6 ms·

Box has secretly filed for an IPO

106 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

staunch 13y ago
Wild prediction: Box goes public, Dropbox follows, Dropbox buys Box and kills it, Dropbox hires Sean Parker who tells them to "drop the 'Drop' - it's cleaner" and becomes Box: Microsoft 2.0
- untilHellbanned 13y ago
  I'm starting to think Box will win in the end. They've always been focused on the $$$. Maybe Dropbox is a more fun and friendly company, but investors don't give a sh about that. (note: i like both companies alot, but this is my gut feeling)
  - izolate 13y ago
    Shame, really. By concentrating on the enterprise market, Box may have sealed a brighter future for themselves than Dropbox has. That's sad because I'm pretty sure the team at Dropbox could run circles around the Box team. I mean, they have Python's creator working for them.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      And there's a lesson there for would-be entrepreneurs with a technical background - your technical abilities only play a small role in the success of your venture. The smart business move is to focus on generating revenue, like Box did.
  - nashequilibrium 13y ago
    You just need to look at the state of thing now and how everything has being going for the last year, clearly Dropbox has all the momentum and usability. How many conferences have you seen Box's ceo at, that guy is at every conference and Box is supposed to be a startup. Box was the first cloud service i used, then moved onto Dropbox because the usability was just amazing. I also think Dropbox may have better engineering talent because the syncing works so much better than ubuntu one,drive and box.
    - w1ntermute 13y ago
      Box has a completely different customer base than Dropbox, with completely different needs. Just look at their customers page: https://www.box.com/customers/ https://www.box.com/customers/ 97% of Fortune 500 companies are Box customers. "Usability" is not a primary concern when your customers are building services on top of your platform.
      - smarx 13y ago
        What a strange coincidence! 97% of the Fortune 500 also use Dropbox. :-) From https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info: "Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses with presence in 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies."
        eitally 13y ago
        It's so easy to manipulate those numbers. For example, in my 22,000 seat Google Apps domain, we have a 25 seat license for GQueues. .1% of my users use the product, yet GQueues could legitimately call us a customer. For a business productivity tool, that's ... stupid. However, about .1% of users also use engineering design tools from Cadence. Totally different situation there, given the use cases. One should always take these numbers with whole mines of salt.
        _delirium 13y ago
        I wonder who the 15 holdouts are in both cases.
        dagw 13y ago
        It's quite interesting to note that Box talks about "customer" while Dropbox talk about "presence". The really relevant number is how many of those Fortune 500 companies are fully paid up customers vs a just bunch of people using their free personal account to share files within a project on a ad-hoc basis.
        pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  - zamalek 13y ago
    Not sure. My sister recently had her wedding and obviously the issue of sharing photos comes up. Me: "Just put them in cloud storage." Her: "Oh you mean ##a## DropBox?" It has become a common noun instead of a proper noun - at least for the less savvy. That level of entrenchment was one of Facebook's historical defining moments. Edit: Grr, homegrown textile.
    - y4mi 13y ago
      The "DropBox" has been around longer than the service though... I heard it for the first time with KDX (Haxial) servers, where you had one designated folder into which you could upload files to the server (the others were read-only). But I'm certain that it was used for ftp servers/clients in the same way before
- magic5227 13y ago
  Another idea. Box goes public, DropBox goes public some months later. Both do well and grow large. Box wins business in the enterprise, DropBox wins in consumer. Everyone wins and are happy ever after. Until 7 years later when a startup kills both.
  - bane 13y ago
    Or Oracle buys them both, kills off DropBox and turns Box into a malware distribution channel.
  - glomph 13y ago
    I don't think either are going to last particularly long with both microsoft and google aggressively trying to take their business.
- joelrunyon 13y ago
  "Drop the drop" Love it.
  - minikomi 13y ago
    That would work as a fantastic campaign for box as well.
- af3 13y ago
  aerofs will beat everyone ;)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- noinput 13y ago
  This, was perfect.
darkmirage 13y ago
Aaron was smart to recognize that Dropbox had the first-mover brand recognition among consumers that is hard to overcome and therefore deliberately chose to focus on enterprise deals. This seems to be paying off for Box. For example, as a Stanford student, we all get 30 GB of free Box space associated with our .edu addresses. However, I wouldn't write off Dropbox. The flipside of this is that no one at Stanford actually use the Box space that the university has seen fit to pay for. Consumer mindshare is a powerful tool. Think of how a few years ago people were saying that the iPhone would never be allowed in the corporate world because it was not designed for the enterprise. When it comes to enterprise file-syncing, I see Box as a top-down approach and Dropbox as a bottom-up approach. Box has the lead now but it's a perilous one.
- argumentum 13y ago
  What makes you say Box has the lead?
- ghayes 13y ago
  As Box was around before Dropbox, how do you say that Dropbox had a "the first-mover brand recognition"? Do you mean that DropBox had a higher market share of consumers, and so, decided to push toward SMB and Enterprise? In that way, yes, it seems to have been a good strategy.
  - pmorici 13y ago
    I've known about Dropbox for years I just heard of Box in the past several months and when I went to look at the company history on Wikipedia I was very surprised to find Box had been around a lot longer. Not sure if my experience is common but It think that is what the OP is talking about in general.
    - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      Same for me in the UK; but corp seems to be where the money is made so no great surprise.
- 13y ago
joelrunyon 13y ago
Well if nothing else, this reminded me to reset my box password so I could login and see what's actually in it. I currently have 25GB and am using 100MB or so :)
untilHellbanned 13y ago
does a secret IPO start public trading at same time as normal IPO?
- adventured 13y ago
  Assuming this is a serious question: yes. The secret aspect only applies to the process leading up to the IPO.
- tomfakes 13y ago
  It's probably better to call this a 'Beta IPO' filing. This is a fairly new system that allows companies to work out bugs in their filings before they open it to public viewing. Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    "Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!" But it could have been intended to be.
zinssmeister 13y ago
"..its valuation was $10 billion." -.-
gcb0 13y ago
I used to have high hopes for Box. While everyone else was mining you data and trying to lock you in with shelfware editors for .docx, .pdf, etc, they were focusing on encryption, api and no-BS clients. but of course it was all a matter of time. now their apps have less synchronization features than the competition and more bloat thanks to editors for all the formats you will never use a sync app to edit in the first place. Their android app almost went on the right direction though...
kartikkumar 13y ago
Got a relative working at Box who's been there for a while. Husband is doing his best to launch a startup and he's made some big strides forward in the last year. Think they'll be very happy with a big payday. I have Dropbox seamlessly integrated in a number of my devices, but I don't pay anything. I think Box has the advantage of having built a foundation on the basis of customers that expect to pay. Will be interesting to see if Dropbox can transition to capturing more paying customers.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  The thing that's always got me with Dropbox is the relatively steep price cliff. I pay nothing for 16GB of Dropbox because of referrals and other gimmicks. If I want to add space, it's $100-120. If I want my wife or kids to benefit from the space I don't need, I need to buy a very expensive business plan. Give me a $50 annual option that's useful, and I'll be a paying customer!
tuke 13y ago
Box was the first of these cloud drive providers to offer to sign a HIPAA BAA. For partners who did that and integrated through the API, they now have lock-in. On that basis alone, I think Box is here for the long haul. Meanwhile, while Google will now sign a HIPAA BAA, you have to give up parts of Google Apps once you go that route.

