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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox's stock has been stuck at around $6B valuation for years with flat growth and income around $2.5B per year. It is just stuck.

Box.com, which is quite similar, is not that different. Around $3B and $1.2B in income. Similar valuation.

I think it is the market, not the leadership.

It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

Not sure where to go since the big guys won't acquire you given that they have alternatives. Maybe a business software acquirer like Salesforce or Dell? Or an AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub?

I honestly do not know where to go.

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Is that bad though?

Think about it. If you're paying all your bills, all your wages, and you have a strong product that people enjoy, and you're able to compete in the market - maybe not gaining any ground, but at least not losing any either - why change?

Of course I moderately understand the market pressures at work, but at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.

> at some point in the human civilization journey we'll have to be content with something instead of chasing clouds all the time.

Surely we're not even close to this point though? I can think of a lot of things that would be incredibly good for humanity to have, and which are achievable with enough economic growth, but which we are currently very far from because our economy does not have the necessary productive capacity (for example, enough solar/wind/nuclear/renewable power to completely eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels)

I mean sure, but marginally better/more profitable file storage isn’t any of that, and artificially juicing the share value doesn’t actually make any difference to the real economy it just makes some people who like gambling on made up numbers happier for a bit.

What does any of that have to do with Dropbox?

The point is that we should be directing our energy in a direction that’s net useful for human kind which should translate into growth. Dropbox is not one of those because there are many viable alternatives.

If we stop chasing clouds, we'll have to go back to local offline storage!

Exponential growth can’t last forever, and I do worry about what will happen when the gravy train stops. Maybe we can figure out interstellar travel before it does so the limiting factor becomes “the galaxy” rather than “our planet”.

I think impending demographic collapse might give us a peek at that sooner than you'd think

Clarify exactly what you mean by "demographic collapse."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline

> In the aftermath of World War I, birth rates in the United States and many European countries fell below replacement level. This prompted concern about population decline.[8] The recovery of the birth rate in most Western countries around 1940 that produced the "baby boom", with annual growth rates in the 1.0 – 1.5% range, and which peaked during the period 1962–1968 at 2.1% per year,[13] temporarily dispelled prior concerns about population decline, and the world was once again fearful of overpopulation. After 1968, the global population growth rate started a long decline. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has reported that in the year 2023 it had dropped to about 0.9%,[13] less than half of its peak between 1962 and 1968. Although still growing, the UN predicts that global population will level out around 2084,[81] and some sources predict the start of a decline before then.

In other words, the last time everyone got worked up over this, the trend reversed itself too hard within a few decades, and then reversed itself again. Meanwhile, over half a century after the "decline" started, we have over twice as many people as we had when it started, and the earliest projections for when growth will stop is another half century from now. I think there are a lot bigger problems we'll need to reckon with before then, and if we manage to remain stable by then, it seems like we have good precedent for reversing it fairly quickly.

I'm not so sure that global population growth tells the right story vis-à-vis declining birth rates in western countries.

Well, they were directly asked what they meant and replied with a link to a giant Wikipedia article. If they had a more specific point to make, they're being weirdly cagey about it.

As long as everybody is nationalist (not to say racist) and keeps borders closed to protect the homeland, those differences matter. Realizing that one thing people get worked up about (immigration) is a solution to the other thing they get worked up about (not enough kids!!1) would be a great insight.

Yes, but no one is really complaining about "not enough kids." They are complaining about not enough kids of their preferred skin tone. So they see immigration as an exacerbation.

I can't help but agree here. "Declining birth rate in the western world" just comes across as a dog-whistle to me. I guess I kind of only alluded to this myself with my response that they were being "weirdly cagey", and I wish I had been more direct like you were willing to, so thank you for this

Not everything is in the exponential growth model. Most small businesses in your town for example. Margins might afford an upper middle class lifestyle for the owner and that is a good enough business model for this company to last decades, even pass down through the family.

