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Dropbox Cuts Several Employee Perks as Silicon Valley Startups Brace For Cold (businessinsider.com)
Not everything is working out at Dropbox, popular cloud storage and sharing service, last valued at $10 billion. Business Insider is reporting a major cost cutting at the San Francisco-based company. As part of it, the publication reports, Dropbox has cancelled its free shuttle in San Francisco, its gym washing service, pushed back dinner time by an hour and curtailed the number of guests to five per month (previously it was unlimited). These cuttings will directly impact Dropbox's profitability. According to a leaked memo, obtained by BI, employee perks alone cost the company at least $25,000 a year for each employee. (Dropbox has nearly 1,500 employees.) From the report: Dropbox isn't the only high-profile startup to unleash a company wide cost-cutting campaign lately. A number of unicorn startups, worth over $1 billion, including Evernote, Jawbone, and Tango, have all gone through some form of cost cuts, whether layoffs, office closures, or reduced employee perks. [...] A lot of this has to do with the slowing venture funding environment in Silicon Valley. Investors have become much more conservative with their money lately, and are losing patience for startups that have failed to generate returns after years of free spending. For Dropbox, the cost cuts may have less to do with the state of the VC market than with its own ambitions. Dropbox CEO Drew Houston has repeatedly said in the past that he doesn't need to raise capital in the private market anymore. Instead, Dropbox may want to show investors that its business is strong enough to IPO.
Not everything is working out at Dropbox, popular cloud storage and sharing service, last valued at $10 billion.
Nope, and I quote "T. Rowe Price marked down its holdings in Dropbox by 51% in the fourth quarter of 2015". This places a valuation of $4.9 billion, down from $10 billion. Fidelity and Black Rock had similar mark downs for their holdings of Dropbox.
Money spent on perks is money spent on the actual business. Giving incentives for skilled employees to work for you is a core of business
And the fact that "dinner" is considered a perk demonstrates why anyone with a life outside of work should never, ever consider working for a startup.
On a side note... it seems to me this announcement also did double duty as a passive-aggressive method of informing Dropbox's workers they'll be expected to work an additional hour each day, going forward.
#DeleteChrome
ah, memories of my old pet goat.
had to sacrifice him, though; the SCSI bus demanded it, for some reason. don't ask, I simply followed directions from a USENET post and that was all it took.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Washing clothes while the employee is at the company gym.
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
5% ownership . . . of what?
Of the company. Which means, among other things, 5% of future profits.
And where's the other $950 Million of that 1 Billion?
Equity.
but what if that $50M is actually the only money I have? In reality, my company is only worth $50M.
No. A company's value is not the same as the cash in their current account. Not at all.
The only unicorn i have ever seen was a mule with a strap-on dildo on his head.
To me, most of these unicorn startups look just as stupid.
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
When every other provider on the market was offering cheap storage (including Google and Microsoft), Dropbox refused to drop their prices. They were charging for 100GB what everybody else was charging for 1TB. As such, they lost a lot of customers to the competition, and a lot of customers who could have been producing revenue stuck with the "free" tier rather than pay $10 a month.
They've sort of learned their lesson, now offering 1TB for $10/mth, but still haven't quite caught on yet: they don't have anything between $0 and $10 a month. A lot of customers who want a bit more than the free tier, but don't want to pay $10/mth, aren't being served. Google will sell you 100GB for $2/mth, and I bet Dropbox is leaving a lot of money on the table by forcing people to pick between Google at $2 or DropBox at $10.
1500 hundred people to run a file server.
Reminds me of this picture from the 1990s:
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pini...
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
And the fact that "dinner" is considered a perk demonstrates why anyone with a life outside of work should never, ever consider working for a startup.
Bah.
You're assuming that the offer of dinner tells you something about required work hours. It tells you nothing about that. It may be that employees are required to work long hours and company-provided breakfast and dinner are indicators that employees should be at work before breakfast and not leave until after dinner. Or it may legitimately be a perk, a company-provided convenience for employees who are working late because they don't come into the office until 11 AM or because they actually choose to work long hours because they're excited about their projects and enjoy what they're doing.
The existence or absence of perks like meals doesn't inherently mean anything about expected work hours. If you want to find out what expected work hours are, you have to ask people who work there.
it seems to me this announcement also did double duty as a passive-aggressive method of informing Dropbox's workers they'll be expected to work an additional hour each day, going forward.
I think it's far more likely that the change is intended to dissuade employees from grabbing a free meal on their way out the door, to reserve the perk for the people who are legitimately working later and save money on food.