As we were reporting the news about Dropbox’s $250 million funding round, Forbes went live with a fascinating story, detailing how co-founders Arash Ferdowsi and Drew Houston turned down a “nine-digit” acquisition offer from Apple back in late 2009 when the company was only two years old.
The late Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic co-founder and former CEO, reportedly led the first (actually, only) meeting and apparently told Dropbox’s founders that they should sell because Apple would crush the company with a competing product – the recently debuted iCloud service. → Read More
We knew it was in the works, and now Dropbox has confirmed that it has raised a massive round of funding. The company has landed $250 million in Series B financing (bringing its total of capital raised to $257.2 million). Last we heard the round values Dropbox at $4 billion.
Index Ventures led the round, with participation from a stellar list of new investors (Benchmark Capital, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Institutional Venture Partners, RIT Capital Partners and Valiant Capital Partners). Early backers Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, and Hadi and Ali Partovi also participated in the round. Founded in 2007, Dropbox was initially jump-started at Y Combinator. → Read More
A month ago, we revealed that Index Ventures will lead Dropbox’s new, massive funding round, which values the company at $4 billion. Now TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has revealed in a Tweet that venture firms Greylock and Benchmark Capital are also part of the round. We’ve also heard from sources that IVP is part of the round as well. We’re still unclear how large the round will be.
As Michael reported in August, the company was reportedly valued at one point at $5 billion or more. But the uncertainty in the financial markets and Dropbox’s desire to get specific investors on board resulted in a lower valuation. → Read More
Dropbox is finally moving to close that massive valuation venture round we’ve been talking about all summer. According to multiple sources, Index Ventures will lead the round, which values Dropbox at around $4 billion.
At some point I hope that the entire story comes out about this round. Nearly everyone in Silicon Valley has taken a look. There was early interest at valuations of $8 billion or more, although one source says that it may have been firms who threw out huge numbers just to get a look at the company’s financials. As of a couple of weeks ago I had “firm” information that the round would close at $5 billion or more. → Read More
If you’re a fan of cloud-based music lockers, it’s a good time to be alive. Back in March, Amazon somewhat surprisingly beat Apple and Google to the music streaming and storage punch with their “Cloud Drive” and “Cloud Player”. Both Google and Apple have since launched cloud music offerings (or betas thereof), and all three continue to improve and evolve as time marches on.
As a music fan, it’s great to see cloud music storage and streaming services moving forward in tandem, even if we all have to admit to having our own personal favorite. Because, frankly, the more competition in this space, the better. Which is why you should be paying attention to a new startup that’s entering stage left: Mecanto. Yes, today, a new cloudy music service enters the arena, promising unlimited music streaming and storage to listeners all over the world — that won’t put a dent in your wallet. (Mecanto is offering TC readers 1,000 free 6-month subscriptions. Huzzah! See below for more info.) → Read More
We’ve been tracking the twists and turns of the Dropbox mega funding round for over a month now. In July Sarah Lacy wrote that they’d be raising $200 million to $300 million at a $5 billion or higher valuation. A week ago MG Siegler wrote that the auction process was over and Dropbox was considering bids as high as $10 billion.
The company has now chosen which investors will lead and participate in the round, we’ve heard from one of our sources. The final valuation will be less than $6 billion, and we’ve heard that the original estimates of a $200 million – $300 million round are still accurate. We do not yet know who’s leading the round or otherwise participating, but that information will probably become available soon. → Read More
Dropbox, the startup that makes it super-easy to sync files between your computers, phones, and other devices, is growing. A lot. As in, they’re about to hire hundreds of people — and they’re getting an office that’s eight times larger than their current space to fit them all.
The company has just finalized plans to move from their current office on San Francisco’s Market Street across town to 185 Berry Street in China Basin, just down the street from AT&T Park. Their current office is around 11,000 square feet. Their new home: 87,000. The company plans to move into the new office early next year.
According to real estate firm Jones Lang LaSalle, this is the second largest tech lease in San Francisco this year, after Twitter’s agreement to lease space in Central Market.