On the micro level, I agree. On the macro level, I don't know how viable those businesses will be when the wider economy is no longer growing exponentially (and frankly that may well be the least of all concerns).

Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine. They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local and they serve a need that has kept them in business for decades already, even with how many eras now of outsourcing and globalization and online shopping and all these other touted death blows that have been weathered all the same by these businesses.

> Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine.

This is a non sequitur. If the economy contracts and 99% of these businesses go under, 1% may well remain (“they exist…”) but that does not mean that all is well (“they will be fine”).

> They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local

The local economy in most of America is highly coupled with larger corporations. Either the large corporations are the major employers or the large corporations are the major customers for the area’s employers. Even if it’s not that, everything is tightly coupled to the banking system, as we learned in 2008.

Don't worry, private equity is working diligently to make sure that can't happen anymore.

It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking. Organic customer churn and attrition means that you're just a few years away from irrelevance. If DBX wants to stay a stable tech company, it should figure out a way to go private.

Yeah but in a market where the current suppliers are satisfying demand, I feel like the churn just means your customers will go across the metaphorical street to the other guy, and you likewise have the opportunity to bring in someone from a competitor. So you still, of course, need to invest in marketing and retention, but as a means to maintain stability, not to grow forever. The cloud storage market feels pretty mature, so customers are going to be constantly shopping around for the best deal, or the best support contract, or whatever.

> It's not necessarily bad, but in tech, not actively growing is tantamount to shrinking.

Dont we frequently complain that the primary driver behind ensittification of products is the need for perpetual growth at any cost.

I understand the need for growth but if the market is saturated and profits are stable, then may be thats a signal that they need to innovate or branch out into other/adjacent tech without making it worse for their existing customers. But leaders take the shortcut.

In the current economic system, if capital is not growing, it’s reducing.

Can you explain this further?

For example, if the market cap is $6B and has been for years, how is that reducing?

HDDs, SSDs, RAM for their servers are all up what, anywhere 50% to >100% for the year?

I think they're saying that inflation means the $6B is reducing in buying power.

inflation … ?

My rule of thumb is inflation will eat half your principal every 20 years unless you're growing. An average of 3.5% growth will double every 20 years.

A bank account (or a spread of bank accounts across different banks to stay under the FDIC insurance limit per-account) is way, way, way safer than a flat market cap publicly traded company -- and with the same or perhaps better rate of return. Stocks are "supposed" to give better rates of return than "flat", in exchange for the higher risk.

Inflation, plus if you’re not trying to grow your market share, competition will be taking it away from you.

It was both the market and the leadership.

Dropbox failed to find a second act: they struggled to find PMF with their acquisitions and new products: Dropbox Passwords, Dropbox Paper, Carousel etc.

As Steve Jobs warned Drew Houston, Dropbox was "a feature, not a product"

Dropbox is a $6B product, just no second act

It's a great product. They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft. Their lack of a second act is due to a failure of product vision and enterprise execution.

I don't see the need to become bloated like slack and a one size fits all application. They do a great job with the product they have. Is there anything wrong with just being what you are? Why does the lack of a second act need to be a bad thing if your first product is great and still extremely valuable?

I would also if anything put Zoom in with Dropbox, they have a product that is by far the most enjoyable to use in that space, but any other offshoot is not worth it.

Zoom is great, but it's hard to argue for paying $x per user when you're already paying $x per user for email/office and "teams is free".

Teams being free doesn't make teams good. Just like Google Drive and OneDrive being packaged in for cheap doesn't make them good. It is clear why they are lower value.

And they had Paper, which was an excellent product (I was at Dropbox a decade ago; we all used Paper constantly and it was great) very close to what Notion later became. They never got it over the hump to wider PMF — like you say, a failure of product and of enterprise execution.

(Given that it was so close to Notion, I think Paper is one area where the product vision was on to something good; but they didn't succeed at product execution, connecting customer feedback to iterating correctly on product improvements.)

Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.

The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.

