Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?(s-1.vercel.app) |
Dropbox is an obvious PE Target?(s-1.vercel.app) |
> But a lesson from this story is twofold: when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it. Economically, the return from a capital efficiency standpoint would be much better. Second, public companies that are truly just a feature never give you great returns.
Dropbox was a private company when Jobs offered to buy it for $800 million in 2009. Drew Houston (the founder) has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation since then and is today worth over $2 billion. He's also on the board of Meta.
So the point about investing in companies that are features might be a decent (if obvious) one for retail investors looking at public equities, but the lesson here isn't "when Steve Jobs tries to buy you, take it".
Not quite sure how the author reached that conclusion, considering – by their own calculations – Dropbox is profitable, rich on cash flow and worth at minimum 10x what Steve Jobs offered for it.
What you're missing is that he was able to build his company, run it for years, get paid well and step down from the CEO position with a stake worth a couple of billion dollars.
You can't always reduce everything to money. Lots of entrepreneurs, perhaps the majority, would consider Drew's outcome to be the ideal one: you get to do what you love, raise your baby and earn a fortune.
Not everyone wants to sell out, start a family office and spend their days on a boat pondering what the purpose of life is and what they should do next.
This feels like a judgement purely in financial numerology. Is bigger of necessity "better" for every founder?
Think what you will of their writing and opinions, but one thing The Economist get right is that they don't assume you know what things are, it's spelled out at the first mention. So first mention of PE would be: private equity (PE).
Or
> And Sequoia’s (a venture capital firm) investment in Dropbox was a great one, second to Airbnb in Fund 12 (another venture capital firm).
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
This is exactly what I've done: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
Work didn’t like it as Dropbox was new/unknown and eventually banned us from using it. This was about 15 years ago and the only way to share files between colleagues was to manually upload a file to their shared drive (through a browser) and then ask your colleague to go download it.
Works Dropbox was replaced by Microsoft. My personal Dropbox was replaced by Google Drive, and then by iCloud.
Nice to know Dropbox is still make lots of cash really. They started it all.
Actually box.com was first (launched as box.net in 2005), and Dropbox was founded in 2007.
BrandonM on April 5, 2007 | parent | context | favorite | on: My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive
I have a few qualms with this app:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.
Make a product that solves a sufficiently common problem, and make it extremely high quality. Want more growth? Find another problem to solve and launch a product in that space.
As for Steve Jobs and selling out, Apple bought FingerWorks. That's how they ended up with excellent, multi-touch touchpads while the rest of the computing world suffered. Make great products (or "features") and never sell out to soulless megacorps.
[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/fdrive | https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash
Reaction to fragmede as I am rate limited:
You don’t have to travel full time.
And yes working at Dropbox is boring. Dropbox stores files. Things haven’t changed since 2009. There is not any product growth. They still store files. 95% of their daily operations is sales. That doesn’t sound enticing to me.
Being bought by PE is a death sentence. Maybe drawn out by years, but a death sentence none the less.
Prices goes up, quality of service goes down. After few years, everything goes down the drain, PE and their execs can't figure out what went wrong.
Often they do sell it for parts, or they enshitify the hell out of it to squeeze revenue from loyal customers. Not necessarily because it's the optimal strategy, but because truly fixing a business is hard and these are decent shortcuts from their perspective.
But that's not a given, sometimes they do truly turn it around for the better.
Maybe we’re Notion/Evernote? Buy Hackpad, plow a ton of money into Paper (which was legitimately good), then quietly deprioritize it.
Maybe we’re actually some kind of enterprise document productivity suite? Buy HelloSign. Plow a bunch of money into a desktop app. Pull more plugs.
A lot of smart people were trying. We made a lot of bets (too many?). None of them proved to be a second act, and the competitors eventually caught up.
The point is that different people have different priorities, and retiring in your mid-twenties to enjoy your many millions is a perfectly reasonable choice.