Investors Bet Big on Box.net with $48M Round | Hacker News Reader

Investors Bet Big on Box.net with $48M Round

xconomy.com

17 pointswaderoush14 comments

But Box.net is a child of the Web and the Facebook era, rather than an earlier age of desktop and server-based enterprise applications built to work only inside corporate networks. That means it’s less intimidating to use—and it also means word about the service spreads more virally. “You don’t get to the 5 million users they have today and the 60,000 businesses without users actively introducing it to others in their workflow, and that is a fundamentally different model from SharePoint,” says Holleran. “Box.net has the opportunity to grow that market substantially and become the leader.”

I'd like to see their actual customer numbers. I don't know a single individual who uses Box.Net (most people I know use dropbox). But I know several companies (my own included) that have been implementing Box because Sharepoint has become such an over complicated failure.

But I didn't find Box "virally". I simply realized Sharepoint wasn't delivering what it promised and went searching for other solutions.

Yeah, I found about about them from their billboard near SFO.

You needed a service, so you searched for it based on features and cost? When I need to solve a problem, I wait for my social graph to to create buzz OR a lean startup to convince me to pay for a product that doesn't exist, but they promise to build and launch for me in a weekend ;-)

- we stopped going after consumers at least a year ago, virally refers to how we are growing our business and enterprise accounts which largely has been word of mouth and referrals.

Congrats to box.net ... a great success story of a nimble startup kicking Sharepoint's and Documentum's butt. But the whole "end fo the low-cost Web startup" framing is just silly. box.net is infrastructure -- document storage infrastructure which, guess what, takes a lot of disk space. Disks are cheaper, but documents are a lot bigger these days. So yes it still costs a lot of money to scale to take on Microsoft and EMC. Film at 11.

The article's actual headline is much better.

Good on Box.net. That's a hardball market space to be in. Not sure the "end of the low-cost startup" prediction is warranted, implied, denoted, or otherwise entailed by Box.net's large funding. I mean, if you're going to be a cloud company for businesses, you need servers, right? and servers cost money?

Yeah I can't figure out if "end of the low-cost startup" means that VCs are going to have to pay a lot since there have been so many big investments recently, or if it's about the infrastructure costs you noted.

Holy fallacy, Batman! Just because one startup raised a lot of money, it means that now all startups have to?

In related news, someone somewhere bought a yacht, surely this means that nobody can live cheaply any more!

The actual headline is much more appropriate. We chose to raise money to grow more quickly and to not have to rely on going public to get funds. We could have continued with less funding (low-cost) but chose not to, so no its not the end of low cost startups, we chose this route :)

Seems like a great choice to me. You're looking at a billion dollar business and opportunities like that don't come along every day.

The company originated in 2005 and has raised several smaller rounds of capital in the past. They're not a startup anymore; they're a full-fledged business.

If they're still raising VC, I'd still qualify them as a startup.

Facebook just raised $1.5 billion on a reputed valuation of $50 billion.

At what point do you stop calling something a startup?

When they start offering a return on investment? Facebook is an odd case as they are quasi public, but typically I'd say to be a "real business" you should be making money not taking VC.

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