106 points by coloneltcb 13y ago

Wild prediction: Box goes public, Dropbox follows, Dropbox buys Box and kills it, Dropbox hires Sean Parker who tells them to "drop the 'Drop' - it's cleaner" and becomes Box: Microsoft 2.0

untilHellbanned 13y ago
I'm starting to think Box will win in the end. They've always been focused on the $$$. Maybe Dropbox is a more fun and friendly company, but investors don't give a sh about that. (note: i like both companies alot, but this is my gut feeling)
- izolate 13y ago
  Shame, really. By concentrating on the enterprise market, Box may have sealed a brighter future for themselves than Dropbox has. That's sad because I'm pretty sure the team at Dropbox could run circles around the Box team. I mean, they have Python's creator working for them.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    And there's a lesson there for would-be entrepreneurs with a technical background - your technical abilities only play a small role in the success of your venture. The smart business move is to focus on generating revenue, like Box did.
- nashequilibrium 13y ago
  You just need to look at the state of thing now and how everything has being going for the last year, clearly Dropbox has all the momentum and usability. How many conferences have you seen Box's ceo at, that guy is at every conference and Box is supposed to be a startup. Box was the first cloud service i used, then moved onto Dropbox because the usability was just amazing. I also think Dropbox may have better engineering talent because the syncing works so much better than ubuntu one,drive and box.
  - w1ntermute 13y ago
    Box has a completely different customer base than Dropbox, with completely different needs. Just look at their customers page: https://www.box.com/customers/ https://www.box.com/customers/ 97% of Fortune 500 companies are Box customers. "Usability" is not a primary concern when your customers are building services on top of your platform.
    - smarx 13y ago
      What a strange coincidence! 97% of the Fortune 500 also use Dropbox. :-) From https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info: "Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses with presence in 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies."
      - eitally 13y ago
        It's so easy to manipulate those numbers. For example, in my 22,000 seat Google Apps domain, we have a 25 seat license for GQueues. .1% of my users use the product, yet GQueues could legitimately call us a customer. For a business productivity tool, that's ... stupid. However, about .1% of users also use engineering design tools from Cadence. Totally different situation there, given the use cases. One should always take these numbers with whole mines of salt.
      - _delirium 13y ago
        I wonder who the 15 holdouts are in both cases.
      - dagw 13y ago
        It's quite interesting to note that Box talks about "customer" while Dropbox talk about "presence". The really relevant number is how many of those Fortune 500 companies are fully paid up customers vs a just bunch of people using their free personal account to share files within a project on a ad-hoc basis.
        pbhjpbhj 13y ago
- zamalek 13y ago
  Not sure. My sister recently had her wedding and obviously the issue of sharing photos comes up. Me: "Just put them in cloud storage." Her: "Oh you mean ##a## DropBox?" It has become a common noun instead of a proper noun - at least for the less savvy. That level of entrenchment was one of Facebook's historical defining moments. Edit: Grr, homegrown textile.
  - y4mi 13y ago
    The "DropBox" has been around longer than the service though... I heard it for the first time with KDX (Haxial) servers, where you had one designated folder into which you could upload files to the server (the others were read-only). But I'm certain that it was used for ftp servers/clients in the same way before
magic5227 13y ago
Another idea. Box goes public, DropBox goes public some months later. Both do well and grow large. Box wins business in the enterprise, DropBox wins in consumer. Everyone wins and are happy ever after. Until 7 years later when a startup kills both.
- bane 13y ago
  Or Oracle buys them both, kills off DropBox and turns Box into a malware distribution channel.
- glomph 13y ago
  I don't think either are going to last particularly long with both microsoft and google aggressively trying to take their business.
joelrunyon 13y ago
"Drop the drop" Love it.
- minikomi 13y ago
  That would work as a fantastic campaign for box as well.
af3 13y ago
aerofs will beat everyone ;)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
noinput 13y ago
This, was perfect.

