IIRC PayPal was very similar - it was sold for $1.5B, but Max Levchin's share was only about $30M, and Elon Musk's was only about $100M. By comparison, many early Web 2.0 darlings (Del.icio.us, Blogger, Flickr) sold for only $20-40M, but their founders had only taken small seed rounds, and so the vast majority of the purchase price went to the founders. 75% of a $40M acquisition = 3% of a $1B acquisition.<p>Something for founders to think about when they're taking funding. If you look at the gigantic tech fortunes - Gates, Page/Brin, Omidyar, Bezos, Zuckerburg, Hewlett/Packard - they usually came from having a company that was already profitable or was already well down the hockey-stick user growth curve and had a clear path to monetization by the time they sought investment. Companies that fight tooth & nail for customers and need lots of outside capital to do it usually have much worse financial outcomes.
This sets alarm bells off for me, of the kind saying the large investors are looking to claw as much back as possible via IPO because the core business isn't as viable as they thought. Demonstrating profitable quarters in the run up to IPO is highly valuable, so if they aren't doing that . . . yuck.<p>DropBox, for better or worse, appear to have cleaned up on the consumer front, and you'd have to be blind to not notice the trend these days is consumer tech getting into enterprise IT, and not vice versa. GDrive isn't too hot, yet, but I'm sure they'll eventually get there. Then MS probably have the biggest motivation to chase the enterprise market.<p>Sorry Box, I just don't see this working out at all. Something smells bad.
Random question: When a company finally IPOs, how much equity are the top guys expected to hold onto?<p>I know it's common for founders to be allowed to cash out some of their equity during financing rounds, usually enough to make them comfortable (a few million).<p>The reason I ask is if you're Aaron Levie and Box IPOs, are you expected to not sell much of your remaining stake unless you leave the company? It just reminds me a little of the investment banks where partners understood that it was frowned upon if they sold their equity. Many of them lost everything when the banks collapsed (some would say rightfully so).
4% for a company like Box is pretty consistent (maybe slightly higher).<p><a href="http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding-how-dilution-affects-you-at-a-startup/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/10/14/understanding-...</a>
I view this as being smart. Box is under heavy competition not just from Dropbox, but from Google and Microsoft. 4% of $250 million is better than 50% of $0. The landscape is littered with founders who drank the koolaid and thought they were going to billions and ran their companies into the ground. Maybe Levie won't own 50% of Box, but maybe he will own 4% of a viable company with a real business going forward. And if all else fails, he'll walk away with $10 million.<p>That's a "problem" I'm sure many of us would like to have.
I agree with the article that since startups are pass/fail, the founders must due whatever they have to do to succeed. Marc Andreesen says to even take that highly diluted fourth round to get to product/market fit and increase your chances of success. <a href="http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee204/ProductMarketFit.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee204/ProductMarketFit.html</a>