11 ms·

Dropbox raises about $250 million at $10 billion valuation

• seeingfurther 13y ago
  No paywall link: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=site:wsj.com%20Dropbox%20Raises%20About%20$250%20Million%20at%20$10%20Billion%20Valuation https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&q=site:wsj...
• tzury 13y ago
  Cached version (no paywall) http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579327001976757542 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online....
• dchuk 13y ago
  When did WSJ start using that paywall?
  • tzury 13y ago
    Get the cached version at http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579327001976757542 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online....
  • batoure 13y ago
    They actually were one of the first newspapers to implement a paywall in 1997. But in recent years they allow a certain number of referring urls to break through it so that they can generate traffic from major aggregators. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paywall
  • dybskiy 13y ago
    If you google the article title and go from there you can bypass the paywall for now.
• joelrunyon 13y ago
  Anyone got a link to a non-paywalled version? Also - I love dropbox as much as anyone, but do they have the numbers to justify a 10B valuation?
  • keeptrying 13y ago
    Go through google and you can read it. Google for "dropbox valuation"
  • TheMakeA 13y ago
    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579327001976757542 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:online.... p.s: I thought this behavior was against Google's ToS...
    • dictum 13y ago
      I don't even know what Google's terms of service are anymore: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7030768
    • patio11 13y ago
      It is not only not against ToS, it is behavior which is specifically recommended by Google. The term of art is "first click free." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/74536?hl=en First click free is a multilayered Faustian bargain with the traditional print media. It preserves Google's ability to give their users what they want, which is searches which show high-quality, free information, like NYT or WSJ articles. It allows the NYT/WSJ/etc to remain on the only Internet which matters, which is the Internet you find at google.com. Also, the not-so-subtle threat is that if you fail to implement first-click-free, perhaps because you believe your information is worth paying for, then Google will send navigational searches for your articles to scraper sites.
  • paulfurtado 13y ago
    Google the exact article title and follow the link from Google to WSJ. For whatever reason, it seems like they don't paywall traffic from Google searches.
• codegeek 13y ago
  I did a google search with the link to access non-paywalled https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303465004579327001976757542 https://www.google.com/#q=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews... Click on the search result and it is non-paywalled
  • Aaronn 13y ago
    Still paywalled for me
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• AVTizzle 13y ago
  Dropbox Inc. has closed on about $250 million in a funding round that values the online-storage provider at close to $10 billion, according to two people familiar with the deal. A BlackRock Inc. BLK -0.33% investment fund is leading the deal, which also includes previous backers, said one of these people, who declined to provide more detail. Dropbox wasn't immediately available to comment. At $10 billion, Dropbox is one of the most highly valued companies backed by venture capitalists. The company's valuation has more than doubled since late 2011, when investors valued the San Francisco-based company at $4 billion. The company also got a higher price than expected when it approached investors as recently as November. Dropbox raised $250 million in its 2011 financing from Goldman Sachs and venture-capital firms including Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures and Accel Partners. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Dropbox had expected sales of more than $200 million in 2013. The company made $116 million in sales in 2012, according to people familiar with the company's financials, more than doubling its $46 million in revenue in 2011. The year before, it nearly quadrupled sales from $12 million. --David Benoit contributed to this article.
  • jgalt212 13y ago
    50X sales. That makes HP's purchase of Autonomy look cheap.
    • jzwinck 13y ago
      Maybe not the best comparison, since HP later accused Autonomy of accounting fraud related to that acquisition.
  • mlyang 13y ago
    Dropbox really needs to accelerate its enterprise sales to justify this valuation long term. Given the tight integration that Box has with so many enterprise software solutions and Box's focus on enterprise, it'll be interesting to see how these two firms fair against each other on the public markets eventually (inevitable at this point given their valuations). Maybe just being a household name will do it for Dropbox even if Box can close more/better enterprise deals.
• ccbrandenburg 13y ago
  Could someone please explain why they would raise another round at this stage? Investors are assuming an IPO and want to get in before that I guess.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• mattmaroon 13y ago
  Congrats Drew and Arash!
• dchuk 13y ago
  Since they're hosted on AWS, their bandwidth and storage costs have to be monstrous per month. Anyone have a rough estimate of how much they're paying currently and how much they could possibly stand to save by using this investment money to possibly build their own data center/acquire one?
