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Dropbox IPOs. Its Founders Are Now Billionaires (cnbc.com)
Yesterday Dropbox finally launched its stock on NASDAQ. Reuters reports:
Dropbox Inc's shares closed at $28.42, up more than 35 percent in their first day of trading on Friday, as investors rushed to buy into the biggest technology initial public offering in more than a year even as the wider sector languished... At the stock's opening price, Dropbox had a market valuation of $12.67 billion, well above the $10 billion valuation it had in its last private funding round... It has yet to turn a profit, which is common for startups that invest heavily in growth. As a public company Dropbox will be under pressure to quickly trim its losses. The 11-year old company reported revenue of $1.11 billion in 2017, up from $844.8 million a year earlier. Its net loss nearly halved from $210.2 million in 2016.
CNBC reports that Y Combinator almost passed on a chance to invest in Dropbox -- which became its first IPO ever -- "because it had misgivings about bringing on a solo entrepreneur." After Drew Houston, the creator of Dropbox, scrambled to find a co-founder in time for his in-person interview, the company was admitted into YC in 2007. Four years later, venture capitalists poured money into Dropbox at a $4 billion valuation. YC has since become a power player in Silicon Valley, helping spawn numerous companies valued at over $1 billion today including Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart and Coinbase. It also backed Twitch, which Amazon acquired in 2014 for about $970 million, and the self-driving tech start-up Cruise, which GM bought in 2016 for over $1 billion. But in its 13-year history, YC had yet to see any of its companies go public until Dropbox's stock market debut on Friday...
Houston is now worth over $3 billion and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi owns shares valued at more than $1 billion.
Dropbox's Twitter feed posted a video from their NASDAQ debut, adding "We're so thankful for the 500 million registered users who helped us get here."
CNBC reports that Y Combinator almost passed on a chance to invest in Dropbox -- which became its first IPO ever -- "because it had misgivings about bringing on a solo entrepreneur." After Drew Houston, the creator of Dropbox, scrambled to find a co-founder in time for his in-person interview, the company was admitted into YC in 2007. Four years later, venture capitalists poured money into Dropbox at a $4 billion valuation. YC has since become a power player in Silicon Valley, helping spawn numerous companies valued at over $1 billion today including Stripe, Airbnb, Instacart and Coinbase. It also backed Twitch, which Amazon acquired in 2014 for about $970 million, and the self-driving tech start-up Cruise, which GM bought in 2016 for over $1 billion. But in its 13-year history, YC had yet to see any of its companies go public until Dropbox's stock market debut on Friday...
Houston is now worth over $3 billion and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi owns shares valued at more than $1 billion.
Dropbox's Twitter feed posted a video from their NASDAQ debut, adding "We're so thankful for the 500 million registered users who helped us get here."
stays free, I'll keep my family videos and recopies on it.
If (when) they become greedy and charge me, I'll just move someplace else.
I don'f totally hate dropbox, at least I can use it on all my platforms. Their linux support was good at first, now it kinda sucks.
Looks like no one learned from the dot com boom. This along with all the Kentucky Fried Cryptocurrencies is why I don't trust geeks with money.
Stop storing your files on someone else's servers!
#DeleteFacebook
I have a real question for y'all. Why would anyone with plenty of income and no immediate expense to expand basically turn control of all major decisions over to random Wall Street assholes and rich, stuck up individuals that only care about money? Then every single corporate decision has to go through them and they end up ruining your company like for example EA. Just get a damn private or bank loan if you need funds. Having "investors" scrutinize everything I do would be the worst nightmare and the last option I'd ever consider if I started a company.
1. Fedgov prints a bunch of free money out of thin air, calling it "Quantitative Easing"
2. Fedgov gives that free money to their friends / "campaign contributors" in the big banks
2. The big banks bid up every asset they can find, but still have piles and piles of free money sitting around.
3. Big banks can't figure or anything else to do with all that free public money - so they start giving a bunch of it to the bankers' inbred, half-wit cousins who run VC firms in Palo Alto
4. The VCs discover they've been given more money than they can possibly waste on hookers & blow. So they hire a few of their butt-buddies from the Stanford dorms to found some "startups".
5. The butt-buddies look at what other loss-making companies are doing, then do the same thing only with an even stupider company name.
