Earlier quoted context omitted.
That thread is hilarious, especially the first reply.
I wonder how the people who replied to that thread feel now?
I have seen "I was wrong then" posts over time.
Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
31–40 of 80 posts
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#32"Dropbox, which is increasingly competing with Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," This implicitly (if not explicitly) reverses the actuality, which is really: "Dropbox, which is increasingly facing competition from Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," They do a better job later on with, "Those featu…
I have a few friends who work at Box, that company seems much better at extracting revenue from its product via concentrating on the business rather than consumer space.
Their product isn't as good, but I bet they have some amazing sales people.
Like most 'enterprise' stuff.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#33"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million." http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...
i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it. What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?
Dropbox is the ideal insurance against laptop theft. If you stole my laptop right now, I wouldn't lose files that I care about.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#34Seems a bit like setting an anchor for a buyout. I have a feeling a 4 billion offer by Google/MS/Amazon would be accepted very quickly even if it was very little cash/all stock. Maybe my sense is very wrong but it seems like a decent time to get bought out timing wise.
Google or Microsoft won't buy them. They're hedging their bet that this technology will be a commodity soon (Google Drive and SkyDrive). It doesn't really fit in Amazon's universe. They already told Apple to screw (albeit only at 800M). I think that Drew is a True Believer, where he thinks there is tremendous growth potential in this space. And hell, anything's possible. Who would have thought that such a simple idea, done extremely well, would have such potential.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#35I'm curious to know what the plans are to keep driving revenue. Obviously very impressive numbers, but it looks like YoY top line growth looks slow: less than 100% [$116->$200M+]. It leaves one scratching their head as to how Dropbox gets to something like $1B/year under its current business model and later justify something like a 20B public market cap. That would take a something billion users with roughly the same conversion rate. They would need the same base of users as Facebook, but with a huge percentage of them actually paying money, while facing intense competition by players who demonstrate they are willing to lose billions of dollars a year to compete in new markets.
One obvious answer is Dropbox for businesses, but it remains to be seen how well they actually compete in that space. Fined tunes permissions/controls. Integrations. Enterprisey things. They all become more necessary at higher price points. I wonder if Box is in a position to improve their existing sync client faster than Dropbox is to add all those features/controls yet keep their core simplicity.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#36Will the use the funds raised to finally optimize their CPU-hungry client, so that it doesn't cut my battery life by 30%?
I'm worried about Dropbox. Worried that they concentrate on adding features (photo syncing?) instead of caring about their loyal paying business customers, who mostly want the software to Just Work and Work Well.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#37"Dropbox tallied $116 million in sales last year, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million." http://online.wsj.com/news/article_email/SB10001424052702303...
i m flabbergasted at the amount of money there is in this service (and related ones) - is it really that useful? I had a dropbox account since the early days, and i have hardly put any use into it. What do people actually use it for? Share files? Backup solution?
Besides sharing files (for which Dropbox is great), I am increasingly symlinking folders to subfolders in my Dropbox to attain automatic synchronization between machines. It's just by far the most seamless and painless to set up solution I know of.
I recently became a paying user and I now store all my personal docs to my Dropbox. My main impediment to doing this was concern about security, but then I discovered and deployed Boxcryptor Classic (https://www.boxcryptor.com/en/boxcryptor-classic), which give me a great deal of peace of mind. It's a fully client-side, zero-knowledge file-system encryption app. I now keep all my documents in my Boxcryptor, which sits in my Dropbox.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#38During the Dublin Web Summit (two weeks ago) Drew Heuston stated that Dropbox hadn't touched the previous funds they had raised. I wonder why the need to raise the money at this point?
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#39"Dropbox, which is increasingly competing with Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," This implicitly (if not explicitly) reverses the actuality, which is really: "Dropbox, which is increasingly facing competition from Microsoft and Google as well as fellow startup Box in the fast-growing field of cloud storage," They do a better job later on with, "Those featu…
Since you're nitpicking, I'll just point out that both formulations actually have the same meaning. There's nothing (not even an implication) in the first quoted sentence that suggests that Dropbox is younger than its competitors.
'Competing with' and 'facing competition from' are exact equivalents.
Re: Report: Dropbox seeks new funding, valuing company at $8 billion
#40Recently, more of my software has added Dropbox as an option for synchronizing its data between devices - but I'm hesitant to do so. It seems like Dropbox lacks the necessary access-control granularity. If your FTP client, and a chat program, and a password manager all decide they need read/write access to your dropbox, doesn't that open up attack-vectors across completely unrelated applications and services in ways that previously may have been isolated and sandboxed?