  • hbags 13y ago
    "The company uses more than uses more than 10,000 physical servers to manage user content, along with Amazon Web Services." source: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/10/23/how-dropbox-stores-stuff-for-200-million-users/ http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/10/23/how-d... I was trying to find a comment on HN where one of the dropbox employees references their datacenter, but my hnsearch-fu wasn't up to par.
    • dchuk 13y ago
      Per the linked article: "User metadata is stored in the company’s data centers, while the actual files reside on Amazon’s S3 storage service." So I'm assuming they have determined that S3 is cheaper than their own metal for actual file storage?
      • byoung2 13y ago
        So I'm assuming they have determined that S3 is cheaper than their own metal for actual file storage? With S3, they don't have to physically own enough hard drives to support every user maxing out their allotment. If I started DropBox tomorrow, and a million people signed up for free accounts with 2GB, S3 would cost me $0 at first. As more and more users start to fill up their accounts, it will make more economic sense to migrate in-house (a la Backblaze storage pods).
        • jzwinck 13y ago
          Surely it's the same with bare metal. Companies who store client data do what is called capacity planning, where they estimate how much space (or compute power, or whatever) they will need for the next N months, and buy it on a rolling basis. Nobody would actually purchase 2 GB of physical disks every time a 2 GB capacity signup occurs. Whether it makes more sense to bring it in-house depends on some other factors, such as whether Dropbox is willing to cut some corners relative to what S3 provides (i.e. maybe there are S3 features they don't need), and how dedicated to budget trimming their employees really are (some people just don't have the stomach for cutting costs way down, e.g. if they see it as compromising in some way).
• highCs 13y ago
  I'm not able to read this without signing up. I suggest a [restricted access] in the title of such articles like [video].
  • dctoedt 13y ago
    Poster here -- good suggestion; I just added "($)" to the title. EDIT: Looks like it got deleted.
    • nwh 13y ago
      I don't know why posters can even change the title if we aren't allowed to.
      • tptacek 13y ago
        It's helpful for fixing typos. Think of it as a tool that the site provides to help you make sure the "correct" titles are on news stories, and not as a feature the site provides to allow you to better express your opinions.
  • dangoldin 13y ago
    A way to bypass is to search Google for that title and click on the WSJ link from the results. It seems the WSJ looks at the referrer and allows search engine sources.
    • AhtiK 13y ago
      Or go to http://www.google.com http://www.google.com and type into address bar: javascript:window.location="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303465004579327001976757542" http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230346500... :-) One step further is to define a new keyword search type in your browser to perform this redirect for any provided url in the future.
      • stuartd 13y ago
• paracyst 13y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  • riffraff 13y ago
    so could microsoft and google, but neither SkyDrive not Google Drive have made dropbox suffer much yet.
  • venomsnake 13y ago
    Exchanging and syncing files is very tricky service to get right. Because no one has managed to do it painlessly so far. It is much more than just users and hardware. While dropbox are of the better services out there it is still open for innovation - there are still pain points to be eliminated. So squashing them may require another startup and not big behemoth. As with the case of Origin and Windows 8 learned recently - creating something people like is just hard.
• sjg007 13y ago
  Clearly, MSFT, Apple, or Google could buy them.
  • spiderPig 13y ago
    Why? They all have equivalent products that have pretty much all the features. They should probably buy them for the talent and user base though.
    • pessimizer 13y ago
      At this point I don't think that the product is as important as the branding and the userbase.
      • batoure 13y ago
        Their patent portfolio might be of high value if they have patented certain processes for file synching.
    • gregpilling 13y ago
      They could also buy them to reduce the competition and acquire customers for cloud storage services.
  • aquadrop 13y ago
    For $10 billion? And they would have to kill their own cloud storage solution. Plus, Google and MS compete with AWS which hosts all data for Dropbox. And I don't think they are so valuable, MS bought Skype for $8.5 billion and Skype had several times more revenue. Dropbox, probably, is heading to the IPO.
  • cjensen 13y ago
    Apple tried under Jobs but allegedly Dropbox said there was no price they would say yes to.
• namenotrequired 13y ago
  Link without paywall: https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCoQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Fnews%2Farticles%2FSB10001424052702303465004579327001976757542&ei=fK7ZUoCbOOWd0QXS8oCgAw&usg=AFQjCNH5aRtNl2COWiZBUb33PGEcXg0fUA https://www.google.nl/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
  • pattisapu 13y ago
    Am I doing something wrong? When I click this link I still get paywalled. :(
    • changdizzle 13y ago
      If you manually google the title and then click through you should be able to bypass the paywall.
