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Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

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Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#51

Post by ghshephard »

Nate75Sanders wrote: post #49
awj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to doubt your personal evidence at this point. Almost everyone I know who has a Dropbox account pays for it.

Ok, are they businesses or individuals? What are they using it for?

Once you start to share files with a lot of other people, you very, very quickly use up the initial quota that you get with your free account.

That's the Dropbox strategy - if you use it as an individual, you probably won't use that much. But, once you start using it in a social way - you quickly need to pay for a pro account.

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#52

Post by onedev »

ghshephard wrote: post #51
Nate75Sanders wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, are they businesses or individuals? What are they using it for?

Once you start to share files with a lot of other people, you very, very quickly use up the initial quota that you get with your free account. That's the Dropbox strategy - if you use it as an individual, you probably won't use that much. But, once you start using it in a social way - you quickly need to pay for a pro account.

They give out so much free space, right now I have 55GB of free space for life. Then again, I'm not the typical user; I've visited Dropbox HQ a couple times, gone to their recruiting events, and know some Dropbox engineers.

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#53

Post by nostromo »

hardtke wrote: post #38

Social networks are winner take all markets, whereas Dropbox is not in such a market. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all trading at 20-40 times revenue based on the fact that they enjoy strong network effects.

Dropbox is not a social network, but they still have a (softer) network effect.

For all of my personal syncing I use BitTorrent Sync. However, because a few friends want to share files with me, I'm still a Dropbox customer.

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#54

Post by awj »

Nate75Sanders wrote: post #49
awj wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to doubt your personal evidence at this point. Almost everyone I know who has a Dropbox account pays for it.

Ok, are they businesses or individuals? What are they using it for?

Individuals. Some are using it for business purposes, some for personal use. Most of the personal users have filled their quota with sharing as 'ghshephard' mentioned.

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#55

Post by argumentum »

awj wrote: post #36
dchuk wrote: post #32

It's incredible how cynical everyone is in this thread about the valuation of a company that actually MAKES MONEY and how optimistic people were about the Snapchat valuation in the thread from last week, a company that hasn't made a dime. It seems the only way to really get a massive valuation as a "company" is to make sure you don't start making any actual money, otherwise people will stop harping about "growth is t…

Well, when you have no profit to speak of there's nothing to anchor the discussion. The hopeful talk about "growth" with the hazy implication that the company has a "profit" switch they will eventually flip into the "on" position. The cynical see a storm of speculation with no concrete anchor and walk out on what they see as a waste of time. Which, I guess, is a long way of saying "I agree with you". I think my theor…

By that standard, how do you justify Amazon's $170B market cap, given it's notoriously low profit margins?

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#56

Post by MichaelGG »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #45
MichaelGG wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPv4 and UPnP allows most of the P2P scenarios IPv6 does. Please clue me in as to how a P2P system is going to maintain always-on backups/storage of my personal photos.

> how a P2P system is going to maintain always-on backups/storage of my personal photos. A client to something like OceanStore.

I read the first paragraphs of the overview[1]. It sounds like a federated service that the end-user would still pay for and treat like AWS. The P2P aspect is inter-company federation of storage (so like AWS and Azure could cooperate).

This isn't P2P in the common sense (end-user devices aren't talking to each other). And it doesn't eliminate the need for AWS-esque providers, even if their backend happens to be federated among multiple companies. To the end-user, there's zero difference.

1: http://oceanstore.cs.berkeley.edu/info/overview.html

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#57

Post by a8da6b0c91d »

MichaelGG wrote: post #56
a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how a P2P system is going to maintain always-on backups/storage of my personal photos. A client to something like OceanStore.

I read the first paragraphs of the overview[1]. It sounds like a federated service that the end-user would still pay for and treat like AWS. The P2P aspect is inter-company federation of storage (so like AWS and Azure could cooperate). This isn't P2P in the common sense (end-user devices aren't talking to each other). And it doesn't eliminate the need for AWS-esque providers, even if their backend happens to be feder…

There's no need for anything like AWS or any payments. You offer some of your bandwidth and storage to the P2P network and get bandwidth and storage in return. Any machine on the network can participate. It has nothing to do with cloud providers. It's quite analogous to bittorrent.

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#58

Post by heurist »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #27

Are there not several DropBox clones on GitHub? And several competitors already there (and something called Box that is less consumer orientated?) Add in the switching costs are low to non-existent (it is just git isn't it?) - surely their competitive most is almost non-existent - in which case their profits are going to constantly eaten by competitors. What is it I am missing?

Brand recognition

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#59

Post by Raphael »

casca wrote: post #4

This seems like a very convoluted way of coming to the valuation. Revenue != profit. I can easily create business that generates $1bn/month in revenue by selling dollars for 90 cents. Dropbox may be worth $8bn, but surely it makes more sense to assess the valuation based on the growth in profitability?

You can easily acquire 100 million dollars to burn every month?

Re: Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

#60

Post by MichaelGG »

a8da6b0c91d wrote: post #57
MichaelGG wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the first paragraphs of the overview[1]. It sounds like a federated service that the end-user would still pay for and treat like AWS. The P2P aspect is inter-company federation of storage (so like AWS and Azure could cooperate). This isn't P2P in the common sense (end-user devices aren't talking to each other). And it doesn't eliminate the need for AWS-esque providers, even if their backend happens to be feder…

There's no need for anything like AWS or any payments. You offer some of your bandwidth and storage to the P2P network and get bandwidth and storage in return. Any machine on the network can participate. It has nothing to do with cloud providers. It's quite analogous to bittorrent.

Right, so in other words, it doesn't help most users in any way, shape, or form. It's no replacement for AWS or Dropbox or anything of the sort. I'm not going to run it on my tablets. My kids aren't going to run it on their laptops.

Edit: Even the overview says "The providers automatically buy and sell capacity and coverage among themselves, transparently to the users." It's clear from the overview that it's meant as a way to achieve a better availability than a single company, not as some magical free P2P replacement.

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