Dropbox IPOs. Its Founders Are Now Billionaires (cnbc.com) 69
Yesterday Dropbox finally launched its stock on NASDAQ. Reuters reports:
Dropbox Inc's shares closed at $28.42, up more than 35 percent in their first day of trading on Friday, as investors rushed to buy into the biggest technology initial public offering in more than a year even as the wider sector languished... At the stock's opening price, Dropbox had a market valuation of $12.67 billion, well above the $10 billion valuation it had in its last private funding round... It has yet to turn a profit, which is common for startups that invest heavily in growth. As a public company Dropbox will be under pressure to quickly trim its losses. The 11-year old company reported revenue of $1.11 billion in 2017, up from $844.8 million a year earlier. Its net loss nearly halved from $210.2 million in 2016.
CNBC reports that Y Combinator almost passed on a chance to invest in Dropbox -- which became its first IPO ever -- "because it had misgivings about bringing on a solo entrepreneur." After Drew Houston, the creator of Dropbox, scrambled to find a co-founder in time for his in-person interview, the company was admitted into YC in 2007. Four years later, venture capitalists poured money into Dropbox at a $4 billion valuation. YC has since become a power player in Silicon Valley, helping spawn numerous companies valued at over $1 billion today including Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart and Coinbase. It also backed Twitch, which Amazon acquired in 2014 for about $970 million, and the self-driving tech start-up Cruise, which GM bought in 2016 for over $1 billion. But in its 13-year history, YC had yet to see any of its companies go public until Dropbox's stock market debut on Friday...
Houston is now worth over $3 billion and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi owns shares valued at more than $1 billion.
Dropbox's Twitter feed posted a video from their NASDAQ debut, adding "We're so thankful for the 500 million registered users who helped us get here."
CNBC reports that Y Combinator almost passed on a chance to invest in Dropbox -- which became its first IPO ever -- "because it had misgivings about bringing on a solo entrepreneur." After Drew Houston, the creator of Dropbox, scrambled to find a co-founder in time for his in-person interview, the company was admitted into YC in 2007. Four years later, venture capitalists poured money into Dropbox at a $4 billion valuation. YC has since become a power player in Silicon Valley, helping spawn numerous companies valued at over $1 billion today including Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart and Coinbase. It also backed Twitch, which Amazon acquired in 2014 for about $970 million, and the self-driving tech start-up Cruise, which GM bought in 2016 for over $1 billion. But in its 13-year history, YC had yet to see any of its companies go public until Dropbox's stock market debut on Friday...
Houston is now worth over $3 billion and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi owns shares valued at more than $1 billion.
Dropbox's Twitter feed posted a video from their NASDAQ debut, adding "We're so thankful for the 500 million registered users who helped us get here."
As long as it (Score:2)
stays free, I'll keep my family videos and recopies on it.
If (when) they become greedy and charge me, I'll just move someplace else.
I don'f totally hate dropbox, at least I can use it on all my platforms. Their linux support was good at first, now it kinda sucks.
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Charging for a service is your definition of "greedy"?
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nope, dropbox was a cool idea. I hosted my apps there till they allowed direct linking. Nowdays I use gdrive, icloud and onedrive too. I'm not mad at dude, I used his bandwidth when it was premium. Now he cashes out, good for him.
Billions for a file server (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, you should worry! (Score:2)
Stop storing your files on someone else's servers!
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You put a backup HDD at a realtive's house. Or a safety deposit box, or Iron Mountain..
( would probably go with a NAS setup with a secure connection from my home and appropriate incrementals/snapshots of things I couldn't just download or rip again..
Dropbox is where I share stuff, and I really DGAF about security.
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A backup is a copy that won't likely go away for the same reason the original won't. There are no backup systems that are totally reliable and will function in a major thermonuclear war or after a really large asteroid strike. Dropbox gives me geographical redundancy, if nothing else.
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I use Dropbox and, to some extent, iCloud. Anything important gets encrypted locally. Yeah, its a bit of a PITA on an iPhone but I'm rarely, if ever, looking at my tax returns on a cell phone.
For smaller files or discrete bits of information that I do want on my mobile devices I use 1Password.
If it's *really* sensitive, it stays on a thumb drive in my gun cabinet.
If it's *really, really* sensitive, I just forget it.
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Stop storing your files on someone else's servers!
Why? Those other people are far better at looking after your files than 99.9% of the population out there. In other news I also get my car serviced at a mechanic, pay for someone to wire my house, and keep my money in a bank.
