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Fidelity marks down stake in pre-IPO startups Cloudera, Dropbox

61 points by dan_ahmadi 11y ago

smaili 11y ago
marked down its stake in big data software company Cloudera by nearly 37 percent also slashed the estimated worth of cloud-storage company Dropbox by almost 20 percent. Ouch
- kh812000 11y ago
  At Strata+Hadoop last week Cloudera said they are continuing to sign up 100% y/y customers and growth remains steady. Surprising that their valuation got cut so much...
tristanj 11y ago
About that Dropbox markdown, I'm not sure if that's news, GSV capital has been marking down their dropbox position for months now. According to their SEC filings (ticker GSVC), these are the estimated share prices for Dropbox common stock over the past year. June 30, 2015 - $22.88 per common share September 30, 2015 - $19.06 per common share December 31, 2015 - $16.94 per common share Q1 2016 data not released yet That's a 25% markdown over the last six months of 2015. Seeing how many other tech stocks have fallen a lot lately (LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, GoPro), another Dropbox markdown isn't that surprising.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- scurvy 11y ago
  I think you meant to type "money losing tech stocks" instead to find just "tech stocks." Profitable tech stocks are doing quite well. The ones you mentioned largely lose money or have drastically cut forecasts.
entee 11y ago
Winter has come. It's sad to see companies that are providing real, important products getting hammered for not meeting potentially impossible expectations. People have been talking about Dropbox struggling to meet its valuation for a while now. I'm a little more surprised at the Cloudera markdown, they seem to be a pretty important company in a sector that only keeps growing. Any insights as to why Cloudera was marked down?
- jcdavis 11y ago
  > It's sad to see companies that are providing real, important products getting hammered for not meeting potentially impossible expectations They signed on to those expectations when they took those sky high valuation investments. Thats not going to make the employees feel all that much better, of course
- IndianAstronaut 11y ago
  The cloudera devaluation is quite concerning. They seem to hire high quality candidates and have a growing customer base.
- p4wnc6 11y ago
  I see the markdown more as a reflection that customers, at large, actually aren't getting value from these companies, or at least less value than previously assumed. I know it's only anecdotal, but with e.g. Dropbox, I don't know a single person who pays for Dropbox, and every Dropbox user I know claims they would be content to migrate to some other free service or just buy external hard drives and deal with lesser accessibility before they would pay on a subscription basis for arbitrary cloud storage. So then the question is about enterprise clients, and it seems the value proposition for enterprise cloud data management is just good enough. Many other enterprise cloud services provide the same thing as merely a tiny add on to a whole suite of other cloud tools and services. I even remember in a past job once I asked if my team could have a tiny budget (on the order of like $100/yr for our team size) to have a private work-related Dropbox set up. Various managers got involved and shut it down right away, claiming that the $100/yr was just not something they could approve, even though we probably paid at least 5x to 10x that per person for various other cloud services. They basically said, make due with this other legacy enterprise thing that has some crappy Dropbox clone buried somewhere inside it. More surprising than Dropbox being marked down is that it was ever valued at those levels in the first place, IMO.
xfour 11y ago
I'm enjoying fidelity's releases as a public company they have to release financial information. Gives as close a proxy as one can get to the health of these "Unicorns" remember that term? I wish fidelity or some other financial company would've taken a stake in the front runners of this cycle, Airbnb and Uber. On that note does Google Ventures doesn't have to give updates on how their investments are doing as alphabet or is that just lost in the noise.
- entee 11y ago
  I think it has more to do with mutual fund regulations than public company regulations. I'm not sure how much Google has to disclose about its internals but I think it has a lot of discretion.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    Correct. Fidelity is NOT a public company.
- mrgordon 11y ago
  They did take a stake in Airbnb and Uber. They just marked Airbnb up 14%

61 points by dan_ahmadi 11y ago

marked down its stake in big data software company Cloudera by nearly 37 percent also slashed the estimated worth of cloud-storage company Dropbox by almost 20 percent. Ouch

kh812000 11y ago
At Strata+Hadoop last week Cloudera said they are continuing to sign up 100% y/y customers and growth remains steady. Surprising that their valuation got cut so much...

tristanj 11y ago

About that Dropbox markdown, I'm not sure if that's news, GSV capital has been marking down their dropbox position for months now. According to their SEC filings (ticker GSVC), these are the estimated share prices for Dropbox common stock over the past year. June 30, 2015 - $22.88 per common share September 30, 2015 - $19.06 per common share December 31, 2015 - $16.94 per common share Q1 2016 data not released yet That's a 25% markdown over the last six months of 2015. Seeing how many other tech stocks have fallen a lot lately (LinkedIn, Yelp, Twitter, GoPro), another Dropbox markdown isn't that surprising.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
scurvy 11y ago
I think you meant to type "money losing tech stocks" instead to find just "tech stocks." Profitable tech stocks are doing quite well. The ones you mentioned largely lose money or have drastically cut forecasts.

entee 11y ago

Winter has come. It's sad to see companies that are providing real, important products getting hammered for not meeting potentially impossible expectations. People have been talking about Dropbox struggling to meet its valuation for a while now. I'm a little more surprised at the Cloudera markdown, they seem to be a pretty important company in a sector that only keeps growing. Any insights as to why Cloudera was marked down?

jcdavis 11y ago
> It's sad to see companies that are providing real, important products getting hammered for not meeting potentially impossible expectations They signed on to those expectations when they took those sky high valuation investments. Thats not going to make the employees feel all that much better, of course
IndianAstronaut 11y ago
The cloudera devaluation is quite concerning. They seem to hire high quality candidates and have a growing customer base.
p4wnc6 11y ago
I see the markdown more as a reflection that customers, at large, actually aren't getting value from these companies, or at least less value than previously assumed. I know it's only anecdotal, but with e.g. Dropbox, I don't know a single person who pays for Dropbox, and every Dropbox user I know claims they would be content to migrate to some other free service or just buy external hard drives and deal with lesser accessibility before they would pay on a subscription basis for arbitrary cloud storage. So then the question is about enterprise clients, and it seems the value proposition for enterprise cloud data management is just good enough. Many other enterprise cloud services provide the same thing as merely a tiny add on to a whole suite of other cloud tools and services. I even remember in a past job once I asked if my team could have a tiny budget (on the order of like $100/yr for our team size) to have a private work-related Dropbox set up. Various managers got involved and shut it down right away, claiming that the $100/yr was just not something they could approve, even though we probably paid at least 5x to 10x that per person for various other cloud services. They basically said, make due with this other legacy enterprise thing that has some crappy Dropbox clone buried somewhere inside it. More surprising than Dropbox being marked down is that it was ever valued at those levels in the first place, IMO.

xfour 11y ago

I'm enjoying fidelity's releases as a public company they have to release financial information. Gives as close a proxy as one can get to the health of these "Unicorns" remember that term? I wish fidelity or some other financial company would've taken a stake in the front runners of this cycle, Airbnb and Uber. On that note does Google Ventures doesn't have to give updates on how their investments are doing as alphabet or is that just lost in the noise.

entee 11y ago
I think it has more to do with mutual fund regulations than public company regulations. I'm not sure how much Google has to disclose about its internals but I think it has a lot of discretion.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  Correct. Fidelity is NOT a public company.
mrgordon 11y ago
They did take a stake in Airbnb and Uber. They just marked Airbnb up 14%