
Box has secretly filed for an IPO - coloneltcb
http://qz.com/172541/box-has-secretly-filed-for-an-ipo/
======
staunch
Wild prediction: Box goes public, Dropbox follows, Dropbox buys Box and kills
it, Dropbox hires Sean Parker who tells them to "drop the 'Drop' \- it's
cleaner" and becomes Box: Microsoft 2.0

~~~
untilHellbanned
I'm starting to think Box will win in the end. They've always been focused on
the $$$. Maybe Dropbox is a more fun and friendly company, but investors don't
give a sh __about that.

(note: i like both companies alot, but this is my gut feeling)

~~~
nashequilibrium
You just need to look at the state of thing now and how everything has being
going for the last year, clearly Dropbox has all the momentum and usability.
How many conferences have you seen Box's ceo at, that guy is at every
conference and Box is supposed to be a startup. Box was the first cloud
service i used, then moved onto Dropbox because the usability was just
amazing. I also think Dropbox may have better engineering talent because the
syncing works so much better than ubuntu one,drive and box.

~~~
w1ntermute
Box has a completely different customer base than Dropbox, with completely
different needs. Just look at their customers page:
[https://www.box.com/customers/](https://www.box.com/customers/)

97% of Fortune 500 companies are Box customers. "Usability" is not a primary
concern when your customers are building services on top of your platform.

~~~
smarx
What a strange coincidence! 97% of the Fortune 500 also use Dropbox. :-)

From [https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-
info](https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info): "Dropbox is used in over 4
million businesses with presence in 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies."

~~~
dagw
It's quite interesting to note that Box talks about "customer" while Dropbox
talk about "presence".

The really relevant number is how many of those Fortune 500 companies are
fully paid up customers vs a just bunch of people using their free personal
account to share files within a project on a ad-hoc basis.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I find Box's claims a bit unbelievable - 97% of the Fortune 500 are paying
customers? HP, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, Google, Cisco, ... maybe
they're all in the 15 holdouts?

Mind you searching for information on this is nearly impossible as Box co.
don't have a trademark to distinguish themselves by.

~~~
dagw
Also I guess the whole concept of 'customer' is a bit nebulous when it comes
to huge companies. If a 6 man HP sales office half way round the world decides
to sign up for the cheapest option for internal use, can Box or Dropbox claim
that they have HP as a customer?

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darkmirage
Aaron was smart to recognize that Dropbox had the first-mover brand
recognition among consumers that is hard to overcome and therefore
deliberately chose to focus on enterprise deals. This seems to be paying off
for Box. For example, as a Stanford student, we all get 30 GB of free Box
space associated with our .edu addresses.

However, I wouldn't write off Dropbox. The flipside of this is that no one at
Stanford actually use the Box space that the university has seen fit to pay
for. Consumer mindshare is a powerful tool. Think of how a few years ago
people were saying that the iPhone would never be allowed in the corporate
world because it was not designed for the enterprise.

When it comes to enterprise file-syncing, I see Box as a top-down approach and
Dropbox as a bottom-up approach. Box has the lead now but it's a perilous one.

~~~
ghayes
As Box was around before Dropbox, how do you say that Dropbox had a "the
first-mover brand recognition"?

Do you mean that DropBox had a higher market share of consumers, and so,
decided to push toward SMB and Enterprise? In that way, yes, it seems to have
been a good strategy.

~~~
pmorici
I've known about Dropbox for years I just heard of Box in the past several
months and when I went to look at the company history on Wikipedia I was very
surprised to find Box had been around a lot longer. Not sure if my experience
is common but It think that is what the OP is talking about in general.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Same for me in the UK; but corp seems to be where the money is made so no
great surprise.

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kartikkumar
Got a relative working at Box who's been there for a while. Husband is doing
his best to launch a startup and he's made some big strides forward in the
last year. Think they'll be very happy with a big payday.

I have Dropbox seamlessly integrated in a number of my devices, but I don't
pay anything. I think Box has the advantage of having built a foundation on
the basis of customers that expect to pay. Will be interesting to see if
Dropbox can transition to capturing more paying customers.

~~~
Spooky23
The thing that's always got me with Dropbox is the relatively steep price
cliff.

I pay nothing for 16GB of Dropbox because of referrals and other gimmicks. If
I want to add space, it's $100-120. If I want my wife or kids to benefit from
the space I don't need, I need to buy a very expensive business plan.

Give me a $50 annual option that's useful, and I'll be a paying customer!

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gcb0
I used to have high hopes for Box. While everyone else was mining you data and
trying to lock you in with shelfware editors for .docx, .pdf, etc, they were
focusing on encryption, api and no-BS clients.

but of course it was all a matter of time. now their apps have less
synchronization features than the competition and more bloat thanks to editors
for all the formats you will never use a sync app to edit in the first place.
Their android app almost went on the right direction though...

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tuke
Box was the first of these cloud drive providers to offer to sign a HIPAA BAA.
For partners who did that and integrated through the API, they now have lock-
in. On that basis alone, I think Box is here for the long haul.

Meanwhile, while Google will now sign a HIPAA BAA, you have to give up parts
of Google Apps once you go that route.

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untilHellbanned
does a secret IPO start public trading at same time as normal IPO?

~~~
tomfakes
It's probably better to call this a 'Beta IPO' filing. This is a fairly new
system that allows companies to work out bugs in their filings before they
open it to public viewing.

Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!

~~~
dllthomas
_" Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual
secret!"_

But it could have been intended to be.

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joelrunyon
Well if nothing else, this reminded me to reset my box password so I could
login and see what's actually in it.

I currently have 25GB and am using 100MB or so :)

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zinssmeister
"..its valuation was $10 billion." -.-

