I'm sorry, but a $10B valuation for Dropbox is just retarded. I haven't been to Dropbox's site in months.
I use my computer less and less each day for editing the content I create and consume for personal and work use. I'd much rather create/upload photos, prezos, docs, spreadsheets, etc. to a SaaS service like Google Docs than store and edit it locally.
Dropbox's sole value to me today is syncing my content across machines. I rarely use (if at all) their website to consume content. OTOH I use Google Aps every SINGLE day to consume and create content.
A $1B valuation I could maybe get comfortable with, but $10B is just stupid.
I disagree. Tonight I heard a 70-year old grandmother observe with surprise that her best friend of 50 years, although quite computer-savvy, had not even heard of Dropbox! When your company is capturing a mass market to the point of going viral among grandmothers, the idea that it might be worth billions is not "retarded" or "just stupid".
They've done a whole lot of hiring and not a whole lot of releasing. You've got to assume that investors are seeing/hearing something that the general public is not.
For example, Dropbox is well positioned to jump-start a significant enterprise business. Maybe they have something pretty incredible in the works?
I wouldn't necessarily count on them being that close to anything that amazing at least from a technical standpoint. I'm starting to realize that as a company gets big, it takes more and more people just to keep things going, make sure their systems don't melt down, do support, analyze all the useage data they're generating, manage the other people, etc. They're only at like 60 employees, right? That's really not many for a site with 25M users, many of whom run an agent that constantly hits their servers asking if there are updates.
Twitter's done a lot of hiring (up to ~500 people) and not a lot of releasing (last real release was ... new twitter?). Are they working on something huge and secret? No, they're keeping the site from melting down, making things more efficient so that that they site won't melt down in a few months, and making incremental improvements to the growing number of pieces of their service.
I'm sure Dropbox is working on more, but I don't think that they've made significant progress on anything earth-shattering. I'd guess that they're showing investors some very solid revenue and usage trajectories and some plans on how they're going to extract more money out of more companies in fairly obvious ways. Maybe some early prototypes of something earth-shattering.
(Cue giant release proving me totally wrong within a month)
I use my computer less and less each day for editing the content I create and consume for personal and work use. I'd much rather create/upload photos, prezos, docs, spreadsheets, etc. to a SaaS service like Google Docs than store and edit it locally.
Dropbox's sole value to me today is syncing my content across machines. I rarely use (if at all) their website to consume content. OTOH I use Google Aps every SINGLE day to consume and create content.
A $1B valuation I could maybe get comfortable with, but $10B is just stupid.