
One year after Box’s IPO, is the party over? - cgoodmac
http://venturebeat.com/2016/01/23/one-year-after-boxs-ipo-is-the-party-over/
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awwstn
This is just a competitor trying to stand on Box's shoulders, and it
definitely doesn't belong on HN. Here's the disclosure from the piece:

> Full disclosure: I’m COO of Hightail, and we indirectly compete with Box.
> They are bigger than us and focus more on large enterprises across various
> industries, while we target small-and-medium businesses in creative
> industries such as consumer goods, advertising and media & entertainment.
> Although I’m not a Box shareholder, I can’t claim to be completely
> impartial. My assessment of Box is not only as a competitor, but also as a
> comparable for how our company should be valued. I should also note that I’m
> far from an accredited financial advisor. These opinions are my own
> observations and are not a recommendation to buy or sell shares.

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JonFish85
My takeaway from this is just that I'm surprised at how many people are still
trying to capture some money from cloud storage. On top of the already-
enormous competition (Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Apple), Box already had their
exit, DropBox is trying to figure out their future and the author of that
article is going for the smaller creative-business cloud storage market.

Is there really enough profit in that space to support that kind of
differentiation? Especially when the big companies above don't need to turn a
profit on their cloud offerings since it's part of their bigger platform, it
seems like these companies are chasing after a phantom profit.

"In short, it stuck the landing when a lot of people were predicting a crash,
achieving liquidity for its investors and employees along the way."

How is this true? As the article says at the top, they're currently trading
for less than half of their IPO price, and the lockups are expiring. Given
that the founder was diluted down to the ~5% ownership range, I suspect that
employees got hosed on their stock options too. Especially considering that
they presumably could have gotten more money elsewhere (if they were top-50
employees and made $200k before taxes, that's roughly $20k/year, again, before
taxes).

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hamburglar
If your options are at $0.50 and you IPO at $10, you still make money if it
drops to $5. Dropping below IPO price is only really a problem for the folks
that bought on the IPO. Granted, it may not necessarily be a _healthy_ sign,
but it doesn't necessarily mean disaster for the early shareholders.

