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…
Dropbox S-1
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Re: Dropbox S-1
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
[deleted]
Re: Dropbox S-1
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Arash is a cofounder iirc.
Re: Dropbox S-1
#154Just 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...
This may not be a very well-received comment due to the securities fraud he has been convicted for, but in Martin Shkreli's YouTube lessons on investing (Really aimed towards future day traders / full time investors, but good points are made) he says the sec.gov site is the best place to take in content and he showed after you get used to the ( ugly ) government site layout, you can actually get to the information you need quickly. But day traders and full time investors probably fit your category of economists.
Re: Dropbox S-1
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well. For Y-Combinator is a win. It's an opportunity to convert their equity to cash and get a return on their investment.
Private companies that operate at a positive cash-flow are free to distribute profits to shareholders. Sure, going public makes it easier for investors to liquidate their stock, but that doesn't mean you can't get returns from investments in private companies.
As a practical matter, Dropbox is operating at a loss, yet has value as a company because of the expectation that it will hopefully someday turn a profit. IPOing allows Y Combinator, which specializes in early stage investment, to realize a return on their investment and invest in more companies without having to wait even longer.
Re: Dropbox S-1
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could also call out the flip side though, right? Dropbox could negotiate deals with the ISPs to "box out" smaller competitors. Maybe it costs them upfront but it also solidifies them in the market.
If you don't control the network, though, it remains a risk. Whoever you partner with can renegotiate the terms later or back out of a contract depending on the exit terms (may cost them, but may be worth it for what they can get from Google). This is the problem of the tenant, the renter. The landlord can change the terms and eat into your profits. At some point it's not worth dealing with them, but it's not always…
But renters don't have market share.
If you're Amazon (Dropbox), you have a strong position to negotiate better shipping (network) rates from FedEx and UPS (ISPs).
Re: Dropbox S-1
#157Congratulations to them. I don't really understand why anyone would use dropbox given the multitude of different offerings out there. I'm curious if anyone who uses them can give me a take on why I should use them. I currently use Google Drive + Google Docs and am very satisfied. I pay for 1 TB of storage for personal work / storage.
Dropbox has better quality software, and I would use them if they had individual plans that just scaled linearly like google drive and amazon drive do.
Because they don't I use amazon drive, which is 2TB @ $10/month. I mostly use it for client side encrypted backups and use about 1.3TB currently.
Also I've noticed many apps if they do integrate with a drive provider, they integrate with dropbox almost all the time, and the others not so much.
Re: Dropbox S-1
#158Must be nice to be Quintin Clark. Showed up in Sept of 2017 and was awarded $34MM worth of stock according to this S-1.
It looks like a healthy business. Congrats to dropbox.
Re: Dropbox S-1
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
It surely depends on how much users pay for the service, and how high the non-software costs are. But in any case, the examples given are B2C free to use products which are generally going to provide... not a ton of revenue per user.
I thought Dropbox's revenue mainly comes from it's business clients - B2B is more $ compared to B2C although B2C might be more profitable as customers might pay the $10/1TB and not really use that much anyways) Their paying users have increased, but the revenue per user has decreased (based on the S1...which I assume is because of enterprise deals).
This is from the SNAP S1 not the dropbox S1
Re: Dropbox S-1
#160I 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.
I know that Facebook moved to Dropbox from Box for internal use.