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Congrats Dropbox

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Congrats Dropbox

#141

Post by jedberg »

rossdavidh wrote: post #2

I like Dropbox and YCombinator, but this line near the end was odd: "Today is a big milestone for YC. When we launched 13 years ago, we never imagined that a company that we’d funded would one day go public." Really? What were they doing funding it, then? I hadn't realized that wasn't the original idea at YCombinator.

Don't forget that YC was started mostly with money that came from PG and Trevor and RTM selling Viaweb to Yahoo. Most exits then and today were sales to bigger companies. The expectation was that most of the companies would fail and maybe one or two would sell to a big company for a life-changing amount of money for the founders and nice return for YC.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#142

Post by paws »

smeyer wrote: post #116
paws wrote: post #95

Congrats to the Dropbox team. Apologies if this is a naive question but I haven't had much success Googling. I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this. When did that happen?

>I've never heard of a company going public without an investment bank's support. I assume there was a law to require this. Dropbox had the support of lots of investment banks[0]. Even Spotify is hiring banks to advise it in its direct listing, even if the banks aren't underwriting [1]. If you want to read about the roles of investment banks and other financial institutions in IPOs and the existence and history of al…

Thank you

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#143

Post by rmason »

What's with the Boston VC's? The minute I saw the original Dropbox video here on HN it looked like a can't miss product. I told all my friends about it. Heck not only did Sequoia invest, but Steve Jobs tried early to buy the entire company.

There are some companies where it's easy to see why they were missed. I never saw the point of AirBnB, never would use the service myself. But DropBox had almost universal appeal.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#144

Post by jurt »

totalZero wrote: post #94
smt88 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How was it drama-free? There was a #DeleteDropbox campaign after they hired Condoleezza Rice, widely considered to be a war criminal (especially outside US conservative circles) and definitely a proponent of domestic spying programs.

> widely I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of California and college campuses.

The protests against the Iraq war is considered the largest global protest in history. I would call that "widely".

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#145

Post by dragonwriter »

alecb wrote: post #134
totalZero wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> widely I'm not sure you'll find much well-reasoned support for this notion outside of California and college campuses.

Spearheaded a war that resulted in the deaths of 1+ million Iraqis that was started unilaterally on the pretext of fabricated evidence.

Condoleeza Rice did not spearhead the Iraq War by any reasonable standard. (If you can fairly credit anyone other than President Bush with that, its Vice President Cheney, who was actively pushing for aggressive war with Iraq and arranging for it both before 9/11 in the administration, and even advocating it publicly for many years before joining the administration.)

I'm not saying that there might not be some basis for finding her culpable for some acts of the Administration that amount to war crimes, crimes against peace (launching a war of aggression is that, not a war crime), or crimes against humanity, but spearheading the Iraq War clearly isn't on the list, either from advocacy or authority standpoint. Knowingly helping to provide the false pretext for it might be, however.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#146

Post by staunch »

Drew Houston was rejected by YC when they interviewed him for his previous idea. When they attempted to judge him as a founder, prior to any success, they completely failed to identify one of the best candidates they had ever seen.

After another attempt at getting YC's attention, Drew Houston even got shooed out of YC's offices and went home feeling rejected and having "sour grapes" about the situation.

He only got into YC because he created a demo video that HN loved. And that HN post easily could have been buried by a bigger story or whatever. A quantum of luck was involved.

This should have permanently disproven the entire concept of judging a founder's potential in interviews. Unfortunately, people love the feeling of being a judge. Deciding the fate of other people, however incompetently, is an irresistible joy for many.

Paul Graham talked (in his speech at Stanford) about his own inability to correctly judge founders after a decade of trying. Calling it guesswork. Too bad that he retired and it went unfixed at YC, but something crowdfunding-ICOs may be the ultimate fix anyway.

Thanks to decentralization, we can (hopefully) look forward to an accelerating number of companies as good as Dropbox.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#147

Post by umeshunni »

noir_lord wrote: post #105
totalZero wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Samsung isn't privately held. It's listed in the Seoul market as KRX:005930

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#148

Post by kyleblarson »

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.

He achieved three commas.

Re: Congrats Dropbox

#150

Post by nrb »

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.

Using that math, the initial investment of 15000 returned 4000x
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