5 ms·
From TFA: Unlike money-losing Snap, Dropbox will come to the table with annualized sales of more than $1 billion, Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston said in
by cossatot 9y ago
From TFA:
Unlike money-losing Snap, Dropbox will come to the table with annualized sales of more than $1 billion, Chief Executive Officer Drew Houston said in an interview last year. It’s also been profitable, excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization. Those benchmarks are the product of more than two years of focusing the company, expanding its product suite for businesses and reining in expenses, Houston said at the time.
- maxxxxx 9y agoDoesn't "profitable, excluding interest, taxes .." mean not profitable?
- blibble 9y agothey wouldn't say it if they didn't have to
- kornish 9y agoEBIDTA certainly has merits and drawbacks – like any other metric – for measuring the health of a company. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebitda-margin.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/e/ebitda-margin.asp
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoEBITDA is a good un-levered metric because it approximates cash flow. For a ten-year old company going public, actual cash flow and net income are more important. If Dropbox are trying to price at a premium to Box and don't even have profits, they're going to look like Snap and Twitter more than anything respectable.
- philjr 9y agoKinda. It approximates cash flows for some types of companies. For others it doesn’t. Hard to generalize here. Ultimately the best measure of cashflow is cashflow. It’s a good normalized measure of a stable mature business, but it can overstate or understate the health of depending on the revenue and billings model. So, basically, YMMV
- redwood 9y agoBit of a trick: build your own cloud and turn opex into depreciation on capital investment = become "profitable"
- user5994461 9y agoAnd hide the $600M of debt you just took.
- jlittel 9y agoNot necessarily. Excluding interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) is a common financial metric. It can demonstrate a business model is working, before taking in to account capital structure or other semi-external factors.
- maxxxxx 9y agoThis is a ten year old billion dollar company. How can they not have figured out a viable business model?
- Roedou 9y agoAsk Twitter?
- goialoq 9y agoAmazon was a 20 year old company before it was reliably profitable by accounting metrics. Is their business model viable? That's how a growth company works.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> Amazon was a 20 year old company before it was reliably profitable Amazon’s decision was quite obviously a choice. Snap and Twitter are more natural comparisons for Dropbox if it’s still unprofitable.
- Brendinooo 9y agoI don't think that's true. Snap's and Twitter's consumer-facing product is free, while Dropbox charges for theirs. They played the long game here. I'm still not a paying customer after almost ten years (partially because I got a lot of free space via referrals and trying out their apps). But if I ever max it out and decide to start paying someone for space, it'll be them unless there's something out there that does what they do at a price that's low enough to make the effort to switch worthwhile. And, more notably, the freemium model means that they're able to invade the business world in the same way that the iPhone did with BYOD. And there's a lot more money there. I'd be stunned if Dropbox wasn't very successful already, and I'm happy that someone outside of the Big 5 is doing what Dropbox is doing. It's a fantastic and indispensable product for me.