      • pattisapu 13y ago
        thanks!
• mmaunder 13y ago
  The closest comparable I can think of is Salesforce which has a $34B valuation right now as a public company. Totally different sector, but a software company that focuses on doing one thing really well and generates over $3Bn yearly revenue. https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:CRM&sa=X&ei=Gq_ZUvPkF5PRkQfX84GoAw&sqi=2&ved=0CCsQ2AEwAA https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:CRM&sa=X&ei=Gq_ZUvPkF5...
  • rgbrenner 13y ago
    Salesforce ... a software company that focuses on doing one thing really well One thing? They own Heroku, Desk.com, Work.com, and several other companies.
    • monkeyspaw 13y ago
      And their focus over the next few years is to be the cloud computing company for businesses. Had a salesforce VP tell me recently that SF wants to dominate non-CRM software (e.g., electronic medical records in the cloud) while Oracle and SAP are still working on figuring out this whole "cloud" thing. Large businesses are still just entering the cloud with a lot of their software. Salesforce is the company they think of when thinking cloud. There's a lot of power in that.
• glasz 13y ago
  this is going to be funny some day. when the bubble bursts.
  • dclara 13y ago
    Can't agree with you more. Not only for the reason of jealous. Let's do a no-brain estimate. Dropbox has: 1. A novel idea - $1M 2. A neat implementation - $10M 3. A reasonable size of user base (including one-time sign-in users and abandoned users) - $100M 4. Any state-of-the-art technology backed up? No 5. Any innovation which changes the whole industry or UX? No 6. Any system level software design? No Where does the rest of the value come from? If this kind of system is worth $10B, then how much is AWS worth? Box is aiming enterprise market which makes more sense, because if they can handle fine-grained user security, that will be a lot different. Basically, corporations need a SkyDrive + SharePoint (hosted in cloud service) if they don't want to host data in-house. Are there anything like this existing today? If Dropbox is worth $10B today, what is that going be worthwhile? We want to encourage new applications to make users life easier, but to a limited extent. We should encourage more productive inventions instead of being too much bragging on a piece of small app with some new functionality like this. - Eggs should not be washed.
    • glasz 13y ago
      this is not limited to dropbox. and most of the "value" is pure speculation. We should encourage more productive inventions instead of being too much bragging on a piece of small app with some new functionality like this. bragging is ok. little steps are ok. just be realistic.
• jwwest 13y ago
  Could someone explain what the point of Dropbox as a company is now? They literally own their space, everyone loves them, and I'm sure they're making money hand-over-fist. However, they raised another round? Why?
  • jmathai 13y ago
    Dropbox definitely doesn't own the enterprise space. I imagine that's where they see the growth opportunity. In the enterprise they've got different hurdles and competition.
  • ithinkso 13y ago
    I'm of course not even close to be familiar with business and investments but what I think is going on here is that you can't rely on 'cash cow' forever.
  • rhizome 13y ago
    If publicity equaled making money hand over fist, Ron Burgundy 2 would be the top grossing movie right now.
  • nlh 13y ago
    Just as a quick point of reference, they don't actually own the space. I do love them - I think they are an awesome company and expect they'll do well, but I just switched my entire company from Dropbox to Box. In short, Dropbox falls very short when it comes to "enterprisey" stuff like fine-grained permissions, etc. They certainly _could_ own the space, but at the moment Box has a vastly superior enterprise offering.
    • derengel 13y ago
      Do they have something similar to dropbox packrat?
  • mmahemoff 13y ago
    Two things. 1. Enterprise, as someone else mentioned. It's still mostly considered a consumer brand, especially as they've focused on features like photo syncing with mobile phone partnerships. They're an ideal fit for enterprises though and still have huge opportunities. 2. An app platform or what I call "Bring Your Own Data" (not unlike App.net and to some extent Evernote). This is a rising paradigm where users own their data and 3rd-party apps hook into it. Instead of the prevailing cloud model where apps and data are silo'd. An early example is Tunebox, which plays and manipulates MP3s within your own Dropbox instead of hosting them on your behalf. Another example is the way 1Password uses Dropbox to sync data instead of doing its own hosting and syncing. The app platform is really big as developers don't have to think about syncing. Traditionally data sync has been one of the main benefits of the web. But Dropbox API means developers can write rich, native, apps on any platform and assume the syncing "just works". This is a bit like the other fork in the road that Twitter walked away from, ie to be the underlying cloud infrastructure for apps. (I wouldn't be at all surprised if Dropbox acquired App.Net or similar to provide a powerful pubsub layer too.) Developers focus on making awesome user-interfaces and delegate all the network infrastructure to Dropbox. That's similar to the way developers can use tools like Firebase and Parse, with the key difference that data resides with the user.
