Would love to take a stab at valuing their equity although I'm sure their cap structure is a wedding cake of preferences on top of ratchets on top of pro ratas and pari passus and conversion preferences...
around $400m in annualized revenue as of last summer (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-24/dropbox-is...). no recent news of their growth, but I would be surprised if they did more than 20-30% user growth since then (not bad, but not a rocketship anymore...which FTR is totally cool with me, even admirable at this stage!)
Jives with back envelope calcs: 400m+ users, assume 1% paid users = 4m+ paid users. each user pays something around $100/year (8.99/month if you pay up front, 9.99/month if you bill monthly, some legacy cheaper, some business customers). 4m x $100 = $400m. It's actually not a bad business! =)
Not sure about costs, but they are cash flow positive from what they've said publicly (http://www.recode.net/2016/6/14/11937132/dropbox-cash-flow-p...) and that's been confirmed from what I've heard anecdotally/personally from some senior folks over there and some VCs who I think would/should know (and that I trust..ha).
so overall, seems like a solid business, i think the issue now is whether they can grow at a rate that's exciting enough to the market to justify a $10b+ valuation...TBD!
as one kind of comparison (not definitive by any means, just one that we have the #s to do..): box did around 300m in revenue last year (so less than DB), but Box market cap was around 1.5B at that point, so 5X revenue. if you did the same math to DB, we're looking at around 2B market cap for DB...1/5 of their last raise at 10B =/
could be viewed as example of raising at higher valuation than prudent (not unusual ha), but who knows, maybe they'll pull a rabbit out of a hat =)
I was thinking about how to value companies like this over the weekend: fast growth, huge revenue, where it all gets eaten by opex. In a normal business you just look at gross profitability and assume a lot of opex will lead to long-term appreciation of the equity but, software is so damned competitive that it's like they need to keep plowing cash into opex just to stay relevant (vs grow the business)
In any case it's hard to fathom that a company with $400MM in ARR can be going public just now...nowhere near unprecedented given the recent huge financing rounds but man, that's just a big company, no two ways about it.
EDIT: One more comparable I've been watching a lot recently. New Relic is on track to do about 230-250M in the next 12 months. Their aggregate common is worth something like 1.6B right now, so your "5x revenue" might be a little conservative, I think they'll get more like 6-7x, and likely even more as consumer companies tend to get more interest from individuals because it's a name they know. My over/under on aggregate equity value at IPO is ~$4bln, will be interesting to see how big the float is.
This math drives me nuts!
The logic of directly tying valuations of a private company to the only public direct competitor in the space is flawed (analysis don't use GOOG,MSFT for this). Using the current logic; if Dropbox (private) beats the crap out of Box (public), this would result in reduced growth and reduced quarterly numbers for Box. However, Box's numbers are then used as indicators/benchmarks for the cloud storage space, and then used to price Dropbox.
When you look at Box's valuation, you should be aware that the price is partially because of risk/competition from Dropbox. How much of the price? I have no idea.
To borrow a comment from @barleyworth from another thread:
here are things that actually matter for valuing these sorts of companies:
* cost to acquire a customer (Box's S-1 notoriously had sales+marketing which was greater than their revenue)
* customer churn, or relatedly, lifetime value per customer
* subscriber growth
* margins (i.e. storage costs)
- Full disclosure I am an ex-Dropbox employee.