Dropbox Files Confidentially for U.S. IPO (opens in new tab)

I like Bloomberg's redesign. It's bizarre but fun.

Moreover, Bloomberg is a media company (well, at least the magazine). They have much more license to be insane.

Dropbox is a productivity company and the redesign seems...unwanted? What corporate executive is looking at his Dropbox and thinking that you know, this needs some Sharp Grotesk

What I like about Bloomberg's design team is that they try to navigate a fine line between being serious and playful. It's not easy because you could easily find yourself being too safe, where the playfulness ends up being too corporate and forced.

I remember going to the Bloomberg Design Conference a few years back, where they opened with an intro movie featuring their design team satirizing the design process by critiquing a white sheet of paper, eventually settling on a rotated version.

>This is what the general 404 page used to be:

>https://imgur.com/gallery/0MoqU4Y

Used to be?

https://www.bloomberg.com/gdhdsgsd

The trending feed they have on their homepage is just bizarre -- it scrolls at 2x or 3x the speed of the main body. Half of me is not a fan, but the other half thinks it fits in with the design of the rest of the page (notwithstanding the question of whether /that/ is good).

the last one is creepy but informative. Btw: bloomberg managment doesnt know about it; its just their webdesigner being big fan of Musk.

Bloomberg's design rules.

It looks like a person from hot topic got inspired by the Apple iPod / iPhone commercials and decided to go crazy with it. Awful execution.

Please for all that is holy, tell me they got hacked or something?

The type is named “Sharp Grotesk”. Seriously... how many meetings involved lines like “We’re trying to decide between Grotesk and xxxx”, “what do you think of Grotesk”, “I need sign off on this Grotesk typeface”.

> That's all anyone wants out of them

I'm sure they have better data on this than you or I do. There is an unfortunate tendency on HN to assume people are idiots who don't know what they're doing, as evidenced by every "why does company X need Y engineers??!!" comment.

This is what has made Dropbox so successful. You have files. They sync. It does one thing and it does it really well.

I'll also admit their enterprise tool that lets you sync only some files as you need them is also seems cool, although I've never worked at a place that used it, and even if I did, I'd probably have to use it in a VM since I've used Linux at my last three jobs.

Dropbox could try to build new products. Keep Dropbox as it is, but then try to branch out and build other tools. Maybe other office tools, or project management tools? They could keep the same login systems if they wants to pitch them to enterprise. But I agree, their core product is sold and should stay that way. Their brand can help them quite a bit if they start offering other products, but only if they're up to the same quality.

Except investors. This "collaborative platform" angle is clearly designed with the IPO roadshow in mind.

Probably because it's a dangerous place to be in long term. Storage is going to get cheaper and cheaper from the big guys. Already for me there's no point to paying for DropBox when I can pay for iCloud for similar prices and get all the benefits of the integration that storage provides that DropBox doesn't (photos, etc) for the whole ecosystem.

I've never needed to get more storage with DB… the free was always good enough though I'm also sure I'm not a big expense to them… many free users are.

Design fashion has the property that if you do something that pushed the envelope it always seems wrong until it becomes normal and other brands adopt it.

> I feel like it’s some sort of reference to popart

I was hoping it's supposed to be a hommage to vintage electronics manuals.

I don't think it's the aesthetics that people react to. The aesthetics are a little on the 1980s neon retro side, but personally, I find this almost creepily dissonant purely in how far the message is from the product. Nobody would deny that lots of people use Dropbox for "creative" work. But Dropbox itself has nothing to do with creativity -- there's no sense in which Dropbox itself can be a fun, zany, kinetic kind of experience. It's not GoPro. It's a folder that syncs. This design reeks of someone uncool trying to appeal to a young, fashion-conscious demographic, with cringeworthy results. It's as transparently cynical as any attempt Microsoft (for example) have ever made to appeal to anyone younger than 30.

It's beautiful, fun and quite daring. I would generally opt for the 'straightforward and professional looking' solution, but that might be because I'm boring and generally unimaginative.

Kinda sad realizing that you prefer this, but would chose boring just because it's somehow more safe.

The uniformity of response in this thread is what feels like a joke.

They also recently switched the clever black and white fork logo for UberEats to a very generic green and white with no symbol, just the name "Uber Eats". Weird

Worse than making no money, you could have exercised your stock options for any number of totally valid reasons and lost some or all of that cash.

I thought they switched to RSUs? Are you sure that new grad didn't get a mix of RSUs and options?

Yes, but there's no denying that a bit of bait and switch goes on at these companies whereby they grant you a bunch of stock options, call it part of your total comp, and then restrict 100% what you can do with them unless it's on their terms.