Yeah, when signing into Paper it always felt pretty silly how the auth flow was all like "are you sure you want to share your Dropbox account info with this Paper thing?" as if it was some third-party service.

Ironically, just within the last year Paper has gotten much more integrated into Dropbox as a single UX. And… it's significantly worse: slower, clumsier, harder to navigate. (I don't think there's any inherent reason those had to be correlated; it's just that Paper has clearly been destaffed a lot in recent years, so naturally any new changes will tend to be less polished.)

Another issue: Paper was tied to your Dropbox account.

From Dropbox's perspective, this sounds great. Accounts become more useful and valuable. The addressable market of a Dropbox account grows! Plus, everyone has a Dropbox account already, right?

Unfortunately, it turns out that business customers generally don't deploy Dropbox wall-to-wall. It's expensive. Not all employees need file sync.

A Dropbox account ends up being an obstacle to adoption.

And a distraction: a common account creates an irresistible urge to spend a lot of time finding ways to tie this new product into the old one.

I'm not sure I ultimately buy that Dropbox is expensive - for one thing, Notion now charges basically the same as Dropbox, and you don't even get file sync in the deal.

I can definitely believe that that was an objection customers had, though. I just suspect that what it really meant was another way of expressing that there wasn't PMF - if the PMF were there, they'd have willingly paid, just like they do now for Notion or Slab or what have you.

And yeah, there was definitely some energy going into trying to tie the products together more (putting Paper docs in your Dropbox folders) - and when that finally shipped it sadly made the Paper experience worse, not better.

> They had the brand, the capital, and the user base to become what Slack, Zoom, or Notion became. Instead, they spent a decade fighting a losing battle over storage pricing with Google and Microsoft

Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.

> Is the alternative not likely that they would have spent a decade fighting a losing battle over office software with Google and Microsoft? Paper was a great product but the big guys have vertical integration so companies prefer their end-to-end solutions (GSuite etc) and I don't see how Dropbox could have easily overcome that.

Slack, Zoom, and Notion all argue against that. Yes, they have to compete against Google and Microsoft's integrated solutions, but they're good enough that they have held their own. Of course they would be bigger if Google and Microsoft didn't have such products.

How about a strange outdated idea. Stay where you are and start paying dividends? Well, somehow that is now unacceptable idea.

DropBox has been retiring shares fairly consistently. This is generally used as an alternative to dividends, and is done primarily for tax efficiency.

It's done to increase EPS per share and return cash to ongoing shareholders in a more tax friendly way, yes.

People say this, but the cash is returned only if you sell. A dividend is cash in pocket plus the stock.

The dividend is taxable ordinary income. The increased share value is not taxable until sold, and then it’s capital gains; usually a much lower rate.

In most cases dividends are taxed at the capital gains rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_dividend

Good correction, thanks. For completeness, that’s dividends on stocks, but not dividends on bonds, which are treated like interest.

In any case, dividends are taxable in the current year, and unrealized stock gains are not.

In case the difference doesn’t seem like a big deal, consider that if you die without selling the stocks, your heirs inherit them at the prevailing price, and no one ever pays tax on the gain they made between when you bought them and when you died.

Rich people who need neither dividend cash or stock sales to pay living expenses prefer not to get dividends so they can pay very little tax.

This enormous loophole for the rich brought to you by your US representatives.

Correct. That's part of the tax efficiency, the whole point for some investors.

Even if you set your dividends to automatically reinvest via a DRIP program, you still pay taxes on dividends in the year in which they are issued. This reduces the effect of compounding.

> plus the stock

The key point in a buyback is that each share of stock becomes worth more because the company is divided into fewer units. So each share is worth more than it would be had the case instead been used to pay dividends.

Where do those shares then go? Are they just gone forever?

Or do they then turnaround and give them to employees?

If its gone forever, then… why? They just bought something and burnt it? Isnt that like a waste of resources?

The stock market, still to this day is a very very strange thing…

The company is owned by the shareholders. When shares are ‘burnt’ the remainder of the shares become more valuable.

