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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

#61
In the past year, Dropbox has lied to it's customers about encryption and how much power Dropbox has over the data (!!!), shown that they deduplicate before encrypting (and that they can view files in your Dropbox and make them unsharable), and finally allowed all Dropbox accounts to be logged into without a password, for four hours.

And yet they are at a $5B+ valuation?

I'm amazed at how dropbox seems to be able to make any mistake and keep going. Very few other companies are capable of this. I'm not sure whether i should congradulate them or be disappointed.

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

#62
post #4

Dropbox has traction and paying users. Why do they need $200 million? Of course it's not just a two-man gig anymore, but... what is it for? If their business model isn't supporting the growth they want and they're not going to change it, is throwing money around going to be all that helpful? Maybe I'm doubting that they'll be able to bring in that many new users because I can't imagine how anyone hasn't heard of drop…

1) Founders may want to take some money off the table. 2) I do not see why DB couldn't end up being a 100B company. They built a huge business with one fucking product. One. I do not even remember the last time I noticed new features. I want to see them starting to move more into backing up/syncing social data as well. There could be a day when all your social data will be simply poured into your DB, and they will do…

"They built a huge business with one fucking product. One."

That's not a good sign, that's a bad one. That means if anyone attacks that one product credibly, the whole company is rocked hard. Better to be diversified, broadly speaking. (Details matter, of course.)

What are the odds Google, Amazon, and a not insignificant number of the other backup vendors in the world are planning some form of direct competition?

... actually, this speaks to what sort of concerns me about a bubble right now. Excessive valuations aren't themselves a cause, they have to be a symptom of something else. ISTM there is an excessive optimism over any one company's ability to completely lock up the market forever and ever, amen. To be honest I don't expect one masterstroke that comes in and just destroys Dropbox in three days, but valuating them as if it's just an assured thing that they're going to completely own the home backup market over the next ten years is absurdly optimistic. It's one possible outcome, but not anywhere near the most likely. Valuating Facebook as if it's going to own social networking forever and ever is absurd; look at the very rapid inroads G+ is making, my point being that even if G+ crashes and burns it has clearly demonstrated that it has a chance, and that means other competition has a chance, too. Valuating X as if it's going to own the market is stupid, and a lot of the valuations seem to be based on that; not a reasonable, rational assessment of the possibility that they may own the market or at least do well, but valuations based on the solid, near-100% of that outcome. Seems unwise to me.

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

#64
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?

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