And how many years was it before early Dropbox employees allowed to cash out?

What sort of opportunities? I'm curious what I can eventually do with my options.

Is there any guarantee of a cash-out opportunity at private startups? Or is it at the mercy of your employer and one can even have bad experiences like Zynga where your options could be clawed back?

It's more than just the waiting though, it's the uncertainty and the fact that you've got this capital tied up in an investment that you could have in another investment (i.e., go work somewhere where you simply get paid instead of get stock).

Using a 10% time-value-of-money discount, your stock options are only worth ~35% of their final monetary value when you first start out in the 10-year payoff case. That's not a 35% chance that you'll make something, that's the discount on what you do make. You still need to factor in the risk that you'll get nothing or a pittance, especially if we're talking early startup where the risk that you get nothing is probably somewhere in the 90% range. You don't have to come up with very unrealistic numbers in the current environment before you're looking at applying a ~95% discount to your hopes on what your stock options might be worth in 10 years.

(IMHO, working at a startup when you're young for some hard & fast experience, if you can afford it, is possibly still worth it, but at this point in 2017, early engineers should be demanding either cash or founder-level equity grants. An in-between grant that may pay out $100,000 in ten years may sound grand from the perspective of someone about to receive that payout, but from the front-end you should value it somewhere around $5K or so, and I wouldn't fight anyone who wants to pick numbers to push that lower. On an annualized basis, $5K is more like "a minimal raise" than a reason to work at a company.)

There’s no reason not to look for quick payouts if you’re fresh out of college and looking to dive into the world of Silicon Valley style startups.

Money today is worth more than money tomorrow, and often the lump sum of money you get at the end of a startup’s liquidity event as an employee is not much greater than someone who earned money through a more traditional route, if you even get it. I know people who chased the startup life for years with nothing to show for it.

A decade later when they finally give up and resign to a more traditional career path, their cohorts who started down that path a decade ago are now impressively far ahead of them in life. I’m talking big houses with long hallways and a baby or two keeping them up at night while they ascend the ranks of a “real” company during the day.

So when playing the startup game, the only thing on your mind should be “fast money, fast money, fast money!”. If you like to see businesses that have been around for way longer than 10 years and building strong revenue that most startups can only dream of, don’t look for startups.

Given that the Bay area has the highest cost of living in the US, I think 10 years is a lot to wait for payout. In that time you could have got married, had kids, bought a house, had a parent get sick, get divorce, etc. People have real lifestyle changes which make the extra $$ important to them over a 10 year period.

The standard pitch (that many recruiters abuse) was that your options would become real in 4 years but the reality is this is closer to a decade. If companies were marketing their options realistically instead of selling them like snake oil the 10 year point would be fine.

I remember interviewing with an almost unicorn and their VP of engineering literally tried to pitch their options by telling me to assume the company would IPO at XXX price within 4 years. No mention of opportunity costs, tax issues, liquidity issues, etc. He even forget to consider the strike price when "helping" me ballpark the benefit. And everyone seems to forget there is thing called the discount value of cash - $200K in 10 years is not the same as $200K in 5. It's been 2 years since I got that unicorn offer and I can say that the company is at a minimum still 4 years away from an IPO.

Stop selling the snake oil and people wouldn't be unhappy when there is a decade long payout time.

What, no. The problem is that the typical arrangement is that employees must either buy their options (which have been very expensive at Dropbox for past 5 years at least, and thus out of reach and highly risky for most), or forfeit them soon after they leave.

So in practice, employees are shackled to the company until IPO happens.

(Note: some more progressive companies have been combating this dynamic a number of ways -- I don't know if Dropbox is among them)

I don't mean this facetiously, but what is different about Dropbox as a company compared to what it was 7 or 8 years ago? Their primary product seems mostly the same from an end user perspective.

These days, that is mitigated partially by salaries that are closer to market (and sometimes even higher than market) than was historically the case for startups.

But the AMT/exercising problem can be severe if you're unlucky.

Dropbox probably moved to RSUs at some point over the past few years, so this is only true of the last batch of options holders depending on the strike price.

What do you think of Mega? [1]. I switched from Dropbox to Mega because of that same pricing issue. I'm not a power user but it certainly works well for syncing files and photos across by Linux and Android devices.

[1] https://mega.nz/

There's an open source Google Drive cli for Linux too, works super well: https://github.com/prasmussen/gdrive

Same boat, If they had a $5 tier - even for only 20gb I would be a paying customer. As is I keep using my free plan.

I'd also love to have a slightly lower tier than 1TB, maybe just 20GB or 50GB.

You must not be an iPhone user. The fact that photo backups pause every 30 seconds or so is one of the most incredibly annoying software issues I've ever had to deal with. Switching over to iCloud photo backup didn't come soon enough.