It’s easy to see if you imagine there are only three shares and one of them is torn up. The other two now own the entire company.

It’s a way of giving money to shareholders without the value being realized in the sense of being immediately taxable.

If you look at all the tech companies doing buybacks, usually the shares created for employee RSUs matches or exceeds the shares retired from buybacks.

Not in all cases, but many

Which is why GAAP earnings matter and not free cash flow

Let's say we own a company with 10 shares, I own one share, you own 4, and 5 are owned by others. Each share is worth $100 (to make it simple).

The company has $100 "to spare" - they could pay a dividend (give me $10, you $40, $50 for "the others") - but they'd be taxed on the income they made to be able to pay this, and you and I would be taxed receiving the dividend. We'd net out maybe $8, maybe $7 per share.

Or they could buy my share for $100, and retire it. I get the $100 (and pay capital gains tax unless it was in an IRA or otherwise not an issue). You now own 4 shares of a 9 share company, which is worth the same, but your percentage is a big bigger now.

Getting rid of the double taxation of dividends would likely slow down or end most buybacks; the main advantage is that they let the shareholders decide if/when they take the tax hit.

> If it’s gone forever, then… why? They just bought something and burnt it? Isnt that like a waste of resources?

You might have an easier time with some numbers.

A corporation called Hluska trades at a market cap of $100. Hluska has issued 100 shares. Now, let’s say that Hluska burns ten shares and the market cap stays the same. Now it trades at a market cap of $100 but it has 90 shares outstanding.

Stock holders will only lose stock if they sell stock. In that case, they will be taxed at a capital gains rate which is generally lower than the tax rate on income from dividends. So it’s a way to return capital to shareholders who want out in a tax effective way.

If it doesn’t work, it’s a waste of resources. Let’s go back to our example, that idiot Hluska was trading at $100 with 100 shares outstanding, burned 10 and now trades at a market cap of $80. In that case, yeah, it’s a waste of resources because each individual stock is worth less money post burn. But that doesn’t really happen very often. A better capitalized company than Hluska with its soaring $100 market cap should be able to withstand a burn event without crushing market cap by 20%.

Unfortunately this is the case when a company is beholden to investors. Investors aren't getting into the business of "making a steady stream of money without outsized growth" unless you are Warren Buffett.

Most investors are focused on multiplying their investment many times over, and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in net income a year is not big enough.

And this is one reason why the world is burning (literally and figuratively).

None of this seems to be the case.

Source?

i like how on the internet you can just say things

That applies to the real world too actually.

> It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

A huge unforced error though is that the starting price for individual plans is $20/year versus $10/month for Dropbox and Box. At a certain point you have to recognize that the rules of the game have changed. Once a customer has their foot in the door with a cheaper plan that also offers better integration, why would they move to Dropbox or Box?

They probably have to prove to me nobody can read my files besides me & the NSA (no “our 134 advertising partners …”)

unless they really want to wait for iOneGDrive to enshittify

Edit: as it stands, sounds like uploading already encrypted files to AWS is the option for privacy hawks who still want cloud - such a small market but think it should grow

I think it makes loads of sense to be able to bring your own S3.

The typical answer when people ask why Dropbox doesn't have a cheap low tier is that the more expensive plans are more likely to be underused, and therefore more profitable than a 100GB plan that users constantly max out.

But I'm also curious about whether they've studied the long-term growth impact like you mentioned. I first needed to pay for cloud storage as a broke college student. I'd used Dropbox's free tier in high school and only needed a bit more space, and I certainly didn't have $120/year to spend on it. I ended up switching to Google Drive's $2/month plan and never looked back at Dropbox. If Dropbox had offered a comparable plan, I would have stayed and ended up upgrading to the $10/month plan when I got my first job. Looking at how much data I'm using right now, I would have become exactly the type of underutilizing user they want.

Why is it bad that a company continues to provide services for customers and income for employees?

they commited the worst crime of all time! not using Ai to backup your files!