• incision 13y ago
  My anecdotal sample size of one makes me wonder how Dropbox means to sustain itself. I'd been on a $20/month plan with Dropbox for a few years now. I recently cancelled down to the free tier because... * I didn't want to pay more to store/sync even more data. * All my apps that add great convenience by leveraging Dropbox for sync will work fine and consume just a fraction of the free tier space. This is actually the "killer" feature right now. If I had to pay to keep this functionality, I'd probably pony right up, but it would be tough to start demanding payment for that. * Dropbox is actually pretty slow. Sure, I'm just one person, but their percentage of paying customers has always been small. Just a few years ago, there weren't many if any viable alternatives - now there's a whole slew of them and Dropbox hasn't changed much if any in that span. Also, since it seems to come up so often. I've seen nothing in the way of moves by or significant interest in Dropbox in the enterprise. Meanwhile, Microsoft is pushing SkyDrive, Google has Drive and Box is stating that they're fully enterprise focused.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • swombat 13y ago
    Conversely my business of 10+ people uses Dropbox for its file sharing! costing us well over $1k a year. That's clearly the market they're making their butter from...
  • mbenjaminsmith 13y ago
    +1 I think I was on the $20/month plan. My overall impression of Dropbox was that it was always there when I didn't need it / never really there when I wanted it. 1. Most of the stuff I need to share with myself or others lives in Github. 2. When I want something to sync with my laptop (usually when I'm running out of the house) it's often behind of bunch of other files and means it will have to sync over a mobile connection if I'm going to get it. This usually means using a thumb drive rather than deal with syncing. 3. And this is entirely my fault: I had a handful of older projects in my Dropbox folder that weren't mirrored on Github or anywhere else. When it came time to actually dig one out it turned out that Dropbox had had some manner of sync issue and had renamed dozens of files in my .git folder. It was unusable. I dropped down to the free plan and uninstalled Dropbox from my laptop. Haven't missed it at all.
• akennberg 13y ago
  Does YC buy into later rounds of a company or just let the dilution happen?
  • pg 13y ago
    The latter.
• pekk 13y ago
  Remember that Dropbox has access to everything you store with them, and uses it
  • flyt 13y ago
    What do you mean "and uses it"?
    • cma 13y ago
      Isn't there a datamining and profiling clause?
• lubos 13y ago
  I've been using Dropbox for years and was using it for everything until last year. I didn't even bother installing it after getting new computer. The problem with Dropbox is that it's too general, too abstract. There are now specialized services that are made for hosting source code, hosting photos, hosting music, hosting scanned documents... and each service is doing it better in its niche than general-purpose tool like Dropbox. So who needs Dropbox on its own? I think Dropbox will need to re-invent itself and fast. One way would be to buy other startups that are targeting specific niches and would use Dropbox as persistent storage. This way Dropbox could be offering various apps for free and make money if users run out of their Dropbox space. Think about it, rather than paying monthly for source code hosting, photo hosting, document hosting, email hosting or whatever service separately as we do it now. All these services could be free as Dropbox apps and once you hit 2 GB limit, you pay for storage you consume as a single monthly fee. Is this what Dropbox has in mind? Are they raising capital to go on acquisition spree of struggling startups (think Everpix.com) that have great products but not enough traction? I would love to see that...
  • robszumski 13y ago
    Isn't this what their developer API platform is for? You store users data on dropbox, but create your own UX with your app. https://www.dropbox.com/developers https://www.dropbox.com/developers
    • lubos 13y ago
      Yeah but 3rd party apps will probably need to charge end-user for usage on top of what Dropbox is already charging for storage. If Dropbox would do these services themselves, they could make them free because they make money from storage. Not only that, Dropbox would effectively lock-in their users into Dropbox platform. Right now it is extremely easy to switch from Dropbox to competitor. Once you start depending on so-called Dropbox apps, you can't leave just as easily.
  • zzleeper 13y ago
    What do you use or would suggest for hosting photos, music and scanned documents?
