Every time someone mentions Box, I find myself obligated to quote one of the funniest passages in recent tech history: the Risk Factors chapter from their S-1 IPO filing:
## Risks Related to Our Business and Our Industry ##
### We have a history of cumulative losses, and we do not
expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. ###
We have incurred significant losses in each period since
our inception in 2005. We incurred net losses of $50.3
million in our fiscal year ended December 31, 2011, $112.6
million in our fiscal year ended January 31, 2013, and
$168.6 million in our fiscal year ended January 31, 2014.
As of January 31, 2014, we had an accumulated deficit of
$361.2 million. These losses and accumulated deficit
reflect the substantial investments we made to acquire new
customers and develop our services. We intend to continue
scaling our business to increase our number of users and
paying organizations and to meet the increasingly complex
needs of our customers. We have invested, and expect to
continue to invest, in our sales and marketing
organizations to sell our services around the world and in
our development organization to deliver additional features
and capabilities of our cloud services to address our
customers’ evolving needs. We also expect to continue to
make significant investments in our datacenter
infrastructure and in our professional service organization
as we focus on customer success. As a result of our
continuing investments to scale our business in each of
these areas, we do not expect to be profitable for the
foreseeable future. Furthermore, to the extent we are
successful in increasing our customer base, we will also
incur increased losses due to upfront costs associated with
acquiring new customers, particularly as a result of the
limited free trial version of our service and the nature of
subscription revenue, which is generally recognized ratably
over the term of the subscription period, which is
typically one year, although we also offer our services for
terms ranging between one month to three years or more. We
cannot assure you that we will achieve profitability in the
future or that, if we do become profitable, we will sustain
profitability.
That is pretty standard. It is is to give themselves a defense if their stock never goes anywhere and they go bankrupt. They will still get sued by some plaintiff lawyer but they will prevail with an "We never said we were going to make money." defense.
A more difficult challenge for them is differentiation amongst all the cloud storage providers (Box, S3, Dropbox, Drive, Etc.) variuos levels of API, various costs, and various features. They have some great customers, and one assumes that those customers will help them focus on the things they need to succeed, but at the end of the day you have to be able to serve their needs and pay to keep the lights on, if you can't well that would be the end of that.
saas companies are a little tricker to value. Acquiring customers for say 1/3 of the clv is a great deal for a saas business but will show up as big losses because the acquisition cost is paid out up front while the revenue is earned monthly over the account life.
These are always funny. Read the Risks for the S-1 of 'Restoration Hardware'. It actually goes into (alludes) the CEO's predilection for jumping into the sack with fellow employees!
> We have incurred net losses in each fiscal period since our inception, including net losses of $7.5 million, $22.5 million, and $40.2 million in the fiscal years ended March 31, 2012, 2013, and 2014, respectively, and $18.6 million and $19.4 million in the six months ended September 30, 2013 and 2014, respectively. We had an accumulated deficit of $100.8 million at September 30, 2014....
Maybe not right now, but soon. Box lost $167mm in FY2015 ($158mm in FY2014). They expect to lose $140mm in FY2016.
Their IPO only raised $175mm, so at this rate they will run out of money in FY2017 or shortly after. It's a mystery to me why anyone bought into their IPO, and I think their stock performance since then shows that they will not have an easy time raising additional money from public markets.
They spent too much to acquire their customers, and now they only have demanding and expensive customers. The poor economics of their business forced them to raise money on poor terms (which helps to explain their IPO), and now their options for raising additional capital are going to be increasingly sub-optimal.
This seems to be on par for tech journalism. Take a quote from some analyst, accept it as truth without doing any further research, and then write a story around it.
I work near their Los Altos office and I see a lot of Box employees (How do I know? They wear the Box tees,shirts hoodies, caps etc.) roaming around the San Antonio shopping center and surrounding areas (Which begs to question what am I doing outside the office? Ha! I have a large floor to ceiling window overlooking El Camino and the SA shopping center). I know it's totally anecdotal, but it looks like their employees have given up too. Do they really need 1200 employees?
They post about what an incredible journey it has been with you, their beloved user, in their unlimited-service-for-ever and that you will have 7 days to grab your data from their 10 MBit/s funnel before it is deleted forever.
The cloud/butt is not a place to store your data without having everything backed up locally. Look at a random ToS, they all(?) can terminate your service in an instant for zero reasons.
From what I understand, if a company truly goes into liquidation (as opposed to e.g. Chapter 11, which is like a state of emergency for businesses) it ceases to exist, so it cannot have any obligations (or, for that matter, possessions) anymore.
The trustee appointed to wind down the business will/should try and divide whatever is left as fair as possible.
What that means for intangibles such as "your data that is in their data center that is powered down because they didn't pay the bills" or even "that is on the disks that were repossessed by the company that leased them to them" will depend on lots of factors. Maybe some company turns up who wants to continue the business. Such a buyer likely will want to keep existing customers, and therefore will try and keep the data of the customers online.
Alternatively, if it is clear nobody wants to continue the business, and contracts do not put a price on losing customer data while in liquidation, why would the trustee spend money on keeping a data center running?
In practice, the answer to that question likely is "because subsequent lawsuits will cost more than keeping the data center running does".
Therefore, one can hope such companies do not truly go under but close down in more or less orderly fashion: they go into cheaper 11, find a 'partner' who buys their storage business and migrates the data into their centers, leaving an almost empty shell that can go reinvent itself, or linger for years on (for example, reading Wikipedia, SCO has been in such a zombie-like state for years)
Possibly, possibly not, depends on the circumstances. The real thing to remember is that Box, Dropbox etc. aren't a replacement for backups and if them shutting down without warning tomorrow means you lose data then you are Doing It Wrong.
This was because the company behind Ubuntu (Canonical) shut down the service, they didn't go under themselves.
If the cloud infrastrucure is Box's, and they cannot pay the maintenance fees anymore, I would start seriously worrying.
In a way, committing to a company whose main business is cloud storage gives you more guarantees they won't shut down the service out of the blue (since it's their only, or main, source of revenue), while committing to a big company with their eggs in more baskets (MS, Google) gives you more guarantees that if they shut down the service you'll be given some time to react.
Yev from Backblaze here -> bit of a different use-case. Box isn't a backup service, and Backblaze isn't a syncing/sharing/collaboration service. But you're right, if they are paying to house their data somewhere, that gets expensive. We can charge so little because of our own infrastructure that we rolled out, but it's not designed for the type of stuff that they are doing. Though, I suppose if you design it right it could be.