darkmirage 13y ago

Aaron was smart to recognize that Dropbox had the first-mover brand recognition among consumers that is hard to overcome and therefore deliberately chose to focus on enterprise deals. This seems to be paying off for Box. For example, as a Stanford student, we all get 30 GB of free Box space associated with our .edu addresses. However, I wouldn't write off Dropbox. The flipside of this is that no one at Stanford actually use the Box space that the university has seen fit to pay for. Consumer mindshare is a powerful tool. Think of how a few years ago people were saying that the iPhone would never be allowed in the corporate world because it was not designed for the enterprise. When it comes to enterprise file-syncing, I see Box as a top-down approach and Dropbox as a bottom-up approach. Box has the lead now but it's a perilous one.

argumentum 13y ago
What makes you say Box has the lead?
ghayes 13y ago
As Box was around before Dropbox, how do you say that Dropbox had a "the first-mover brand recognition"? Do you mean that DropBox had a higher market share of consumers, and so, decided to push toward SMB and Enterprise? In that way, yes, it seems to have been a good strategy.
- pmorici 13y ago
  I've known about Dropbox for years I just heard of Box in the past several months and when I went to look at the company history on Wikipedia I was very surprised to find Box had been around a lot longer. Not sure if my experience is common but It think that is what the OP is talking about in general.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    Same for me in the UK; but corp seems to be where the money is made so no great surprise.
13y ago

joelrunyon 13y ago

Well if nothing else, this reminded me to reset my box password so I could login and see what's actually in it. I currently have 25GB and am using 100MB or so :)

untilHellbanned 13y ago

does a secret IPO start public trading at same time as normal IPO?

adventured 13y ago
Assuming this is a serious question: yes. The secret aspect only applies to the process leading up to the IPO.
tomfakes 13y ago
It's probably better to call this a 'Beta IPO' filing. This is a fairly new system that allows companies to work out bugs in their filings before they open it to public viewing. Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!
- dllthomas 13y ago
  "Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!" But it could have been intended to be.

zinssmeister 13y ago

"..its valuation was $10 billion." -.-

gcb0 13y ago

I used to have high hopes for Box. While everyone else was mining you data and trying to lock you in with shelfware editors for .docx, .pdf, etc, they were focusing on encryption, api and no-BS clients. but of course it was all a matter of time. now their apps have less synchronization features than the competition and more bloat thanks to editors for all the formats you will never use a sync app to edit in the first place. Their android app almost went on the right direction though...

kartikkumar 13y ago

Got a relative working at Box who's been there for a while. Husband is doing his best to launch a startup and he's made some big strides forward in the last year. Think they'll be very happy with a big payday. I have Dropbox seamlessly integrated in a number of my devices, but I don't pay anything. I think Box has the advantage of having built a foundation on the basis of customers that expect to pay. Will be interesting to see if Dropbox can transition to capturing more paying customers.

Spooky23 13y ago
The thing that's always got me with Dropbox is the relatively steep price cliff. I pay nothing for 16GB of Dropbox because of referrals and other gimmicks. If I want to add space, it's $100-120. If I want my wife or kids to benefit from the space I don't need, I need to buy a very expensive business plan. Give me a $50 annual option that's useful, and I'll be a paying customer!

tuke 13y ago

Box was the first of these cloud drive providers to offer to sign a HIPAA BAA. For partners who did that and integrated through the API, they now have lock-in. On that basis alone, I think Box is here for the long haul. Meanwhile, while Google will now sign a HIPAA BAA, you have to give up parts of Google Apps once you go that route.