Hey friend, they have a desktop client! https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/7/16267624/google-drive-desk... (ignore the shutdown part, later in the article it lists the two options: Google Backup & Sync; Google Drive File Stream

On the other hand, some of those criticisms were, like, obviously foolish, even at the time.

Like: "The only problem is that you have to install something."? Regular users don't care and they didn't care then.

Linux users can build this quite trivially? Yeah, but your average person can't, so who cares?

"Not income generating"? It's storage. People pay for storage all the time.

it's still making a loss though...

To be honest this was my first reaction to Dropbox as well: just set up a VPN. Looking back, it's clear that I underestimated the advantages of Dropbox and the size of the market. Drew was prescient in identifying an elegant solution to this universal problem.

Probably a significant chunk of the world's economy is from taking an already existing product and making it more accessible.

and get a static ip or a dyndns account, and forward the port on your router. And then make sure your machine is never down. It's really a time waster for the average dev ofc

> For a Linux user

aka approximately no one, and certainly not anyone with a smartphone (technically Linux but you can't set up all these services easily).

They even offer it as just a daemon for linux if you want to install it in a server.

And for me, even on windows, the Dropbox client just seems so much more stable than Drive. It's very common for me to see Drive with a little "dead" icon, saying that it couldn't connect, and stopped trying, and I have no idea why.

Well it was the first. Mega has a Linux client. It's a different service though; full end-to-end encryption.

Parent sounds nothing like those comments. Whereas you see people saying, “just glue together some ftp, rsync, a little SVN, and you’re golden!”, my take on what parent is saying is, “we have offerings from Google, Microsoft, Apple, Joe’s Online Storage, what makes Dropbox special again?”

The picture you try to portray is “no wireless, less space than a nomad, lame” and that’s not the case at all, I think it is a question worth considering.

nothing to do with open-minded. simply checking advantages vs alternatives.

Are you using the OneDrive file stream? I forgot what it is called.

I am using rclone to copy specific files (image backups of my disk).

Well it would also make sense. I just didn't want to gamble on it.

Maybe I will contact the support and ask them.

The few times I've tried OneDrive I was met with frequent crashing and disappearing documents. They had two version for Windows 8 (the touch screen UI one and the office one) which really seemed like they conflicted with each other.

When I used OneDrive, it also didn't sync files. If you opened something in Word from OneDrive, it created it in a temp folder and resynced when you saved it (hence the disappearing documents because of their buggy implementation).

And of course, OneDrive doesn't work on Linux. It's garbage and it's one of the reasons that Microsoft latched onto Dropbox with Office integration because their product was just that horrible.

Are the Linux/OS X/iOS/Android clients for OneDrive good? Because one of the major selling points for Dropbox for me is that their native clients are uniformly excellent, and I rarely have to think about it - it just works everywhere.

I'd rather pay Dropbox more and not have to have the overhead and constant nag of the Microsoft ecosystem -- not to mention Microsoft's questionable privacy policies -- i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7369163

Or the privacy mess that is Windows 10...

1TB on Dropbox is $9.99 per month. That's a bargain. I'm not really one to use an inferior product just to save a few dollars.

Doesn't "profitable, excluding interest, taxes .." mean not profitable?

Would be quite amazing if they are not profitable. After all they seem to be quite conservative on the product development side and have always had courage to charge actual money for their service.

One thing I've always wondered is what is their actual cost structure. Based on my own usage I would assume the actual storage part is quite small compared to the data processing and bandwidth. Since the sync works so smoothly, it is convenient to keep all kinds of projects there. Thinking for example node.js projects, which take not so many megabytes, but may contain 10-100k small files (due to dependencies).

I estimated theri EV/R's (substract debts add cash to valuation) and I get Dropbox 9.0 - 9.5 and Box little over 6.

The real issue for me is that file storage is ultimately low profit margin business when the growth maxes out. The end game comes in next 5 - 10 years during a downturn and Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or some Chinese company buys one or both of them out and gets the brand and the customers.

Box's revenue for this past fiscal year is about 600M, so more like 5x.

Build a company to build a company, not to IPO.

YC was founded in 2005. So yeah, it took dropbox a while but that seems to be the norm these days.

It would be foolish to ICO now. Go public first then pull a Kodak.

/s

Dropbox must have expected people to play their invite game. Not agreeing with original poster though

nagging you about free space when you clearly have it is obviously dysfunctional.

Public folder was a huge one that was axed. Then there was a photo gallery thing that was removed.

When the official has advocated heavily for it, yes that's probably safe to assume

http://www.drop-dropbox.com/surveillance.html