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Congrats Dropbox

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Congrats Dropbox

#101

Post by dgreensp »

That’s me in the bottom right in the striped shirt! Congratulations Drew, I am in awe.

I first met Drew at MIT, and first saw Dropbox when he was showing off what he was hacking on on his Windows laptop in a coffee shop in Cambridge at the start of the summer. My user id is 88, haha. The batch was tiny by today’s standards (what was it, 20 companies? less?). YC invested $5k plus $5k per founder, for food and rent and servers for three months, in exchange for 2-10% of your company. You could have office hours with Paul every week if you wanted. At the end of the summer, a bunch of us moved out west and lived in Crystal Tower in SF. When Drew raised $1m from Sequoia, I was shocked! YC founders at the beginning of the summer were generally two guys with an idea (if that), so raising VC out of the gate was rare. AppJet was another favorite of the batch, and we raised $90k from several angels to keep going. YC had already had its first acquisitions, like Zenter (presentation software acquired by Google).

In those days, the entire YC community was smaller than one batch today.

It is amazing to me to see start-ups I remember from back then still going, and even become household names. AirBnB (2008). Weebly (2006) is even older than Dropbox.

Way to change the world, PG and Jessica. And of course Drew and Arash!

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#102

Post by totalZero »

kchoudhu wrote: post #87
adventured wrote: post #3

Up 47% at the moment. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx

Yeah, the bankers made out like bandits on this one. RIP pre-IPO investors.

Pre-IPO investors don't have to sell their entire stake on an IPO. Often, they don't even have a choice to sell, due to lockup provisions.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#103

Post by simonebrunozzi »

My favorite part of Jessica's memory:

"he suggested Drew delete his Demo Day presentation in the middle of giving it, and then recover it from Dropbox and keep going. Usually we don’t suggest gags like this during pitches, but this one made people pay attention."

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#104

Post by totalZero »

stanfordkid wrote: post #88
felixgallo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks like they mispriced. Most of those gains are accruing to underwriters and speculators rather than the company. Same thing happened to eToys.

people always say this during IPO... you need to take volume into account. What is the volume trading at 44% above the opening price? When you put $700mm of securities on the market you need to price them low enough so that investors hold.

18 million shares traded on the open at $29, and since then 23 million shares have traded between $28.80 and $31.60. Safe to say there's a healthy bid at $29.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#105

Post by noir_lord »

totalZero wrote: post #98
fastball wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need to have an IPO to be a successful venture??

Some ventures get acquired. That can be a path to success, too. Bacardi does revenues of 5 billion plus and they're private. I'd say that's a successful business.

Samsung is privately held as well.

~$300bn revenue.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#106

Post by goatherders »

boto3 wrote: post #70
defen wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably around 0.06 * 10,000,000,000 Assuming no subsequent investments, dilution, selling of shares, etc.

So 600M is the upper bound. Drew Houston owns roughly 25% of the company now, and he probably owned ~75% at when YC invested, for a dilution rate of 3. I'd say YC investment probably has dilution rate of 10, for the real amount of 60M. Not bad, but not Whatsapp scale either.

Hahaha. This comment is hilarious.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#107

Post by totalZero »

felixgallo wrote: post #4
adventured wrote: post #3

Up 47% at the moment. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/dbx

looks like they mispriced. Most of those gains are accruing to underwriters and speculators rather than the company. Same thing happened to eToys.

There's an optics component to pricing an IPO. If your shares surge and stay higher than the IPO price for several months, people view that as a positive sign. I'm not saying it makes sense, but it's definitely something that you will see research analysts discuss when talking about newly-public companies. Keep in mind that big players in the equity market are sophisticated about financial reasoning, but not necessarily well-educated when it comes to the technology itself.

When you aren't sure how to value the assets and business of a company, optics unavoidably make a difference in the way you trade the company's stock. Look at all these software and tech services companies that are priced off of wonky numbers like EV/sales multiples if you don't believe me.

If people see a strong bid, they may be more likely to perceive it as bullishness, which influences their own trading decisions. As a result, the company may actually end up with a higher eventual valuation once the IPO dust has settled and the price has found an equilibrium.

Not to mention that the offered stake isn't the whole company.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#108

Post by degenerate »

FredrikMeyer wrote: post #93
dhouston wrote: post #90

Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)

Here's a link to the actual presentation https://web.archive.org/web/20100817162301/http://dl-web.dro...

That web interface is soooooo much easier to understand and use. Makes me sad how unnecessarily complex modern UI is, not just on dropbox, but across the whole web.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#109

Post by kalid »

dhouston wrote: post #90

Thank you Paul and Jessica for taking a chance on us — we wouldn’t be here without you and YC :) And thank you HN — I’m pretty sure the upvotes on the original screencast helped us get into YC and on Paul & Jessica’s radar to begin with! Even you BrandonM — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 — my favorite HN comment thread of all time :)

Congrats Drew and Arash, amazing job! I still remember meeting you at Startup school and wear account #27 with pride :).

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#110

Post by forapurpose »

geofft wrote: post #57
amelius wrote: post #20

This is nice from a business-perspective. But, stepping back ... I'm sure that a lot of the folks here would agree that something as basic as file-sync should be a standard part of any OS, and follow a non-proprietary protocol. So whereas they have turned something that should have been a commodity into a profitable business, I'm not sure what we have achieved here.

Drew and Arash went to MIT, where their everyday computing environment was UNIX systems with home directories on AFS. For those who haven't used it, AFS is a networked filesystem sort of like NFS, except with a better authentication model and the ability to support failover on the server side. AFS, NFS, Coda, 9P, WebDAV, SMB/CIFS, FTP, Windows roaming profiles, AFP, etc. were all around and (to varying levels) built…

> If you're objecting to the fact that it takes a commercial venture to explore and develop these sorts of ideas, I too dislike that we're in that place. But it's true. We haven't achieved a way to develop standard computer infrastructure without capitalism

While private business certainly is essential, let's not go too far. I can think of ... maybe just one or two pieces of standard computer infrastructure not developed by private business or for profit. Need I list them?

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