Dropbox Could Be A Bargain At An $8 Billion Valuation

This seems like a very convoluted way of coming to the valuation. Revenue != profit. I can easily create business that generates $1bn/month in revenue by selling dollars for 90 cents. Dropbox may be worth $8bn, but surely it makes more sense to assess the valuation based on the growth in profitability?

The Dropbox board obviously feels that an $8 Billion valuation is appropriate. As rational actors, they want to raise money at the highest valuation possible. They have more information than any TechCrunch blogger, so I highly doubt Dropbox is undervalued.

It&#x27;s incredible how cynical everyone is in this thread about the valuation of a company that actually MAKES MONEY and how optimistic people were about the Snapchat valuation in the thread from last week, a company that hasn&#x27;t made a dime.<p>It seems the only way to really get a massive valuation as a &quot;company&quot; is to make sure you don&#x27;t start making any actual money, otherwise people will stop harping about &quot;growth is the only thing that matters, this valuation is accurate&quot; and switch to &quot;profit is the only thing that matters, this valuation is ridiculous.&quot;

Twitter&#x27;s and Dropbox&#x27;s business models couldn&#x27;t be more different. Heck, everything about their businesses is dissimilar. This comparison is idiotic.

The analysis sounds a bit absurd to me. It does not matter if Dropbox is making $1B or $0.5B, what matters is how much profit are they making and if that method of making profits is scalable.<p>If a company that is making $1B in yearly revenues is raising a paltry sum of $250m through investments I am not sure if they see themselves in good financial situation.

I don&#x27;t know much of anything about company valuations, but in terms of what the following two companies mean to <i>me</i> and what I believe they means to the <i>world</i>: if Dropbox is valued at $8B, I no longer have any reservations whatsoever with Tesla&#x27;s valuation based on its stock price. (I do recognize that its price is being corrected this month, but I suspect it will eventually trend back upward.)<p>From my point of view, Tesla brings me at least ten times the value of Dropbox. I don&#x27;t even think Dropbox represents a problem that should exist long-term assuming a re-disintermediated Internet, which is where I am optimistic we&#x27;re heading eventually. Storing and sharing my data using someone else&#x27;s service is retrograde.

Social networks are winner take all markets, whereas Dropbox is not in such a market. Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn are all trading at 20-40 times revenue based on the fact that they enjoy strong network effects.

Anybody have any idea what the distribution is here for consumer vs business?<p>I&#x27;ve literally never heard of anyone, company or individual, paying for Dropbox.

Valuing any company by comparing it to Twitter, a company many consider to be crazily overvalued, seems somewhat inaccurate... I&#x27;m sure the Dropbox board has a better idea of what the company is actually worth.

Considering that Dropbox are completely dependant on Amazon for their service and overnight Amazon could sink them &quot;ooops your instances just got deleted, oops&quot;<p>8 billion is a bit of a joke<p>Now if they owned their own equipment in their own datacenters...

Are there not several DropBox clones on GitHub?<p>And several competitors already there (and something called Box that is less consumer orientated?)<p>Add in the switching costs are low to non-existent (it is just git isn&#x27;t it?) - surely their competitive most is almost non-existent - in which case their profits are going to constantly eaten by competitors.<p>What is it I am missing?

Can we please redefine what bargain means?

When was the last time techcrunch posted something worth reading?