What do people think?
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How big is the threat from Google?
How much is the revenue?
Also Box
Maybe I should reply their recruiter who was pinging me just this morning.
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I hear the food is good.
It’ll be interesting what the valuation is post lockup period. The issue with a lot of unicorns is their private market valuation is higher than they can get on the public markets. They need to go public at some point to let employees be liquid though. You’d think at some point there’d be a talent drain of people tired of waiting for the IPO that never happens.
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And you would be right. Average tenure seems to be about 2-3 years. After a while, it stops making sense to accumulate more of the same company’s stock. Better to go somewhere else and diversify.
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Do you give employees RSU or options? For options, it would be too late to join now
In 3 years Box stock has not done well for a post IPO investor.
I don’t expect anything much better for dropbox.
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You can say that about most of them. I think it was about a year ago I looked up the last 5 years of tech IPOs and posted their post IPO performance. The vast majority were negative post IPO, and that’s in a bull market.
It was surprising. It shows you’re probably better working for a FANG company than a startup. Your equity is more likely to increase in value plus you know it’s liquid when it vests. You can probably add some other established companies to that list.
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Dropbox is a feature not a product.
Brutal words to the employees. Did someone offer to acquire Dropbox? They better have good revenues and even profit.
They have been trying to grow enterprise software. Are they making any headways?
Similar sentiments. Not difficult for big boys to copy the features. As WB like to say, moat is narrow.
Totally agree. The world has changed. Startup is hard. Big boys have tons of CASH, can do anything such as acquire the startup, poach their talents, create the same thing.
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Yes. Steve Jobs. They refuse to sell. So Apple created iCloud. I dropped Dropbox and use iCloud 
$2.99/ mo for 200 GBytes.
This reminds me of an article I read about an engineer who quit Facebook to join Snapchat when it was about to go IPO. Wonder how he feels about his decision now.
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So given that people pay taxes on pre-IPO stock awards, if the value goes down, what kind of losses can the person claim on their tax returns? Are they limited to $3K/yr?
PS: In all seriousness, given Roy’s and Marcus’s analysis, you should wait until a couple of months after they IPO. Once the stock drops, your offer would be based on that stock price. If you took an offer now, you risk losing half that value just after the IPO. If you take it after IPO, you stand a chance of doubling value if it goes back up, or at worst it staying the same.
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For pre-IPO RSU, do you need to pay tax?
For options, you can wait to exercise until the day you sell
That’s not how the game is played.
Just before IPO, startups would beef up their engineer ranks to show that they have tons of engineers working for them, in fact, they would try to recruit as many SWEs from Ivy and prestigious universities like Stanford. Also, try to add in a few top executives from big boys.
Once IPO, ahem, no need for them anymore… the offer would most likely lapse before IPO.