lswcapOne of the most notable IPO companies this year, Dropbox is an online storage services company with 180 million registered users and 11 million paid users worldwide. Last year’s sales were $ 1,110 million, up 31% from a year earlier.
The drop-box traded on the Nasdaq on March 23 and traded at $ 28.48, up 36 percent from the contenders. Dropboxes had a market capitalization of over $ 12.6 billion on the day of listing. This online storage services company, which started with startup, has grown to an incredible momentum. This combiator helped start the drop box. Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Wi-Combiner, is celebrating the drop-box stock listing through a blog ( https://blog.ycombinator.com/congratsdropbox/ ), and at the same time, it is eye-catching as it unveils the founding story.
According to her, on June 26, 2007 she wrote the check to make her first investment in the drop box. A copy of the check reveals that the amount of investment must have had a great effect on completing the drop box establishment documents. The amount invested by the WiBi combinator has contributed greatly to the establishment of the dropbox.
Drew Houston, founder of the dropbox, was alone when he first came to the WiBi combinator, but the WiBi combinator advised him that it would be good to be co-founder. Having accepted the offer of the Wi-Combiner since then, Houston brought Arash Ferdowsi, who later became co-founder.
Livingston later said on April 21, 2007, that he was conversing with them and realizing that the service to be born would have great consequences. At the time, besides Livingstone, all four of the founders of the Wi-Combine met with them, but felt they were all great. One of the co-founders, Trevor Blackwell, was amazed by the drop-box demo.
Of course, there were a lot of online storage services at the time, but none of them had a decisive share. The dropbox founders were going to overwhelm their competitors by creating better online storage services. At the start-up event held by Wii Combiners in the summer of 2007, the dropbox was coded for the service, and at the time, the Wii combinator founders were also brought into the tester.
In August 2007, a demonstration day was held in front of a Boston investor who was collected by Wai Combiner. At this time, Houston will release a presentation file during the presentation and demonstrate it through a dropbox demo program. This announcement was a sign of the presence of the drop box to investors, but not enough to write a check.
But a week later, I made a presentation to a Silicon Valley investor, and I was able to raise money from Sequoia Capital, the world’s largest venture capital fund that invested in Apple and Google.
Livingston was not even dreaming that the start-up from here in 2005 would be listed at the time of the establishment of the Wi-combiator, and emphasized that the drop box listing on the Wi-Combiner is significant.
In 2008, the dropbox was launched in earnest, but it had difficulty in acquiring users. We did an advertising campaign, but it was unbelievable. The dropbox founders felt they needed a different approach and created a four-minute video showing how the dropbox could actually be used.
Co-founder Houston was also a social bookmark site Digg user. He stared at Digg and added jokes that the user knew about, and in the end the video succeeded in recording the highest number of votes in Digg. The dropbox sets a record for over 70,000 new customers in just one night. Of course, if you share this with Facebook or Twitter, the campaign to give you an additional 128MB of free space will also collect 2.8 million invitations in 30 days.
Dropbox eventually gets more than 300 million users in 2008. Since then, Apple Steve Jobs has been trying to buy a dropbox in 2009. Because of this, when the iCloud came out in 2011, the dropbox development team was in a panic.
The dropbox competes with giant dinosaurs such as AWS, OneDrive, Google Drive, and iCloud, reaching 500 million users in 2016 eight years after launch. At that time, the drop-box revealed 500PB of stored data. 500PB is more than 14,000 times more than 100 million pieces of textual data in the Library of Congress, the world’s largest library. Considering that the dropbox storage data at the time of 2012 was 40PB, we can see that the capacity has increased tremendously.
At this point, however, the dropbox plans to change the cloud service infrastructure. Until then, dropbox was using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). The data stored in the drop box can be divided into two types: file and metadata. Previously, dropbox metadata was stored on a web server in its data center, but the files were stored on Amazon S3. But with 500 million and 500 PB, the dropbox decides to build its own storage system. For better service performance or block-level data access, building a direct storage infrastructure is at a stage where you can save money over Amazon S3.
How far will the dropbox grow? As a matter of fact, the dropbox has more than 500 million users. The number of paid users is 11 million, of which 30% are enterprise customers. However, only 2% of the total users are paying customers. Competitor Service Inbox ( https://www.box.com/ko-home/home ) has only 57 million users (?), But the proportion of paid members is 17%.
The dropbox’s growth potential is in the 500 million users and potential customers. Of course, there are many analyzes that how to increase the paid membership rate will be the key to growth in the future. Homework is waiting for you to develop a way to provide more services to paying users and get more money. Data is becoming increasingly important. Ten years ago, there was no change in the next decade. Growth of the dropbox is not necessarily guaranteed, but it is clear that it has entered a good market.
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