

Investors Bet Big on Box.net with $48M Round - waderoush
http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2011/02/24/investors-bet-big-on-box-net-with-48m-round/?single_page=true

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TomOfTTB
_But Box.net is a child of the Web and the Facebook era, rather than an
earlier age of desktop and server-based enterprise applications built to work
only inside corporate networks. That means it’s less intimidating to use—and
it also means word about the service spreads more virally. “You don’t get to
the 5 million users they have today and the 60,000 businesses without users
actively introducing it to others in their workflow, and that is a
fundamentally different model from SharePoint,” says Holleran. “Box.net has
the opportunity to grow that market substantially and become the leader.”_

I'd like to see their actual customer numbers. I don't know a single
individual who uses Box.Net (most people I know use dropbox). But I know
several companies (my own included) that have been implementing Box because
Sharepoint has become such an over complicated failure.

But I didn't find Box "virally". I simply realized Sharepoint wasn't
delivering what it promised and went searching for other solutions.

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kj12345
You needed a service, so you searched for it based on features and cost? When
I need to solve a problem, I wait for my social graph to to create buzz OR a
lean startup to convince me to pay for a product that doesn't exist, but they
promise to build and launch for me in a weekend ;-)

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jdp23
Congrats to box.net ... a great success story of a nimble startup kicking
Sharepoint's and Documentum's butt. But the whole "end fo the low-cost Web
startup" framing is just silly. box.net is infrastructure -- document storage
infrastructure which, guess what, takes a lot of disk space. Disks are
cheaper, but documents are a lot bigger these days. So yes it still costs a
lot of money to scale to take on Microsoft and EMC. Film at 11.

The article's actual headline is much better.

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pnathan
Good on Box.net. That's a hardball market space to be in. Not sure the "end of
the low-cost startup" prediction is warranted, implied, denoted, or otherwise
entailed by Box.net's large funding. I mean, if you're going to be a cloud
company for businesses, you need servers, right? and servers cost money?

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kj12345
Yeah I can't figure out if "end of the low-cost startup" means that VCs are
going to have to pay a lot since there have been so many big investments
recently, or if it's about the infrastructure costs you noted.

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StavrosK
Holy fallacy, Batman! Just because one startup raised a lot of money, it means
that now _all_ startups have to?

In related news, someone somewhere bought a yacht, surely this means that
nobody can live cheaply any more!

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magic5227
The actual headline is much more appropriate. We chose to raise money to grow
more quickly and to not have to rely on going public to get funds. We could
have continued with less funding (low-cost) but chose not to, so no its not
the end of low cost startups, we chose this route :)

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jdp23
Seems like a great choice to me. You're looking at a billion dollar business
and opportunities like that don't come along every day.

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symptic
The company originated in 2005 and has raised several smaller rounds of
capital in the past. They're not a startup anymore; they're a full-fledged
business.

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jonknee
If they're still raising VC, I'd still qualify them as a startup.

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cletus
Facebook just raised $1.5 billion on a reputed valuation of $50 billion.

At what point do you stop calling something a startup?

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jonknee
When they start offering a return on investment? Facebook is an odd case as
they are quasi public, but typically I'd say to be a "real business" you
should be making money not taking VC.

