31–40 of 70 posts
Read this as throwing in the towel with Google announcing cheaper storage plans last week with renewed emphasis on the enterprise mkt?
It takes a bit longer than a week to organise an IPO, my guess is it's been on the cards for a lot longer
So, $250M actually falls short of the $292M they are burning through every year. The net loss of $168M a year means the $250M buys them almost 18 months of runway. Their growth looks less impressive when you consider they spent $292M to only grow revenue $65M. In short, they are spending $5 to make $1. It's possible the customer LTV is actually $6 over a period of years, but they might not be able to borrow enough to…
My understanding of Box is that they focus on enterprise customers more heavily than their competitors. Given upgrade cycles in many large companies, a LTV > $5 is possible. The difficulty and expense of selling a new product to large companies might also explain the marketing budget.
Or, could Box raise prices significantly enough on some customers to lessen their losses without sending too many customers to competitors?
I'm not sure how anyone can look at a growing history of losses due to increasing customer acquisition costs, in an industry with numerous competitors, and want to invest in this.
Is their product actually competitive? I had tried it once long ago, but currently I don't see any particular niche where it'd be superior to dropbox/google drive/onedrive/whatever. What am I missing here?
applications / companies that have security requirements, e.g. healthcare needs BAAs to be signed and Box will do that whereas the rest (of the big players) generally do not
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that insanely many people compared to what they deliver? Many more than DropBox (300+?) and JottaCloud (~10) without me being able to see why. Edit: You were before me, so added my comment as a reply to you instead.
They have a much higher-touch enterprise sales process, so my guess is that most of the extra employees vs. DropBox are sales, customer service, relationship management, etc. Even after the sell, big clients tend to want dedicated account managers, dedicated support staff they know by name, etc. (Still, it does seem like a lot.)
I'm somewhat astounded to hear they have 972 employees. I would have guesstimated somewhere below 200. Even with a huge marketing push, I'm a little at a loss for what they all do.
Isn't that insanely many people compared to what they deliver? Many more than DropBox (300+?) and JottaCloud (~10) without me being able to see why. Edit: You were before me, so added my comment as a reply to you instead.
(Source: dropbox.com/about)
Odd, some numbers are "whited out": "Based on shares of our capital stock outstanding as of January 31, 2014, upon the completion of this offering, a total of shares of Class A common stock and" Can't figure out the valuation.
I think the idea is they fill in these numbers when they get closer to the offering, using values that make sense given the indicated demand.