6. No business acumen, nor any actual talent, are required to get a leadership role at a startup. You just have to be from the "right schools". Consequently the startups have no business model and not much ability to execute. But hey - at least this time they didn't pay "outrageous" salaries to a bunch of filthy working class nerds!
6. The startups make a handsome loss, undercut and bankrupt a few legitimate businesses, and keep on getting bigger and bigger valuations each time they return to the VC teat to suck more free public money.
7. Somewhere way up the food chain, someone in DC or New Jack City gets a little nervous about propping up so many worthless loss-making "startup" companies.
8. The steady stream of free public money starts to dry up
9. The Crash!
10. Somewhere in Palo Alto, a Stanford boy can no longer afford his Personal Ass Sanitation Assistant, and is forced to resume wiping his own butt.
nope, dropbox was a cool idea. I hosted my apps there till they allowed direct linking. Nowdays I use gdrive, icloud and onedrive too. I'm not mad at dude, I used his bandwidth when it was premium. Now he cashes out, good for him.
It's more astonishing to think of what having a billion dollars as an individual means. Think about this. The median income for a person in the US is something like $50k (rounding to make math easy). A billion is one million thousand. So a billion dollars is twenty thousand years of median income. It's an absurd amount of money for an individual.
I'm generally not in the "limit people's wealth" camp, but it starts getting strange to think that it's reasonable for any individual to have wealth equivalent to more that even, oh, say, 1000 years of income.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Legaized MegaUpload?
Yeah. It is absurd for most individuals to have that kind of decision-making power; that's why most individuals do not ever get anything near that amount. Some individuals, though, are worthy of it, and the whole point of the Free Market is to do things like find such people.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahah, oh you are so funny.
If you really think that the billionaires of the world have magically be selected by "the Free Market" as being "worthy" of this type of decision-making power, you are not really living in the same world as the rest of us.
Sure, I can believe that they might be, on average, a bit smarter or more competent than "the rest of us", but the biggest difference is one of good fortune. Being in the right place at the right time with the right skills could in theory be something that a brilliant person could plan, but for the most part the differences between those with "regular" success and those with "amazing" success are purely luck.
"Outliers" by Gladwell does a pretty good job of examining some of these issues.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The 11-year old company reported revenue of $1.11 billion ..."
They have revenues? How? Who pays them a billion a year?
Strange? Well, maybe -- unless you start thinking about the way people's desires change along with increased wealth.
Say you earn that median $50,000/yr. income, but you get a big raise to $100,000/yr. It seems like a BIG deal at first, but you can use up the entire difference just by moving into a new home. So say you find a new job and again double your income? Not only does your higher tax bracket take a bigger chunk out of your take-home pay than you used to give up, but you'll again, pretty easily use up the extra income with such things as deciding to drive around nicer cars, and likely spending more time with groups of people who earn more money too -- and have expectations you'll spend more on outings with them, donations to associations they're involved in, etc.
If you're at the point where you've got a BILLION dollars at your disposal? You're probably going to be interested in tackling appropriately sized projects.... Starting new foundations to research something, perhaps?
I guess what I'm saying is ... whether people give their government enough money so it has billions to spend on things, or individuals manage to amass that kind of wealth themselves? The results probably aren't all that different. Either way, they're definitely going to live a much fancier lifestyle than most of us ... but they're also going to realize that they've got so much income, they can't even realistically just spend it on themselves. People are aware they have that kind of money, and they have a lot of expectations for them to try to live up to. SOME people have no conscience ... but MOST people actually do. They tend to care about SOMETHING. Maybe for them, it's trying to cure an illness that caused the death of a loved one? Or maybe they're fascinated with some aspect of science and technology that they can really advance with the money?
Comparing Dropbox to FTP, is like comparing Facebook to email, and comparing Google to grep. I mean, at some level those analogies all work; but most people use these in completely different ways. In Dropbox' case, you have some people that use it solely like FTP (push a backup of your pics to a central server), but I think most people use it to just automatically keep their work available and up-to-date between all their computers and phones without manual pushing and pulling.
dropbox is 11 years old, but is still called a startup?
You can't buy much with a billion dollars other than a business or mega yacht. You can buy an all gold Lambougini, but in the end, it's still a car.