Box has secretly filed for an IPO | Hacker News Reader

Box has secretly filed for an IPO

qz.com

106 pointscoloneltcb37 comments

Wild prediction: Box goes public, Dropbox follows, Dropbox buys Box and kills it, Dropbox hires Sean Parker who tells them to "drop the 'Drop' - it's cleaner" and becomes Box: Microsoft 2.0

I'm starting to think Box will win in the end. They've always been focused on the $$$. Maybe Dropbox is a more fun and friendly company, but investors don't give a sh about that.

(note: i like both companies alot, but this is my gut feeling)

Shame, really. By concentrating on the enterprise market, Box may have sealed a brighter future for themselves than Dropbox has. That's sad because I'm pretty sure the team at Dropbox could run circles around the Box team. I mean, they have Python's creator working for them.

And there's a lesson there for would-be entrepreneurs with a technical background - your technical abilities only play a small role in the success of your venture. The smart business move is to focus on generating revenue, like Box did.

You just need to look at the state of thing now and how everything has being going for the last year, clearly Dropbox has all the momentum and usability. How many conferences have you seen Box's ceo at, that guy is at every conference and Box is supposed to be a startup. Box was the first cloud service i used, then moved onto Dropbox because the usability was just amazing. I also think Dropbox may have better engineering talent because the syncing works so much better than ubuntu one,drive and box.

Box has a completely different customer base than Dropbox, with completely different needs. Just look at their customers page: https://www.box.com/customers/

97% of Fortune 500 companies are Box customers. "Usability" is not a primary concern when your customers are building services on top of your platform.

What a strange coincidence! 97% of the Fortune 500 also use Dropbox. :-)

From https://www.dropbox.com/news/company-info: "Dropbox is used in over 4 million businesses with presence in 97 percent of Fortune 500 companies."

I wonder who the 15 holdouts are in both cases.

It's quite interesting to note that Box talks about "customer" while Dropbox talk about "presence".

The really relevant number is how many of those Fortune 500 companies are fully paid up customers vs a just bunch of people using their free personal account to share files within a project on a ad-hoc basis.

I find Box's claims a bit unbelievable - 97% of the Fortune 500 are paying customers? HP, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, Google, Cisco, ... maybe they're all in the 15 holdouts?

Mind you searching for information on this is nearly impossible as Box co. don't have a trademark to distinguish themselves by.

Also I guess the whole concept of 'customer' is a bit nebulous when it comes to huge companies. If a 6 man HP sales office half way round the world decides to sign up for the cheapest option for internal use, can Box or Dropbox claim that they have HP as a customer?

It's so easy to manipulate those numbers. For example, in my 22,000 seat Google Apps domain, we have a 25 seat license for GQueues. .1% of my users use the product, yet GQueues could legitimately call us a customer. For a business productivity tool, that's ... stupid. However, about .1% of users also use engineering design tools from Cadence. Totally different situation there, given the use cases. One should always take these numbers with whole mines of salt.

Not sure. My sister recently had her wedding and obviously the issue of sharing photos comes up.

Me: "Just put them in cloud storage." Her: "Oh you mean ##a## DropBox?"

It has become a common noun instead of a proper noun - at least for the less savvy. That level of entrenchment was one of Facebook's historical defining moments.

Edit: Grr, homegrown textile.

The "DropBox" has been around longer than the service though...

I heard it for the first time with KDX (Haxial) servers, where you had one designated folder into which you could upload files to the server (the others were read-only). But I'm certain that it was used for ftp servers/clients in the same way before

Another idea. Box goes public, DropBox goes public some months later. Both do well and grow large. Box wins business in the enterprise, DropBox wins in consumer. Everyone wins and are happy ever after.

Until 7 years later when a startup kills both.

Or Oracle buys them both, kills off DropBox and turns Box into a malware distribution channel.

I don't think either are going to last particularly long with both microsoft and google aggressively trying to take their business.

"Drop the drop"

Love it.

That would work as a fantastic campaign for box as well.

aerofs will beat everyone ;)

This, was perfect.

Aaron was smart to recognize that Dropbox had the first-mover brand recognition among consumers that is hard to overcome and therefore deliberately chose to focus on enterprise deals. This seems to be paying off for Box. For example, as a Stanford student, we all get 30 GB of free Box space associated with our .edu addresses.

However, I wouldn't write off Dropbox. The flipside of this is that no one at Stanford actually use the Box space that the university has seen fit to pay for. Consumer mindshare is a powerful tool. Think of how a few years ago people were saying that the iPhone would never be allowed in the corporate world because it was not designed for the enterprise.

When it comes to enterprise file-syncing, I see Box as a top-down approach and Dropbox as a bottom-up approach. Box has the lead now but it's a perilous one.

What makes you say Box has the lead?

As Box was around before Dropbox, how do you say that Dropbox had a "the first-mover brand recognition"?

Do you mean that DropBox had a higher market share of consumers, and so, decided to push toward SMB and Enterprise? In that way, yes, it seems to have been a good strategy.

I've known about Dropbox for years I just heard of Box in the past several months and when I went to look at the company history on Wikipedia I was very surprised to find Box had been around a lot longer. Not sure if my experience is common but It think that is what the OP is talking about in general.

Same for me in the UK; but corp seems to be where the money is made so no great surprise.

We had been using Dropbox, but have switched to Google Drive; works well enough with the rest of the Google Apps suite.

Got a relative working at Box who's been there for a while. Husband is doing his best to launch a startup and he's made some big strides forward in the last year. Think they'll be very happy with a big payday.

I have Dropbox seamlessly integrated in a number of my devices, but I don't pay anything. I think Box has the advantage of having built a foundation on the basis of customers that expect to pay. Will be interesting to see if Dropbox can transition to capturing more paying customers.

The thing that's always got me with Dropbox is the relatively steep price cliff.

I pay nothing for 16GB of Dropbox because of referrals and other gimmicks. If I want to add space, it's $100-120. If I want my wife or kids to benefit from the space I don't need, I need to buy a very expensive business plan.

Give me a $50 annual option that's useful, and I'll be a paying customer!

I used to have high hopes for Box. While everyone else was mining you data and trying to lock you in with shelfware editors for .docx, .pdf, etc, they were focusing on encryption, api and no-BS clients.

but of course it was all a matter of time. now their apps have less synchronization features than the competition and more bloat thanks to editors for all the formats you will never use a sync app to edit in the first place. Their android app almost went on the right direction though...

Box was the first of these cloud drive providers to offer to sign a HIPAA BAA. For partners who did that and integrated through the API, they now have lock-in. On that basis alone, I think Box is here for the long haul.

Meanwhile, while Google will now sign a HIPAA BAA, you have to give up parts of Google Apps once you go that route.

does a secret IPO start public trading at same time as normal IPO?

Assuming this is a serious question: yes. The secret aspect only applies to the process leading up to the IPO.

It's probably better to call this a 'Beta IPO' filing. This is a fairly new system that allows companies to work out bugs in their filings before they open it to public viewing.

Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!

"Clearly anything on Hacker News and other news outlets isn't an actual secret!"

But it could have been intended to be.

Well if nothing else, this reminded me to reset my box password so I could login and see what's actually in it.

I currently have 25GB and am using 100MB or so :)

"..its valuation was $10 billion." -.-

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