→ Read More
We’ve heard from multiple sources that Dropbox is finally moving on raising its next venture round and it’s a whopper. They’ve had preliminary conversations with several investors, several solid offers they’ve passed on earlier this year and are meeting with investment banks to handle the offering now. Allen & Co. is said to be in the mix, but we’ve also heard nothing has been finalized.
The real news are the numbers we’re hearing from multiple sources close to the company. Dropbox is looking to raise between $200 million and $300 million according to these sources. In terms of valuation, the company has already had multiple offers at a valuation north of $2 billion range, and recently more informal discussions in the $8 billion-valuation range. Our sources expect the valuation to end up in the $5 billion to $10 billion range. → Read More
The Allen and Co. conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho is a peculiar beast. Press aren’t allowed to attend or cover any of the panels and aren’t allowed in the storied Duchin bar.
In addition, attendees are not allowed to talk to the press about the content of any of the meetings which makes for some interesting adventures in reporting.
Still, despite restrictions, attendance is totally worthwhile; After all it’s the place where mythical investor Warren Buffett rubs elbows with Zynga founder Mark Pincus rubs elbows with actress Salma Hayek rubs elbows with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason rubs elbows with fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg rubs elbows with Facebook investor Peter Thiel and so forth. → Read More
Storage startup Dropbox has hired Ramsey Homsany as it’s General Counsel. Homsany is a long time Google lawyer. He joined the company in 2003 and was most recently the deputy general counsel of the commercial group. The 100 or so internal lawyers that reported to him dealt with Google’s various commercial and partnership relationships.
That experience is what Dropbox needs right now, CEO Drew Houston told me today. The company is inking lots of partnerships, for example. And huge growth is on the way.
“Hundreds of millions of people will be moving their hard drives to Dropbox in the coming years,” says Houston, “and we’ll be pioneering a new legal and policy frontier.” → Read More
It’s been an incredibly rough week for Dropbox. On Monday, news broke that a bug in the service’s authentication software effectively made passwords optional for around four hours over the weekend — meaning that you could log into anyone’s account simply by entering their user name.
Given what Dropbox is used for — namely, syncing your most important files between computers — that’s a huge deal. Especially since the service has promoted its security features as one of its selling points. At the time Dropbox said that “much less than 1 percent” of users could have potentially been affected. Now we’ve obtained an email that Dropbox sent out this afternoon to users who were affected by the breach and it’s much more specific.
First, the good news: the scale of the attack affected “fewer than a hundred accounts”. But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs. That’s obviously very alarming. → Read More
This morning a post on Pastebin outlined a serious security issue that was spotted at Dropbox: for a brief period of time, the service allowed users to log into accounts using any password. In other words, you could log into someone’s account simply by typing in their email address. Given that many people entrust Dropbox with important data (one of the service’s selling points is its security), that’s a really big deal.
We’ve now confirmed with Dropbox that the service did have this issue yesterday — Dropbox says that it began after a code push at 1:54 PM PDT and was fixed at 5:46 PM PDT (they had the fix live five minutes after they discovered it). So, in total, the bug was live for around four hours. → Read More
Recently I sat down with a well-connected Silicon Valley CEO who just raised a ton of money, and who knew of other startups raising even more. There is a new startup club of younger companies raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. I already knew a couple of them, but I started asking a few venture capitalists and now I have a pretty good list of who is in that club and who is trying to get in (see below).
As we all watch the established Web companies go public (LinkedIn, Pandora) or prepare for an IPO (Groupon, Zynga, Facebook), there is this new class of younger, but fast-growing, startups rising up right behind them. A lot of them are out raising money right now at $1 billion valuations. These are $50 to $100 million rounds, and they are generally going to companies showing incredible growth rates in both users and revenues, at least according to investors who have looked at these deals.
So who is in the new billion dollar valuation club? → Read More
Ever heard of Dropship? It’s an open-source project that “enables arbitrary, anonymous transfers of files between Dropbox accounts.” Dropbox hopes you haven’t; they tried to squelch it this week, and even accidentally reported that it was subject to a DMCA takedown notice, with predictably futile results. I’m mostly sympathetic: I’m a huge fan of their service, Dropship was a clear violation of their terms, and for obvious reasons they don’t want to turn into an anonymous peer-to-peer file-sharing service. Unfortunately, they accidentally built a system which enabled just that.
