Very rough mental math: At a $5B valuation, PG's share of Dropbox should pay for ~10,000 YC investments
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Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
11–20 of 64 posts
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#12Sounds 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 pr…
There's a difference between 200 million new files and 200 million 'uploaded' files.
eg a song has a fingerprint. If 100 other users 'upload' the same song, it's counted towards their usage but no actual upload or storage is performed, saving costs.
Pretty clever on their part :)
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#13Sounds 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 pr…
There's a difference between 200 million new files and 200 million 'uploaded' files. eg a song has a fingerprint. If 100 other users 'upload' the same song, it's counted towards their usage but no actual upload or storage is performed, saving costs. Pretty clever on their part :)
Yes it is very clever, I had forgotten they ensure they only store unique files (I wonder what percentage of files "saved" are unique). I actually went and looked through the TechCrunch articles from April 17th that announced the Dropbox 25m user mark and 200 million file saves but it doesn't distinguish between unique and saved files. I imagine its the latter as it would be the more impressive number.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/dropbox-hits-25-millions-us...
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#14Dropbox 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…
1) Founders may want to take some money off the table.
2) I do not see why DB couldn't end up being a 100B company. They built a huge business with one fucking product. One. I do not even remember the last time I noticed new features. I want to see them starting to move more into backing up/syncing social data as well. There could be a day when all your social data will be simply poured into your DB, and they will do the job at syncing it via all your devices, and social networks.
Go DB.
Edit: Imagine. I take pictures. Put them on my DB. Set privacies (social, private, family, work, etc...). Then Facebook can now directly grab from my DB, Google, Twitter and new startups as well depending on my settings.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#15With the revenue of 100M, that valuation is insane.
S3 costs must be eating most of the revenues.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#16Dropbox 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…
Exactly. Given that Dropbox is still on a growth curve and it's time to raise more money, you can bet that Drew is being very shrewd in maximizing his valuation and keeping from needing to raise another round any time soon.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#17Sounds 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 pr…
I also wonder if they are selling shares because Microsoft is nipping at their heels. Live Mesh is a serious contender and starts with 5G instead of 2G. I switched.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#18Sounds 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 pr…
> I would imagine that Dropbox pays some sort of bulk price, but I can't find any information.
Storage pricing is right there on the S3 pricing page: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing
Assuming they're at the highest tiers, we're looking at about $0.055/gb storage, $0.050/gb transfer out, $0 transfer in. Transfer out could certainly be less, though, if they're in the >524TB/mo range.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#19Wow. Good for them! Go Dropbox.
yes but what about users like me. used it for years, then find out they can decrypt all my files. then i learnt they owe my files accordingly to their new tos. that made me spent one weekend to actually move my data out of their box. even if, arguendo, they would change the rules overnight and made some sort of promise of not doing evil anymore, it is still going to be a sick organism (to me) that i wouldnt touch it with my file(s) ever again.
Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
#20Dropbox 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…
1) Founders may want to take some money off the table. 2) I do not see why DB couldn't end up being a 100B company. They built a huge business with one fucking product. One. I do not even remember the last time I noticed new features. I want to see them starting to move more into backing up/syncing social data as well. There could be a day when all your social data will be simply poured into your DB, and they will do…
Everything is possible. There might for example be a bout of hyper-inflation in the US, making any business more serious than a lemonade stand worth >$100 billion. And that's about it for plausible scenarios. Becoming that valuable in real dollar terms would probably mean being one of the top 25 largest companies in the US.