Congratulations to the team and of course YCombinator!!<p>3 things I'm looking forward to knowing.<p>1) What is their profitability? I think they might surprise some people here, like Google did when they were private, hiding just how much money they are making.<p>It will be nice to see a cash flow positive tech company going public!!<p>2) What sort of share structure they are looking for. I think after SNAP its going to be a tough sell to get away with no voting control,<p>3) Can they go public at a valuation larger than the rumored $10+ billion they were valued at without resorting to cheap tricks like only floating 5% ala Groupon.<p>As a side note, it looks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs decision 4-5 years ago to start offering more services to private companies is starting to pay dividends
Dropbox Team: Congrats on this great milestone! I think I was one of your first users back in the day, and your product has transformed my life - it's been the single greatest productivity tool I've used in the past 10 years!<p>I know some people will scoff at that, and there is always the "yeah but google drive/box/oneDrive is better", but you guys did it first and still do it best! I've been a Pro member for a long while now and I'll be with you guys until the end - good luck and I'm excited to see what the future holds.
I recently did a purge of nearly all my software subscriptions and Dropbox was among the few that survived. Say what you want about storage being a commodity, I think they have built an outstanding service that continues to deliver a huge value to their users. I hope the employees see a nice windfall.
To me, the interesting thing about Dropbox going public is how comparisons to Box could/will drive Dropbox's valuation. Any investor can easily check out Box's financials <a href="https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABOX&fstype=ii&ei=eLJXWsnzJYzwjAGxpbCgDQ" rel="nofollow">https://finance.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABOX&fstype=ii&ei...</a> and easily compare Dropbox's numbers to that.<p>So Box suffered the pain of being the first in the easy consumer/business online storage category to IPO -- but Box's numbers are now driving valuation of their competitor.
I tried using Dropbox as an alternative to Google Drive. However, just like the other alternative cloud providers it was quite slow.<p>With Google Drive I can max out my Gbit Fiber (I downloaded with 920 Mb/s last time), while Dropbox was slow 8 Mb/s. Though I am not sure if Dropbox isn't rate limited for the free accounts.
Congrats to Arash for getting to this point. He has been very helpful when I reported security flaws nearly half a decade ago. I'm still wearing their sweater from time to time.
First YC company to go public ! Congrats<p>It's always fun to look at the comments at the time the MVP was posted here on HN:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863</a>
Dropbox has come a long way... Kudos to them!<p>My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863</a><p>Dropbox launches (YC summer 07)
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134405" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134405</a>
This is definitely the best Show HN I've had the pleasure of watching evolve! Dropbox is a cool technology started by a cool person. That's what I like to see succeed.<p>Too bad we didn't have the opportunity to buy some "DBCoin" back in 2007. I'd have bought a lot!<p>Congrats dhouston & co on building a company that improves the world in a significant way.
Dropbox has always been a successful company with great mindshare. While not quite a household name, if you worked there and told your family there's a chance they would know what the company is (how many of you can do that?). Yet still, dropbox was founded in 2007. It's been over 10 years to reach IPO. Just a friendly message to any engineers out of school who see the tempting offer to work at a small fast moving startup, you may get the payout like dropbox is about to, but you might have to wait a decade.
Less work for the company because the process is simpler, and allows them to "test the waters" and back out if response is cooler than they imagined it would be.<p><a href="https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-confidential-ipos-are-changing-the-market.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/public-offerings-how-c...</a> is a good read.
i probably gonna get downvoted but i don't get their product. anything they offer you can find better/cheaper elsewhere (google docs, photos etc) or not really needed (paper)
I know I'm not being original when I say I'm really not optimistic about their future. There service is extremely easy to replicate, as seen by all the giant companies who have done so, and all of these giant companies can give better service for free just as an incentive for people to increase their dependancy on their ecosystem (like microsoft and apple do quite aggressively, and google, to a lesser degree)
Dropbox stands out as having one of the most bizarre brand redesigns I've ever seen: <a href="https://dropbox.design/" rel="nofollow">https://dropbox.design/</a>
Please check box's financials [1]. They have annual revenues of $500M
and can surely show a profit with non standard accounting practices (all the BS employed as disclaimers by Dropbox to spin a loss as a profit). Box's valuation is around $3.2B.<p>Personally, anything over a $6.5B valuation for Dropbox is grossly over valuing it, by using Box as a benchmark from the open market<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=NYSE:BOX#wptab=COMPANY" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=NYSE:BOX#wptab=COMPANY</a>
Does this mean they'll remove the constant nag to upgrade my account to get more space? I have 2 GB out of a total of 20GB free on my non-paying account. It's so infuriating that I've uninstalled the client. How did I get 20 GB free? By getting lots of friends onto the service in the early days, and this is how they thank me?