Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
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Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
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Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#2Sounds like a round for the founders and employees to sell some shares (called a series f?), unless Dropbox has some major expansion planned to build its own CDN and data centres instead of using S3. The amount of savings at there scale (200 million new files / day [1]) would be huge as data via S3 is already more expensive then running your own bare metal boxes. I would imagine that Dropbox pays some sort of bulk price, but I can't find any information.
I don't think the 5 billion dollar valuation is out of the ball park considering that they solve a problem that a lot of people encounter including my mother. Their solution is simple and elegant and seems to work. Last statistics I heard they had 25 million users [1] and growing, while I dont know how many of those users are active subscribers I can imagine the conversion ratio is much higher then normal freemium products.
While there has been a lot of anti-Dropbox news in the tech press lately, we need to remember we live in an information bubble that doesn't reach the normal user.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/billion-dollar-valuatio-clu...
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#3[deleted]
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#4Dropbox has traction and paying users. Why do they need $200 million? Of course it's not just a two-man gig anymore, but... what is it for?
If their business model isn't supporting the growth they want and they're not going to change it, is throwing money around going to be all that helpful?
Maybe I'm doubting that they'll be able to bring in that many new users because I can't imagine how anyone hasn't heard of dropbox by now -- which is pretty silly. I've just known about it for a long time because of HN.
Or maybe there are economies of scale that I don't know about, and by spending $x they'll be able to save/make $y>>$x?
(...Are they going to get off of s3, set up their own datacenters?)
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#5Wow. Good for them! Go Dropbox.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#6Very rough mental math: At a $5B valuation, PG's share of Dropbox should pay for ~10,000 YC investments
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#7Dropbox has traction and paying users. Why do they need $200 million? Of course it's not just a two-man gig anymore, but... what is it for? If their business model isn't supporting the growth they want and they're not going to change it, is throwing money around going to be all that helpful? Maybe I'm doubting that they'll be able to bring in that many new users because I can't imagine how anyone hasn't heard of drop…
Current traction and paying customers may not be enough to satisfy their growth/evolution goals. The cash could be used for a lot of thing. One guess is that they may be trying to ramp up the attack the enterprise storage/backup market and need a war chest to have any major impact.
Also, plenty of people who could really use a service like Dropbox have not heard of it. Even with their current product offerings, there is an ocean of customers who haven't been reached yet.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#8Very rough mental math: At a $5B valuation, PG's share of Dropbox should pay for ~10,000 YC investments
Did you factor in for dilution, they previously raised a 7.2m round.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#9More than 4 years ago, a post on HN by Houston asking for a review of DropBox:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
[Edit: Corrected link. Thank you.]
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#10More than 4 years ago, a post on HN by Houston asking for a review of DropBox: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 [Edit: Corrected link. Thank you.]
That's a link to this post.