'It's not viewed as another Snap or another Blue Apron or some of the other consumer tech IPOs that haven't done so well.'īut there may be more at stake with this IPO than the future of Dropbox. 'At first glance, it doesn't look like a train wreck,' says Matt Kennedy, an analyst at Renaissance Capital, which manages IPO-focused exchange-traded funds. What's more, analysts say Dropbox's $7 billion valuation is reasonable, certainly more so than the $10 billion valuation it had on the private market back in 2014. And unlike Blue Apron ( APRN), there's no new threat from a tech giant like Amazon at the last minute before it goes public. Unlike Snapchat ( SNAP), Dropbox's losses aren't growing ahead of its IPO. But the company still lost more than $100 million in 2017.īy tech standards, though, those numbers aren't so bad. 'It doesn't have the mass appeal of a Facebook, but I think in a niche market, it has its presence,' he says.ĭropbox topped $1 billion in sales for the first time last year, and has worked to trim its losses by cutting costs, including certain office perks. That doesn't mean Dropbox is doomed, but Rao says the company's opportunity may be closer to Twitter ( TWTR) than Facebook ( FB). 'Now, you don't need to go to Dropbox to do all the functions that they have,' says Santosh Rao, who tracks Dropbox as head of research at Manhattan Venture Partners. Not all investors are so chill about the growing number of rival services. 'Many others might be stressed out by having companies with a collective market cap of many trillion dollars competing with him,' Partovi says. Houston, 35, has managed to weather that pressure to date by virtue of being a 'very chill dude,' according to Hadi Partovi, an early investor in Dropbox. We created our companies before those other players. 'Neither of us signed up for that necessarily. The fierce competition is 'definitely part of the noise you're always going to have,' says Aaron Levie, CEO of Box ( BOX), a similar service to Dropbox that focuses on business customers and went public in 2015. In its IPO paperwork, Dropbox said it only expects the 'competition to intensify in the future.' Related: Spotify's IPO is not like other IPOsĪpple ( AAPL), Google ( GOOGL), Microsoft ( MSFT) and Amazon ( AMZN) have all launched rival services for storing documents, photos and other files online.

Dropbox careers after college