Dropbox: We're worth $8 BILLION and we'll sell you a 3 per cent slice File-sharing and online storage firm Dropbox is looking to raise $250m in additional funding, which would value the company at a level that's astronomical even for a tech firm - $8bn. Dropbox is trying to raise the cash to add to its sales and engineering teams and acquire technology, two people with knowledge of the plans …
The difference is Dropbox has MS/Amazon/Google as potential competitors and nothing particularly unique in their solution (i.e. while they may have better software/features at present there is nothing to stop their larger competitors matching those) and all are in a race to the bottom for cloud storage.
At least Twitter has a large customer base who are likely to pay for a service if Twitter ever manage to figure out how....
Of course, all of this is completely irrelevant come IPO time...
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Bandwidth etc cost real money, Dropbox gives away a lot of free accounts. Unless their paid accounts also pay for all their free accounts plus business overhead, this $250M is propping up an unsustainable business model. If you think about that, $8Bn sounds even more stupid.
The mistakes of the dot com boom are being made again and a lot of people are going to get their fingers burnt. Offering 3 billion for snapchat is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. All these tech companies have gazillions of customers using their platforms because they are free and to convert these numbers to some wacky valuation is a clear indication that no lessons whatsoever have been learned.
I wouldn't under value the "fancy front end" - basically it is what both Apple and Microsoft have been selling for all these years...
Personally, being a fan of secure personalised FTP style services, I appreciate the convenience of tools/utilities like Dropbox, particularly when they can be readily integrated into other applications and a user's workflow.
The valuation doesn't seem too unreasonable, it only represents circa $40 pa from each of their 175~200M users.
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