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Yeh, but is Dropbox really worth $8 billion?? It's a web-site plus some hard drives!

benmccann 13y ago
Is McDonald's really worth $100 billion?? It's some guys making hamburgers! Valuation is based on a whole host of things including revenue, brand recognition, distribution, customer acquisition costs, customer retention rates, switching costs, growth, etc. You could start a Dropbox competitor and have none of those. The business matters far more in valuing the company than how hard it is to replicate the product. It's much easier to make a hamburger as well as McDonald's than it is to make a business as good as theirs.
- alextingle 13y ago
  McDonalds' revenue in 2012 was US $27 billion. Dropbox's was US $200 million. Certainly there's a lot of potential upside in Dropbox, but it's risky too - their business could easily be disrupted by unexpected developments. McDonald's is pretty much safe as houses. So yes, I think the question stands - is Dropbox really worth 10% of McDonalds?
coldtea 13y ago
You can have a web-site plus their hard hard drives for less than $1 million. Now, try also getting millions of users, tens (hundrends?) of thousands of paying customers, tons of possitive reviews from both major outlets and happy users, Jeff Bezos investing in your company (IIRC), hundends of third party apps offering integration with your service, etc... Oh, and the technology to do what you do, and do it AT SCALE. And also the history of having met and solved tons of technological (OS/use case/etc) obstacles in the process of building your app, now in it's Nth year. I mean, what are you on about? Just a website and some hard drives?
MortenK 13y ago
Dropbox is probably one of the more sustainable companies mentioned in the article, since they have a very large amount of actual paying users and revenue.
- antjanus 13y ago
  That and the fact that Pinterest is actually exploring how to gain revenue. They've used Skimlinks (http://skimlinks.com/ http://skimlinks.com/) before to affiliate the content posted on their site. Probably the best idea out there.

Is McDonald's really worth $100 billion?? It's some guys making hamburgers! Valuation is based on a whole host of things including revenue, brand recognition, distribution, customer acquisition costs, customer retention rates, switching costs, growth, etc. You could start a Dropbox competitor and have none of those. The business matters far more in valuing the company than how hard it is to replicate the product. It's much easier to make a hamburger as well as McDonald's than it is to make a business as good as theirs.

alextingle 13y ago
McDonalds' revenue in 2012 was US $27 billion. Dropbox's was US $200 million. Certainly there's a lot of potential upside in Dropbox, but it's risky too - their business could easily be disrupted by unexpected developments. McDonald's is pretty much safe as houses. So yes, I think the question stands - is Dropbox really worth 10% of McDonalds?

coldtea 13y ago

You can have a web-site plus their hard hard drives for less than $1 million. Now, try also getting millions of users, tens (hundrends?) of thousands of paying customers, tons of possitive reviews from both major outlets and happy users, Jeff Bezos investing in your company (IIRC), hundends of third party apps offering integration with your service, etc... Oh, and the technology to do what you do, and do it AT SCALE. And also the history of having met and solved tons of technological (OS/use case/etc) obstacles in the process of building your app, now in it's Nth year. I mean, what are you on about? Just a website and some hard drives?

MortenK 13y ago

Dropbox is probably one of the more sustainable companies mentioned in the article, since they have a very large amount of actual paying users and revenue.

antjanus 13y ago
That and the fact that Pinterest is actually exploring how to gain revenue. They've used Skimlinks (http://skimlinks.com/ http://skimlinks.com/) before to affiliate the content posted on their site. Probably the best idea out there.