Someone else's server is no different than any other specialist service I* pay for.
* Note I use Seafile on my own server with a decent 290/40 connection that I backup regularly and store offsite. This is also a solution that won't suite 99.999% of people (even more so than the 99.9% I p
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Depends. Putting sensitive information on someone else's servers is risky, but there is a lot of information that is NOT sensitive. I use dropbox extensively as a convenient way to access files from multiple locations and to share files. I only put files there that I woudln't mind becoming completely public. I'm really not worried if someone steals the slides for a talk I've already given in public, or gets my vacation photos.
My secret plans for world domination don't go on dropbox.
Why would anyone do this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why would anyone do this? (Score:4, Informative)
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>Having "investors" scrutinize everything I do would be the worst nightmare and the last option I'd ever consider if I started a company
People have a billion (or two) reasons to give up control.
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Because your company doesn't make a profit, and never will. Why not stick those assholes with that sinkhole?
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Then every single corporate decision has to go through them and they end up ruining your company like for example EA.
Sure that's one example, now with over 4000 publicly listed companies in the USA, care to name 3999 others? I'm sure we can play a game where we can name a privately own company that was driven into shit for every publicly owned one. Though we may be here for a while.
Just get a damn private or bank loan if you need funds.
I see you've never had to raise capital before.
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You seem to have missed the summary. "Its Founders Are Now Billionaires". This is why.
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the story of startups (Score:3, Interesting)
1. Fedgov prints a bunch of free money out of thin air, calling it "Quantitative Easing"
2. Fedgov gives that free money to their friends / "campaign contributors" in the big banks
2. The big banks bid up every asset they can find, but still have piles and piles of free money sitting around.
3. Big banks can't figure or anything else to do with all that free public money - so they start giving a bunch of it to the bankers' inbred, half-wit cousins who run VC firms in Palo Alto
4. The VCs discover they've been given more money than they can possibly waste on hookers & blow. So they hire a few of their butt-buddies from the Stanford dorms to found some "startups".
5. The butt-buddies look at what other loss-making companies are doing, then do the same thing only with an even stupider company name.
6. No business acumen, nor any actual talent, are required to get a leadership role at a startup. You just have to be from the "right schools". Consequently the startups have no business model and not much ability to execute. But hey - at least this time they didn't pay "outrageous" salaries to a bunch of filthy working class nerds!
6. The startups make a handsome loss, undercut and bankrupt a few legitimate businesses, and keep on getting bigger and bigger valuations each time they return to the VC teat to suck more free public money.
7. Somewhere way up the food chain, someone in DC or New Jack City gets a little nervous about propping up so many worthless loss-making "startup" companies.
8. The steady stream of free public money starts to dry up
9. The Crash!
10. Somewhere in Palo Alto, a Stanford boy can no longer afford his Personal Ass Sanitation Assistant, and is forced to resume wiping his own butt.
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It's more astonishing to think of what having a billion dollars as an individual means. Think about this. The median income for a person in the US is something like $50k (rounding to make math easy). A billion is one million thousand. So a billion dollars is twenty thousand years of median income. It's an absurd amount of money for an individual.
I'm generally not in the "limit people's wealth" camp, but it starts getting strange to think that it's reasonable for any individual to have wealth equivalent
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Yeah. It is absurd for most individuals to have that kind of decision-making power; that's why most individuals do not ever get anything near that amount. Some individuals, though, are worthy of it, and the whole point of the Free Market is to do things like find such people.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, oh you are so funny.
If you really think that the billionaires of the world have magically be selected by "the Free Market" as being "worthy" of this type of decision-making power, you are not really living in the same world as the rest of us.
Sure, I can believe that they might be, on average, a bit smarter or more competent than "the rest of us", but the biggest difference is one of good fortune. Being in the right place at the right time with the right skills could in theory
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Strange? Well, maybe -- unless you start thinking about the way people's desires change along with increased wealth.
Say you earn that median $50,000/yr. income, but you get a big raise to $100,000/yr. It seems like a BIG deal at first, but you can use up the entire difference just by moving into a new home. So say you find a new job and again double your income? Not only does your higher tax bracket take a bigger chunk out of your take-home pay than you used to give up, but you'll again, pretty easily use
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Legaized MegaUpload? (Score:1)
Legaized MegaUpload?
Revenues? (Score:2)
"The 11-year old company reported revenue of $1.11 billion ..."
They have revenues? How? Who pays them a billion a year?
startup? (Score:1)
dropbox is 11 years old, but is still called a startup?