131
teej wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find juicy information in the S1 that doesn't get reported on right away. Off the top of my head: * Reliance and risks of Zynga in the Facebook S-1 * Customer acquisition costs in the Blue Apron S-1 * Growth specifics and positioning of algorithms in the StitchFix S-1 * Infrastructure costs in the Snapchat S-1 Besides, an S-1 filing is not written in legalease, it's written in plain language. One of the targ…

Do you have a 5-second summary of what you mean by "Growth specifics and positioning of algorithms in the StitchFix S-1"? Just the fact that they use algorithms to tailor individual boxes, or do you mean something more specific?

I currently work at an e-commerce company and there has been a ton of debate around how "algorithmically driven" Stitch Fix actually is. The general feel in the space from non-technologists is that computers cannot do this job well now and won't be able to do it well in the near future. Stitch Fix makes it a major brand point that computers are an important part of the process. So the real question is - are they making this point because it's true or because it helps their valuation (tech co. 5-10x multiples instead of ecomm 1-4x multiples).

The way Stitch Fix talks about it in their S-1 makes it seem like the latter is the priority. I'm not yet convinced that the practical value driven by algorithms at Stitch Fix is up to par with how much they talk about it.

I was interested in growth to understand both their growth rate but also to get a feel if it was driven by increasing user acquisition costs like Groupon, Blue Apron, etc or if it was organic.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#149

Post by jedberg »

malthaus wrote: post #118

I have a lot of respect for Dropbox as they've created an awesome product and user experience that accelerated its niche. But as with Twitter i'm sceptical of the long-term prospects (and hence the need for an IPO vs a trade sale) of single-feature/protocol companies. Nice liquidity event for current shareholders but why should the public invest here? The product is becoming more commoditized with time as well as bei…

> Box seems to have a lock on the enterprise market which feels like the better long-term strategy than being a consumer/startup brand.

Yet box only makes about $48 per user per year, whereas Dropbox makes $111 per year. So either Dropbox has more enterprise than we think, or consumer is a lot more valuable than we think.

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