• jcdietrich 13y ago
  I wonder how Dropbox and the NSA get along?
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• ereckers 13y ago
  It's funny to see everyone on here stating that they are leaving Dropbox as I'm just about to get on. I've been using Windows machines for years and finally bought a Mac. I need to start using my computers as simple terminals to some degree. The only thing I've been wondering is if running a few things at once is a bad idea; Google Drive, Box, Dropbox.
  • joshmlewis 13y ago
    1.) Is your switching to Mac the only reason for using Dropbox? 2.) Since Dropbox has it's own directory, I imagine the others are similar. It wouldn't really be feasible because the file wouldn't be the same file across all apps.
• sytelus 13y ago
  Wow... That's like 10 instagrams ;). But honestly, when Microsoft, Apple and Google have jumped in to this same space with pretty much same offering, does this makes sense to anyone? I thought they would be out of business because of this. At least 3 out of 5 big startup buyers aren't welcoming them. My only hunch is they have revenues now in $100M range and planning IPO in couple of years as exit.
  • adventured 13y ago
    Apple's product has no mass consumer appeal and will never be a threat to Dropbox. Their approach strictly limits their appeal to the Apple ecosystem. Microsoft doesn't know how to make a good product in this space. As history has shown, you can always beat Microsoft with a substantially better product (Intuit, Google, iPhone, iPad, Wikipedia, Apache, PS2, iPod, Linux etc). Google thinks the key is to force users into a bundled scenario. The flaw in their thinking is that most of the individual products in their portfolio are average at best, including their storage solution. There's no true lock-in. Which is why it hasn't killed Dropbox after years of competition (and why G+ has failed). The only threats to Dropbox are 1) they screw-up their own product; 2) there's a titanic shift in the market itself, enabling a new wave of companies and technologies to dominate 3) a new company creates a better mousetrap, as that's not coming from Google / Microsoft / Apple. Revenue is closer to $250m for 2013. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/11/19/dropbox-makes-hundreds-of-millions-so-why-is-it-only-asking-for-an-8b-price/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/markrogowsky/2013/11/19/dropbox-...
• caruber 13y ago
  Looks like Dropbox is going to go for a shopping spree. 250M is a lot of dough :)
• marcamillion 13y ago
  I can't wait for them to go public and we can take a look at their financials properly. I suspect they will surprise many people - as I had predicted back in 2011 - http://marcgayle.com/2011/01/24/how-dropbox-is-printing-money/ http://marcgayle.com/2011/01/24/how-dropbox-is-printing-mone... Much hasn't changed....I don't think.
  • lowglow 13y ago
    Hey, you might want to check your site for bugs. You have an unresolved merge conflict pushed to production. You wouldn't want your potential clients seeing this: http://i.imgur.com/0oGV3ao.png http://i.imgur.com/0oGV3ao.png
    • marcamillion 13y ago
      Thanks for the tip. I am using Github to host my site, and it turns out that hosting both a static site and a dynamic blog on the same domain is not as simple as it seems. Been going back and forth with Github support on this issue and keep getting different responses from different people - most of which don't help me fix the issue properly. Alas...it's a work in progress and I wish I could just do a git push to resolve that issue, but that's not to be. Thanks though.
• lancewiggs 13y ago
  I might be missing a trick, but if I were Box or Dropbox I'd be reaching out for merger discussions with the other. A combined entity would dominate corporate and retail markets.
• kriro 13y ago
  In light of the NSA scandal I have switched from Dropbox to a self hosted ownCloud. Pretty happy with it :)
• veritas213 13y ago
  thats a ridiculous valuation. What their EBITDA? Oh yeah..
• thomseddon 13y ago
  When I was in the process of creating a similar service specially for students I did a lot of research into their freemium model....The findings were pretty clear: the most reliable source puts their conversion at around 4% and and with approximations on growth and a heavily reduced s3 cost there is a point where it stops working - they need to boost their revenue sources. I have all the projections on my pc, feel free to contact me if you would like to see them.
• Touche 13y ago
  I realize these are companies and they have to compete with proprietary features, but it really bothers me that Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. are all using their own proprietary technology for the basic sync. It really does bother me that a company that was born on Hacker News has yet to open source its sync tech.
• cordie 13y ago
  I wonder how much they value the "Dropbox" brand name at. If you think sharing a file online you're probably thinking Dropbox.
• hgfischer 13y ago
  I'm more and more starting to believe that some SV companies are only laundering money.