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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

#31

Post by natrius »

bdonlan wrote: post #18
ianl wrote: post #2

Sounds 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.

I'd bet that Dropbox is that largest S3 user in existence. Custom rates are very likely.

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#32

Post by mlinsey »

41 days ago, PG's estimation for the sum of the value of all YC companies was 4.7 billion. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html

Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the whole Dropbox team.

(Ordinarily I would say that giving congratulations before a deal is confirmed as closed is a jinx, but at this point there is no such thing as jinxing Dropbox. Their ultimate success, whether this report is true or not, is inevitable.)

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#33

Post by qq66 »

eru wrote: post #21
ianl wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://techcru…

About the percentage of unique files: I guess if you go by volume, the percentage of unique files is small. And if you go by number, the percentage of unique files is big. I.e. bigger files are more likely to be stuff that you didn't make yourself.

Until you get to home video. Which is growing very quickly.

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#34

Post by pbreit »

Kudos to them on a fine product and excellent execution but, wow, this seems pretty frothy. And I don't have a huge problem with some of the other big valuations (Square, AirBnB, etc). But DropBox is going to have to find some other interesting business for investors to see any of that money. Just storing files doesn't seem like it would fit that bill.

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#35

Post by dhbanes »

mlinsey wrote: post #32

41 days ago, PG's estimation for the sum of the value of all YC companies was 4.7 billion. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the whole Dropbox team. (Ordinarily I would say that giving congratulations before a deal is confirmed as closed is a jinx, but at this point there is no such thing as jinxing Dropbox. Their ultimate success, whether this report is true or not, is inevitable.)

Just for clarification, it looks like he stated "the combined value of the top 21 companies is $4.7 billion."

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#36

Post by mlinsey »

dhbanes wrote: post #35
mlinsey wrote: post #32

41 days ago, PG's estimation for the sum of the value of all YC companies was 4.7 billion. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the whole Dropbox team. (Ordinarily I would say that giving congratulations before a deal is confirmed as closed is a jinx, but at this point there is no such thing as jinxing Dropbox. Their ultimate success, whether this report is true or not, is inevitable.)

Just for clarification, it looks like he stated "the combined value of the top 21 companies is $4.7 billion."

Yes, but as explained in the post, that's a decent estimation for the value of the whole portfolio (of the 210 companies through S10).

This is because startup valuations follow a power law, which among other things means that almost all of the value in a portfolio will be in the top 10%. This round of funding is a good example of that principle - if TC is correct, then even among the top 21 companies, a majority of the value will be in the top single company.

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#37

Post by EliAndrewC »

natrius wrote: post #31
bdonlan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'd bet that Dropbox is that largest S3 user in existence. Custom rates are very likely.

Netflix also uses Amazon S3 and is probably an even larger customer, but I agree with your assessment that custom rates are very likely (for both of them).

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#38

Post by blantonl »

mlinsey wrote: post #32

41 days ago, PG's estimation for the sum of the value of all YC companies was 4.7 billion. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html Congrats to Drew, Arash, and the whole Dropbox team. (Ordinarily I would say that giving congratulations before a deal is confirmed as closed is a jinx, but at this point there is no such thing as jinxing Dropbox. Their ultimate success, whether this report is true or not, is inevitable.)

How does PG value YC companies? Is this process public knowledge or something internal to PG?

Re: Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation

#40

Post by blantonl »

Joakal wrote: post #12
ianl wrote: post #2

Sounds 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 :)

Pretty clever on their part :)

It is actually pretty standard. Deduplication is a very common method for not duplicating the same content on shared storage.

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