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CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

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Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#31

Post by pptr1 »

nostrademons wrote: post #2

IIRC PayPal was very similar - it was sold for $1.5B, but Max Levchin's share was only about $30M, and Elon Musk's was only about $100M. By comparison, many early Web 2.0 darlings (Del.icio.us, Blogger, Flickr) sold for only $20-40M, but their founders had only taken small seed rounds, and so the vast majority of the purchase price went to the founders. 75% of a $40M acquisition = 3% of a $1B acquisition. Something f…

It also means Aaron Levie could be fired from Box anytime if Box's stock fails to perform. It adds a significant amount of pressure and sort of handicaps him from taking some risk. In my view this devalues the long term value of the company.

However, they could kill it at enterprise and introduce some game changing product or service,

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#33

Post by changdizzle »

zaidf wrote: post #11
vqc wrote: post #7

Is it possible that he's already cashed out some of his shares privately? (Get himself some liquidity prior to an exit.)

He's almost certainly cashed out partially. You don't get to Series F without cashing out.

tagline for the future Box tell-all movie?

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#34

Post by wwweston »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #22
pyrrhotech wrote: post #12

And the average engineer who thought they'd be rich, probably owns 0.0002%. Have fun with your 200k! Startups are such a scam for the employees.

To add to this, so what if it is "$200K" ? Basically that is enough to completely cover one kids education at a state school, put down 20% on a million dollar house, or seed fund your next "big thing" for easily 6 to 18 months. On top of that you've been working for a salary that probably paid all your existing living expenses so you were not accumulating debt. That is a pretty cool thing. Further, if you continue to…

> To add to this, so what if it is "$200K"

Depends on if it's $200K while working at market rates, or $200K vested over 5 years while working at 50k under the highest market rate you could have had because, hey, you had equity.

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#35

Post by thaumasiotes »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #22
pyrrhotech wrote: post #12

And the average engineer who thought they'd be rich, probably owns 0.0002%. Have fun with your 200k! Startups are such a scam for the employees.

To add to this, so what if it is "$200K" ? Basically that is enough to completely cover one kids education at a state school, put down 20% on a million dollar house, or seed fund your next "big thing" for easily 6 to 18 months. On top of that you've been working for a salary that probably paid all your existing living expenses so you were not accumulating debt. That is a pretty cool thing. Further, if you continue to…

Using an unrepeatable windfall as the down payment on a loan seems wildly inadvisable. The point of the down payment is that you're able make good on the loan.

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#36

Post by fidotron »

This sets alarm bells off for me, of the kind saying the large investors are looking to claw as much back as possible via IPO because the core business isn't as viable as they thought. Demonstrating profitable quarters in the run up to IPO is highly valuable, so if they aren't doing that . . . yuck.

DropBox, for better or worse, appear to have cleaned up on the consumer front, and you'd have to be blind to not notice the trend these days is consumer tech getting into enterprise IT, and not vice versa. GDrive isn't too hot, yet, but I'm sure they'll eventually get there. Then MS probably have the biggest motivation to chase the enterprise market.

Sorry Box, I just don't see this working out at all. Something smells bad.

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#37

Post by crystaln »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #12

And the average engineer who thought they'd be rich, probably owns 0.0002%. Have fun with your 200k! Startups are such a scam for the employees.

Startups that pay employees well are not scams for employees. Startups that give >0.1% are not scams.

Anyone getting 0.0002% expecting to get rich is not being scammed, they are being stupid.

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#38

Post by ryanobjc »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #22
pyrrhotech wrote: post #12

And the average engineer who thought they'd be rich, probably owns 0.0002%. Have fun with your 200k! Startups are such a scam for the employees.

To add to this, so what if it is "$200K" ? Basically that is enough to completely cover one kids education at a state school, put down 20% on a million dollar house, or seed fund your next "big thing" for easily 6 to 18 months. On top of that you've been working for a salary that probably paid all your existing living expenses so you were not accumulating debt. That is a pretty cool thing. Further, if you continue to…

Good point! Although, you didn't really talk about what the engineer gave UP to work at the company.

Depending on the time, $200,000 over 4 years is not a really good reward. In the mean time you have forgone: - better healthcare (if you have a family this ups the cost a lot) - lower stress job - better bonuses at 'big companies' - better options at public companies

Remember, that a great sr engineer, the kinds that startups allegedly hire, tend to be getting $30-80,000 a year in options at companies like Google, Apple, etc.

So now your $50k/year is looking like... well it's looking like a loss frankly.

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#39

Post by psychometry »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #12

And the average engineer who thought they'd be rich, probably owns 0.0002%. Have fun with your 200k! Startups are such a scam for the employees.

I'm curious what kind of warped perspective allows someone to scoff at a $200,000 windfall and where I can acquire such a perspective.

Re: CEO Aaron Levie Will Only Own 4.1% Of Box When It IPOs, Investor DFJ Owns 25.5%

#40

Post by tristanz »

changdizzle wrote: post #32
bthomas wrote: post #28

How much does Mark Cuban have now? (350K as only Angel)

cuban sold his shares to DFJ during their series A in 06 due to disagreements: http://pando.com/2014/01/31/box-is-the-unicorn-that-mark-cub...

The Cuban comment in that thread is interesting:

"I didn't miss a thing. When a company raises hundreds of millions of dollars I would have been diluted to nothing. But the bigger issue is that I'm not a fan of situations where you have to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do tens of millions in sales. It's a lesson learned from the tech bubble

It was one thing when the valuation as a multiple of sales was in stock. It's a bigger thing when that multiple is my cash."

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