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Dropbox S-1

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Re: Dropbox S-1

#391

Post by Urbanxassassin »

lsc wrote: post #361
dlwdlw wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing something fundamental about wanting and it's that we are wired to always want more. I think it's useful to accept this as something universal so we can understand why others and ourselves act the way we do. One is that it accepts the imperfect was of others instead of deriding that others are not perfect from a moral high ground. The other is that it prevents ourselves from playing the victim.…

>The games can be stratified into economic divisions but in terms of striving and human drama they are quite similar. The poor person who has never tasted really expensive food gets the same pleasure from something more simple than a rich person who has numbed his palate does from the most expensive things. My argument is that this is not true. there's a threshold below which not having enough causes significantly mo…

Ahhh yes... We call that 1st World Problems.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#392

Post by XMPPwocky »

candiodari wrote: post #386
XMPPwocky wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And by doing this, provides a way for clients to verify if any user on the file storage server has this file. So if I wanted to know if your mozilla thunderbird has a mail I have the source to, I simply try to store this and get these duplicate records. Yes. This is the reason you don't want this property (being able to deduplicate encrypted files)! But you can provide it, while still providing meaningful security…

> The client has the keys to files stored by other users because the keys are the hashes of the plaintext Personally I find only people explicitly authorized have the key to be the whole point of security. And you're suggesting this as a solution to the problem that organizations providing file storage could see what files you're storing. Under this scheme, it wouldn't just be that organization, but everybody who is…

> Under this scheme, it wouldn't just be that organization, but everybody who is a client, that could see what files you're storing (or at least verify if you're storing a particular file or not)

You can do this today, with Dropbox or whatever else- anything that does deduplication, if it saves bandwidth by not asking for files it already has.

You can't tell who is storing a particular file- only if anybody is. Does this leak information and impact privacy? Yes! But it still provides other useful properties.

If you have a copy of a file, you can see if anybody else does- a boolean value. (And if the server is malicious, it can tell who does (if it logs).) If you don't have a copy of a file, you can learn absolutely nothing about it.

So, for example, if a user uploads a, uh, personal image to the service- with Dropbox, in theory (they likely have strong organizational and technical controls against this sort of thing, mind you) if the server is malicious they can view that image.

With this scheme, the server can't.

On the other hand, if you, say, save a file containing only your social security number- or a similar low-entropy value- the server can crack the hash and decrypt that file. That's the price you pay for being able to deduplicate.

(Perhaps one could only deduplicate large files- thus handling the case of movies, music, Ubuntu ISOs, large system files, etc. To implement selective deduplication- if you want a file to not be deduped, replace all uses of its hash with, instead, a unique random value to identify the file. Server requires no modification.)

Re: Dropbox S-1

#394

Post by lsc »

Frondo wrote: post #389
lsc wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the spirit of Glompers. "More" - fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with that, but really, there's no reason for anyone outside of your group to support you any more than there is for you to support my own personal quest for more money. It's just a larger empire of crumbs. The problem is that I don't think this will work, for the same reason that management generally doesn't unionize. Management doesn't unioniz…

OK, fine, so you don't think it'll work. That's a whole different story from "we shouldn't want more, we're already well paid". If I'm going to be an Adam Smith-style rational economic actor, I'm going to seek to maximize my profit. If I don't, I'm leaving money/time/autonomy/working conditions on the table, and why on earth would I do that? If the most effective way to do that is to organize and negotiate together w…

>If the most effective way to do that is to organize and negotiate together with my fellow workers at Megacorp X--which is both ethically permissible (freedom of assembly, etc) and our legal right--why wouldn't I do that??

Sure, if that's the best bang for your negotiation buck... but there are a bunch of problems with the approach; the hardest to overcome is the fact that many technical jobs are essentially management jobs, except that we're managing machines for capital rather than managing labor for capital.

Do you understand what is special about 'management' as opposed to 'labor' here? I mean, management is labor, but it's different, because in labor, traditionally, you expect a human to execute a task. Management figures out what tasks ought to be executed in order to maximize the return to capital. You can see how this precludes management from unionizing in the traditional American way.

My argument is that same thing applies to the higher end individual contributor technical jobs, too. If I'm right here, American-style unionization would decrease the value we bring to the table and probably the value we can take from the table.

If you want to usefully organize, I suggest you spend your time looking at the IT jobs that are more regimented, where you follow procedures. Those jobs could be usefully unionized.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#395

Post by Frondo »

lsc wrote: post #394
Frondo wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, fine, so you don't think it'll work. That's a whole different story from "we shouldn't want more, we're already well paid". If I'm going to be an Adam Smith-style rational economic actor, I'm going to seek to maximize my profit. If I don't, I'm leaving money/time/autonomy/working conditions on the table, and why on earth would I do that? If the most effective way to do that is to organize and negotiate together w…

>If the most effective way to do that is to organize and negotiate together with my fellow workers at Megacorp X--which is both ethically permissible (freedom of assembly, etc) and our legal right--why wouldn't I do that?? Sure, if that's the best bang for your negotiation buck... but there are a bunch of problems with the approach; the hardest to overcome is the fact that many technical jobs are essentially manageme…

Again, it sounds like you're trying to justify leaving money/time/autonomy/working conditions on the table.

