

Dropbox Raises $250M In Funding, Boasts 45 Million Users - philipDS
http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-raises-250m-in-funding-boasts-45-million-users/

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LeafStorm
Of course, now the question is: what are they going to do with this $250M? The
only new feature that has really come out of Dropbox recently is the API, and
even that has been in development for some time.

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thematt
They could make a land grab for enterprise users. There's tons of stuff you
could do with that money to make Dropbox attractive to corporations.

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mikepurvis
This one. Making Dropbox more friendly to small-medium businesses: a black-box
"dropbox appliance" you put on your LAN (or just the software, in a nice neat
Ubuntu package to replace Samba), selective sync and access-management, user
groups, encryption, etc.

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ebaysucks
Impressive that Dropbox only raised 7.2 million before this round.

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revorad
Congrats guys! I'm really pleased with Dropbox's success. It gives me
encouragement to stay focused on solving unsexy but fundamental problems.

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ebaysucks
I actually think Dropbox has a very sexy business model.

It's the Silicon Valley darling with the least amount of flaws in the business
model, imo.

Too many others need to police their users to take their cut, e.g. AirBnb.

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revorad
Now, in hindsight, when it's getting billions of dollar valuations, yeah it
looks sexy. But when it was starting out?

Google, Microsoft, Apple were going to eat its lunch _any day now_.

You have to download a desktop client? Dude, the future's all about web apps.

All the real money is in social recommendations for the colour of your next
toilet roll.

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TillE
> Google, Microsoft, Apple were going to eat its lunch any day now.

Sure, there was potential serious competition, but not yet. It was still a big
opportunity just waiting for someone to come and do it right.

It's the kind of service that everyone has a use for and many will pay for.
Hook 'em with a free 2GB, and sell extra storage - a very solid business
model.

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revorad
Heh, I don't know why your comment reminded me of this old gem:

 _Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend time reading
software manuals, or Cisco Router manuals, or sitting in my house testing and
comparing new technologies, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

The point of all this is that it doesn’t matter how many times you fail.It
doesn’t matter how many times you almost get it right.No one is going to know
or care about your failures, and either should you. All you have to do is
learn from them and those around you because…

All that matters in business is that you get it right once.

Then everyone can tell you how lucky you are._

[http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-
yo...](http://blogmaverick.com/2005/05/30/success-and-motivation-you-only-
have-to-be-right-once/)

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telemekus
And they STILL cant offer users encryption.

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rednaught
But everyone else is using it now so who needs encryption anyway?

Sorry for the snark. I agree with you but trying to raise a raucous about
client-side encryption seems to be useless at this point. I only hope they use
some of that funding to implement encryption at the very least for those who
want and would use it. Even to make it an add-on price is better than no
client-side encryption. But then we still have to trust the actions of the
binary executable to not do some other nefarious things.

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sandieman
Is iCloud going to be a threat for dropbox?

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0x12
No, because there are even today a lot more non-apple users than there are
apple users and dropbox is platform agnostic.

It may cause them some lost sales but nothing threatening.

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tommi
And in addition, myself including, all apple users are not 100% apple users. I
have macs, linux and android and dropbox works with all of those.

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benologist
That's the big deal breaker really. You have to be _pure_ Apple at home, at
work and on your devices for iCloud to be a replacement.

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cjamerlan
Congrats to Drew and the team! Dropbox is really a fantastic product.

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suking
I'm guessing the founders took a decent chunk off the table...

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paraschopra
Yes, that seems to be pretty much the norm these days. But at valuation of $4B
(as reported by TC), $250 million is just 6.25% dilutions so founders (and
other early investors) did get a pretty good deal.

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suking
Could be participating preferred, accumulating dividends, etc. There's a lot
more to it than straight %.

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DonnyV
So when is Dropbox actually going to be profitable? If you have 45 million
users and you can't be self-sufficient then maybe the business model doesn't
work.

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DonnyV
I just figured with 45 million users why would you need $250 million.

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Maakuth
Of course if they're profitable, with that kind of user base they could keep
growing organically. Perhaps they see some potential strategic investments
that would give them lasting competitive edge, and that need big money.