A business that can bring in a steady $2.5B a year doesn't seem like a bad business to me, so long as they can turn that into a profit. I think there ought to be a recognized place in the ecosystem for this sort of thing, and for me their independence from the gigacorps is a major feature.

Whoa, Dropbox yearly income is about $500 million per year. $2.5 billion income on a $6 billion market cap would be a much better deal.

Box is about $115 million income.

I meant "gross income", which is revenue. Not "net income", which is profit.

I was unclear and I apologize.

Revenue and gross income are definitely not the same. It's a very common confusion.

You are correct actually, not sure why you are being downvoted. I just checked and the definitions are:

"Gross income is that same revenue minus the direct costs of producing the goods or services (such as materials and direct labor)."

Dropbox has deep integration ecosystems, runs your company's data, I think its a no-brainer for it to become the agentic memory for your company if done right with it syncing data across all company services.

> AI company that would use this type of cloud storage as a AI document store / collaboration hub?

Wouldn't that run into the same problem the consumer end has? MS bundles 2TB of OneDrive storage for every user with a M365 license, and Workspace does more or less the same. You can already connect pretty much anything to them as is for pseudo-RAG/enterprise search.

The aggressive bundling from the big players have taken away most of the reasons to pay for Dropbox or box.com and other cloud storage providers.

I'm really not sure what Dropbox could even do other than have gone full swing towards a serious pivot or a new expansion into a new domain, but if they were going to do that they should have done that some years ago, if their current CEO stepping down alarms some of their existing customers, it might not end well.

Dropbox is one of those companies that did something right, and its kind of sad seeing them in this weird limbo state. I hope they don't wind up crashing down hard before they can finally figure something new out. I think their time to shift from being a "single service / product" style company is long overdue. They don't need to shutdown anything they currently have, but it would be in their best interest to either acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering. I really do wonder why they had not done so sooner.

Problem is most consumers and businesses would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each. The former is cheaper and often is easier to cross-integrate - I'd rather just use AWS or GCP storage options than ever touch drop box

Yea, Dropbox was a pretty good DSLR camera, problem was everybody has a mobile phone now…

I mean yeah, who would rather spend time at their job helping other users figure out how to include the right add-in for Dropbox to work with their various apps vs how Office integrates with OneDrive or Google Mail, Sheets, et al. integrates with Drive? Thus adding another layer of software to manage updates, etc. At some point, there is an opportunity cost to using siloed products, especially for something that's become relatively commoditized like cloud storage.

> would rather pay for 1 product that does 7 things ok than 7 products that do 1 thing great each

See Microsoft/Office 365. Aggressive bundling means one license gets you literally everything. Sure, it's all mediocre but it checks boxes and is largely "good enough." No reason to go out and buy slack, zoom, box.com/dropbox, 3rd party email gateways, 3rd party EDR, DLP, an MDM, etc. Microsoft will sell you whatever "checks boxes" product you need under one license and cheaper than buying separately.

And what do we do when Microsoft kills the competition and hikes up the prices? They already did some time ago by the way. [0]

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/Office365/comments/1iwfgzn/with_the...

Throw our hands up and go "wow, never saw that coming!"

In reality, the bundling should have been addressed in the courts via antitrust a long time ago before we got to this point. OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint Storage, InTune, PowerAutomate, etc should all be separate, standalone products. They are heavily subsidized for market capture.

The EU tried, and now Microsoft has to keep an M365 tier without Teams, but it's only $8/user/month cheaper, conveniently cheaper than slack still and pre-integrated. Its malicious compliance.

> acquire a smaller complimentary but profitable company, or start building products that compliment their current offering

I think they've been doing that, but it's tough to do it successfully. Often the best thing is to return money to the shareholders so they can look for higher returns elsewhere. I think the fact that they're still in business is kind of a miracle considering the competition.

I think the analog is the actions around the storage.

