I have a hard time understanding why Dropbox would pay $100M. Compared to the Instagram acquisition, this seems like a blunder. The talent - Maybe worth $10M a

I have a hard time understanding why Dropbox would pay $100M. Compared to the Instagram acquisition, this seems like a blunder. The talent - Maybe worth $10M at the high end, probably same for Instagram Future profit - Difficult to see how this app would be profitable, but maybe it could make a few million a year if it swept the app store. Instagram had similar long term monetization potential to facebook. Technology - Indexing gmail and keeping metadata on each message. A difficult task to scale, but not $10M difficult. Instagram was handling significantly more data, but Facebook certainly didn't need the technology. Users and momentum - Don't see much value for Dropbox here with 700K users. Instagram was growing rapidly and had 20M+ users. Time - Dropbox wants to be in the email and communications space... seems like the could have developed something in 6 months for a few million. Instagram would have been difficult for Facebook to catch up with, since head starts matter in social. Email apps don't have the network lock-in, so there is much less reason to worry about time. Competition - There was no threat to dropbox. Instagram appeared to be dominating a demographic and use case for social, and could easily be seen as a threat to Facebook. However, Dropbox did pay that much. We have to assume there was a reason other than a Techcrunch article.