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What you said is correct now, but when Amazon was Dropbox's age, it was "merely" an online bookstore. Over time, it has transformed into the company it is today

What you said is correct now, but when Amazon was Dropbox's age, it was "merely" an online bookstore. Over time, it has transformed into the company it is today, which has a justifiable, in my view, market cap of 20X Dropbox's "valuation". But you didn't justify this number in terms of profitability, but rather by the value it adds to the economy. We don't know what Dropbox is going to be, yet, but it's already far more than a service that "stores files". It's the default way students and startups share files and work together. That's a pretty good market to build on. How much would a company be worth if it was the default way most people worked together? What chance does Dropbox have of being that company? Those are the factors that justify $8B.

toomuchtodo 13y ago
My argument is that there is no barrier to entry. Want to compete against Amazon? The amount of cash you would need is enormous. That's Google/Microsoft/Apple scale (and, of course, Amazon). Dropbox? Very little barrier to entry. Just like them, you could use S3.
- argumentum 13y ago
  It's not a good argument .. traditional barriers to entry are never as insurmountable as they may seem at first. I doubt Jeff Bezos was concerned with the "amount of cash" needed to compete with Border's or Barnes & Noble. The real barrier to entry is not competition from other companies, it is building a great product/service/company yourself. If it were so easy to "use S3" to start a Dropbox, why is there only one Dropbox? What's stopping anyone from "using EC2" to build another Facebook? How exactly do you explain how Google/Apple/MS/etc became Google/Apple/MS/etc?
  - toomuchtodo 13y ago
    > How exactly do you explain how Google/Apple/MS/etc became Google/Apple/MS/etc? The moat is much higher than it was 5-10 years ago. Do you have billions of dollars that you're sitting on that you could use to compete against Google/Apple/MS?
    - argumentum 13y ago
      I think you either meant the "moat" is a lot deeper .. ;) You'd be in an extreme (and incorrect) minority with that view anyway. Clearly it's much cheaper and easier to start on online bookstore today than 5-10 years ago.

toomuchtodo 13y ago

My argument is that there is no barrier to entry. Want to compete against Amazon? The amount of cash you would need is enormous. That's Google/Microsoft/Apple scale (and, of course, Amazon). Dropbox? Very little barrier to entry. Just like them, you could use S3.

argumentum 13y ago
It's not a good argument .. traditional barriers to entry are never as insurmountable as they may seem at first. I doubt Jeff Bezos was concerned with the "amount of cash" needed to compete with Border's or Barnes & Noble. The real barrier to entry is not competition from other companies, it is building a great product/service/company yourself. If it were so easy to "use S3" to start a Dropbox, why is there only one Dropbox? What's stopping anyone from "using EC2" to build another Facebook? How exactly do you explain how Google/Apple/MS/etc became Google/Apple/MS/etc?
- toomuchtodo 13y ago
  > How exactly do you explain how Google/Apple/MS/etc became Google/Apple/MS/etc? The moat is much higher than it was 5-10 years ago. Do you have billions of dollars that you're sitting on that you could use to compete against Google/Apple/MS?
  - argumentum 13y ago
    I think you either meant the "moat" is a lot deeper .. ;) You'd be in an extreme (and incorrect) minority with that view anyway. Clearly it's much cheaper and easier to start on online bookstore today than 5-10 years ago.