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Comment by TAForObvReasons | Hacker News Reader

> One of Dropbox’s closest competitors, Box Inc., went public last year at a $1.7 billion valuation -- 29 percent below the value it fetched in a private funding round six months earlier. Box shares traded at $12.88 at 12:36 p.m. in New York, below its $14-a-share IPO price.

Will Dropbox valuation be affected by BOX's performance in the last few years?

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I'm obligated to mention Box's S-1 filing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9407229.

I don't know whether Dropbox is profitable, but Box always seemed like it was abysmally managed from a financial standpoint.

That is fairly standard language. Expect Dropbox's S-1 filing to contain similar warnings about profitability and discussions about investment in various parts of the company

The article states that Dropbox is not profitable. However, they are "free cash flow positive", so, take that for what it's worth...

I'm not sure how Box has managed to burn so much cash the past few years, or how they manage to still lose money with revenues of 300m. Post-IPO one would think there might be an incentive to be profitable, particularly when large customer risk assessment includes the financial health of the provider.

They had neither the first-mover advantage (Dropbox), nor massive cash reserves to offer storage at a loss just to compete with Dropbox (Google, Microsoft). They flew out to every single conference about everything to promote Box to people who kept asking, "oh, so you're like Dropbox?"; they bought a bunch of S3 but then they started building their own backend [1], and literally paid people to make 'apps' for their 'platform' [2].

They were always going to have to burn a ton of cash to catch up and it's actually kind of remarkable that they're still around.

[1] https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/why-cloud-storage-startup-box-...

[2] https://gigaom.com/2013/06/06/box-to-pay-mobile-app-develope...

Box.net was available before Dropbox.

Yes, Box was founded in 2005 [1] and launched in 2006 [2], while Dropbox was founded two years later in 2007 [3], and launched in 2008 [4]. But it's undisputed that Dropbox achieved name recognition and popularity before Box did. Therefore, despite dating chronologically later, Dropbox was able to execute better and earlier than Box, and claiming first-mover advantage.

[1] https://www.box.com/about-us/leadership [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/box [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dropbox [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)

Okay, but I think "first mover" is a poor description of a company that came later and executed better. It even seems to undermine the utility of the concept, if people looking backward just assign the moniker to whichever company succeeded.

Well, it does have 'move' in the word. It you're first and don't 'move'... well :)

I've never heard of box til this post and I've used dropbox for years.

https://techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/

Technically, yes. The correct question is how much! :)

> Will Dropbox valuation be affected by BOX's performance in the last few years?

It depends. If Dropbox shows that they are [not] profitable and the margins give us a better picture we can ignore Box. Looking at Google Finance the Box numbers are really bad: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABOX

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