You want to do that? You do you.

That's not the mark of a rational economic actor, willingly selling themselves short on a deal.

You can dress it up by saying "well, we work with machines," but at the end of the day, the machines don't own the company, the machines don't sign your check.

The bosses do, and they're the ones you've decided to give up your maximal time/money/autonomy/working conditions to.

Again, you do you, but the minute you say "we should all willingly give up some of our time/money/autonomy/working conditions to the bosses and owners," well, now you're telling all of us to stop being rational economic actors, which I can't get behind.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#396

Post by totalZero »

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?

Not necessarily.

First, the "vs Box" valuation above is simplistic and may not be comparing apples to apples. They are competitors but they are not identical companies, so scaling valuation based on a couple of inputs fails to capture all of their dissimilarities. Also, there is no consideration for a relative spread between the two if you value Dropbox directly off Box (or in other words, which one trades over).

Second, the IPO is not always priced efficiently. Some executives might prefer to price lower just to see positive headlines about sustained gains after IPO. Others may counter that a low IPO price leaves money on the table.

You should wait to see where the stock trades after IPO and any significant lockup expiries before evaluating the success of investors in the $10bb round.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#397

Post by totalZero »

jmalicki wrote: post #246
ironjunkie wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you state, this comment equals to: "I like Drew, so let me make a donation of 30$ to Dropbox" That's why I like economics so much. A lot of irrational behavior come simply from the fact that humans are usually terrible to understand the underlying economic transactions taking place. One of my favorite irrational behaviour is the one in which people value object they got more than the equivalent price in which they…

You also have to consider the level of effort it takes to sell the bottle to someone who isn't an experienced wine dealer, and the spread that likely exists between the buyer and seller. So even though it may be $500 to buy new, it's probably more like a $100 bottle if they sell it, so it's like getting an 80% off deal? Why not drink it?

> the spread that likely exists between the buyer and seller.

Spread doesn't have to favor a buyer.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#398

Post by achompas »

cjalmeida wrote: post #212
achompas wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I never tried myself but it seems quite feasible to build a decent profile of someones taste in fashion from a bit of data. I've thought about this as well. How would you personally try to build this profile for users, then market to them based on it?

You could initially present a user some images to assess it's preferences and use some recommender system (collaborative filtering), a la Netflix. That could give you an starting point. But I believe the main issue is that fashion products have, by definition, short shelf life, so you can't run the algos on SKU data. Then you can use deep learning on product images + user categorical data to try to predict preference…

> You could initially present a user some images to assess it's preferences and use some recommender system (collaborative filtering), a la Netflix.

You would have to tag the hell out of these photos, right? Disambiguating preferences is the challenge -- the user may have liked images #3 and #7, but why? Specific items, or the color palette, or the silhouette, or just the model? A post by Chicisimo on the front page addresses these hurdles [1].

I've also seen some of these image recognition apps in action -- they pick up on patterns and color very well, but struggled with silhouette.

[1] https://hackernoon.com/how-we-grew-from-0-to-4-million-women...

Re: Dropbox S-1

#399

Post by jmalicki »

totalZero wrote: post #397
jmalicki wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to consider the level of effort it takes to sell the bottle to someone who isn't an experienced wine dealer, and the spread that likely exists between the buyer and seller. So even though it may be $500 to buy new, it's probably more like a $100 bottle if they sell it, so it's like getting an 80% off deal? Why not drink it?

> the spread that likely exists between the buyer and seller. Spread doesn't have to favor a buyer.

No, it typically favors the middleman.

Re: Dropbox S-1

#400

Post by nnain »

bogomipz wrote: post #357
throwaway93192 wrote: post #247

I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago. For all employees that are considering joining a startup as rank-and-file engineers and putting in years of effort, remember that your compensation will be paltry compared to founders and top execs. When your work finally pays off, it will mostly pay off for them. Good…

>"I'll just point out that the SVP of engineering, a former Microsoft exec, received $34 million in compensation, since joining less than 6 months ago." I am curious what contributions can a single executive make to a company that justify $34 million dollars in compensation? More so what contributions did that individual make in less than 6 months that can justify this obscene level of compensation? Did they create 3…

I would guess that he was hired so he can bring in some multi million clients from his network. Such hires can sometimes bring a lot of value to the company or just be a big drain at other times (the more severe effect though can be a dip in motivation for other techies).
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