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Dropbox S-1

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Re: Dropbox S-1

#181

Post by hkmurakami »

zawerf wrote: post #170
mankash666 wrote: post #62

Commentary on valuation: 1. Box, a public company, is currently valued at $3.17B. It had revenues of ~$480M with a net loss of $150M in 2017 [1] 2. In contrast, Dropbox had revenues of $1.11B with a net loss of $111M in 2017. The higher revenues, and lower losses bode well for Dropbox. Objectively, that would value Dropbox in the $8B-$9B range, $1B-$2B short of it's previous $10B private valuation [1]: https://goo.gl…

Does this mean that investors in their $10B round lost money? Is this common?

They likely have protection clauses.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#182

Post by mrep »

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…

They also committed to a 1 billion dollar deal with AWS soon after that: http://fortune.com/2017/02/09/snap-inc-signs-big-aws-deal/

Re: Dropbox S-1

#185

Post by andysinclair »

From the S-1, looks like they will be excluded from the S&P500:

In addition, in July 2017, FTSE Russell and Standard & Poor’s announced that they would cease to allow most newly public companies utilizing dual or multi-class capital structures to be included in their indices. Affected indices include the Russell 2000 and the S&P 500, S&P MidCap 400, and S&P SmallCap 600, which together make up the S&P Composite 1500. Under the announced policies, our multi-class capital structure would make us ineligible for inclusion in any of these indices, and as a result, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and other investment vehicles that attempt to passively track these indices will not be investing in our stock. These policies are very new and it is as of yet unclear what effect, if any, they will have on the valuations of publicly traded companies excluded from the indices, but it is possible that they may depress these valuations compared to those of other similar companies that are included.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#186

Post by jseip »

Amazed by the R&D expense of $380.3M especially because I'm not aware of substantive innovations that they're bringing to market. How has / will that investment translate into new technology or a technically superior product?

Re: Dropbox S-1

#187

Post by uniformlyrandom »

jseip wrote: post #186

Amazed by the R&D expense of $380.3M especially because I'm not aware of substantive innovations that they're bringing to market. How has / will that investment translate into new technology or a technically superior product?

You underestimate the amount of engineering effort required to simply run a fast-growing highload service.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#188

Post by jeroen »

dfee wrote: post #110
toomuchtodo wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their infrastructure commitments are ridiculously high. "In its disclosure, Snap has said that it is contractually obligated to “spend $2 billion with Google Cloud over the next five years and have built our software and computer systems to use computing, storage capabilities, bandwidth, and other services provided by Google.” Of the current losses at Snap, more than 80 percent of those funds go straight into Google’…

Imagine the sales commission on that one. “Here’s a $10B - Closed Won”. When talking about deals that are the enterprise valuations of Fortune 500 companies, do you value the sale as if it were an acquisition? Or, some other way?

$2 billion, not 10.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#189

Post by alex_young »

jseip wrote: post #186

Amazed by the R&D expense of $380.3M especially because I'm not aware of substantive innovations that they're bringing to market. How has / will that investment translate into new technology or a technically superior product?

R&D is probably almost all going to be salaries for engineering talent. It takes a lot of people to run your own end to end solution for 500m users. Remember, they are doing everything from software development to running data centers.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#190

Post by adadad3442 »

jseip wrote: post #186

Amazed by the R&D expense of $380.3M especially because I'm not aware of substantive innovations that they're bringing to market. How has / will that investment translate into new technology or a technically superior product?

That also suprised me- I know that they spend a great deal on optimizations to reduce backend cost, improve uptime / reliability, etc., but I don't see much on the customer side myself...
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