DropBox & Box have both moved in this direction, but perhaps not aggressively enough? I'm thinking in particular about e-signing, where DocuSign has a market cap roughly equal to the sum of DropBox & Box. Both have e-sign products; I am fairly certain that I have never encountered either in the wild despite routinely being sent other e-sign links.

AI is perhaps another emerging opportunity. Instead of uploading documents to a dumb pipe, let me have the pipe do things to them. Dumb, simple example would be I can put PDFs in a folder and after a one-time setup, I can share an API link that lets my users extract specified data from those PDFs via secure JSON API. Or simple CMS instead of WordPress. Or analyze documents flowing through a folder for x, y, z anomalies and alert me.

> I think it is the market, not the leadership.

They never tried to expand the TAM. Storage/servers were not rented out while others HuggingFace/Github/Digital Ocean/Cloudflare etc. sold them to expand their TAM.

> all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions

This is exactly why I use Dropbox. I use a single Dropbox account for my family. It's setup with photo sync on our phones so we can automatically share photos together. It's also setup on the printer/scanner so scanned documents are accessible to everyone. We keep documents in it that we can all access when needed. We also access the data through our file browser on our computers.

I feel my use case is simple but it's impossible to do this with the big players due to integration.

I remember when DBX IPOed and there were a large number of HNers who said proudly they were going to buy the stock and sit on it.. I was always concerned about where Dropbox (and Box.com) goes from here? Network storage always seemed more like a feature than a company, a different flavor of photo storage like Flickr. Didn't Google try and buy them initially?

So I wouldn't say it's the market per se. It's just that network storage has become commoditized. Storage tied to Google, Microsoft or Apple is always going to have a market advantage.

“ It is a tough market that has cut off the consumer end because all the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions…”

Sounds like a natural fit as a feature, not a product.

> the big players have their own deeply integrated solutions: Apple (iCloud), Google (Drive), Microsoft (OneDrive).

So Steve Jobs was right: Dropbox is a feature, not a product.

Poor Drew, if only he’d taken Steve’s advice! /s

Are they profitable? Is there any reason they can't be happy just turning a regular profit? This "growth at all costs" mindset feels toxic.

That mindset is the organizing principle for most of the modern world. Let's see how that works out!

I don't necessarily think that these companies have much room for market cap growth but it is definitely interesting that right at this moment the value of local has gone way up due to Claude Code (plus Cowork and competitors). I suspect that will change in the next several months but I know people who are actively switching from Google Docs to Office because of these tools.

I cannot find the relevant comment right now, but I think HN always knew that the concept behind Dropbox wasn't going to fly ...

Surely you're not referring to this prediction that was so bad, it's now a meme: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

TBF their profit is in decline.

Perhaps think of the stock as a value stock, not a growth/momentum stock.

The thesis is that they should survive and thrive as an investment asset through the AI bust, but performance during the AI bubble is poor. If you are a longer term investor then B2B SaaS valuations appear cheap right now, but you need to be able to weather the storm of missing out on the AI infused bubble.

As evidence the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index is at all-time lows for EV/revenue multiples. While some of the companies will see growth rates impacted by AI, that only explains a little bit of the drop in multiples versus the past.

only a hyper capitalist would think $2.5B/year is "flat growth". maybe instead of paying out shareholders, short term gains. maybe invest in their workforce or company itself?

just a thought for you people.

> I honestly do not know where to go.

Yeah, with blinders on, it's hard to see that. Otherwise, the playground was wide open. If whales start eating your revenue, then you go after them.

iCloud is just rebadged GCS.

GCS and AWS are not competitors with iCloud, DropBox, Box, Drive, OneDrive since they are just raw APIs and storage and not a user facing product.

It is similar to saying that most websites are just cloud-hosted SQL rebranded.

iCloud actually runs on FoundationDB - probably one of most underrated DB engines out there.

you can build object storage on FoundationDB + other awesome bespoke stuff.

It might use FoundationDB, but it is certainly storing those bytes on GCS.

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