One year after Box’s IPO, is the party over?

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.

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).