How about Sony’s PlayStation Network? Of course you have. It was so thoroughly hacked this week that Sony had to shut it down indefinitely. Did you also know that Sony’s PS3 firmware is effectively wide open, because they made a hilariously stupid security mistake? Did you know that that’s probably how PSN got hacked, and that it raised the spectre of the hacker(s) taking over every connected PlayStation 3 in the world and turning them into by far the biggest botnet in history? That probably wasn’t what Sony had in mind, but they accidentally built a system which enabled just that. → Read More
Dropbox will announce a number of milestones on Monday morning, we’ve learned. The file backup and sharing service was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. It was in one of the early Y Combinator classes, now has 25 million users and 200 million files are “saved” daily, and more than 1 million every five minutes.
That’s impressive growth from the 4 million users the company had a year ago (they had two million in late 2009). Dropbox enables people to sync files and media across platforms and devices, in order to have them available from any location. The service also allows people to easily and quickly share files with others. Dropbox provides users with 2 GB of space for free, and they can pay for more.
People use dropbox for personal storage, file syncing between machines, and group collaboration on projects. They have desktop software for the usual OSs, and mobile access, that makes things run smoothly. → Read More
tunesBag, an Austrian music sharing startup that has been around for quite some time, has just raised €250,000 through a government fund and an undisclosed investor. The platform itself is, like many others, a cloud-based iTunes where you can sync your local music library via the cloud to a variety of devices. But the startup has recently added a nifty feature that lets users connect their Dropbox account with their tunesBag library, making the service effectively iTunes-meets-Dropbox.
Through tight API integration, this works well and lets users sync all of their tracks to Dropbox so that they can be streamed. The question remains how many people are actually using Dropbox as a music storing and sharing service with the arrival of many other cloud-based ‘locker’ services dedicated to music. → Read More
The Web is a medium for sharing. Whether it be photos, videos, music, links, code, we share the content we produce and consume all the time. The rise of the social graph has only brought more attention to the ways we share and with whom we share. After all, sharing is caring, amirite friends?
In a recent post, I talked about some of the problems that remain in a specific (and familiar) part of the content-sharing sphere: file-sharing. At the end of the post, I mentioned the popular cloud storage, sync, and file-sharing startup, Dropbox, as a service I use frequently. Part of what makes Dropbox so great is its simplicity — you download the utility, create an account, and you can easily share all of your electronic files in a virtual cloud folder, collaborate with friends and colleagues, and sync between devices and hard drives. Boom. → Read More
It really is kind of amazing that Instagram has shot past two million users in just a few months with only an iPhone app. No Android app, no website, no real third-party support. But starting today, that changes as they’re finally ready to unveil their API. And they already have some pretty nice implementations right off the bat to show what it can do.
Co-founder Kevin Systrom says that it would have been easy enough for them to implement a simple API early on, but they didn’t want to do that (that’s why you may have heard about one developer getting unofficial access shut off). Instead, Instagram decided they wanted to make an API that was both massively scalable and provided a realtime feed of everything going on across the service. Today, they’re unveiling this realtime API for four different elements of Instagram: user photos, tags, locations, and geographies. → Read More
It’s time for another tour of a hot tech company’s office, and this week brings us one of my favorites: Dropbox. The service makes it easy to share files between multiple computers, and their office is loaded with neat memorabilia, games, and unreasonably tall people.
Make sure to watch til the very end for a surprise, twist ending. That I won’t be able to live down for quite a while.
And in case you missed them before, make sure to check out our previous episodes:
We’ve all walked down the street and seen someone with a weird tattoo and thought, “they’re going to regret that later”. What may seem cool at the time, might not seem so cool years from now. Is it possible that the current crop of mobile photo filters will lead to the same type of regret? PicPlz clearly thinks it’s possible.
A new feature the service announced today is Dropbox integration. This nifty ability has been turned on from the backend, so iPhone, Android, and web users can use it immediately. And if you do use it, you’ll be able to automatically save both your original photo and your filtered photo to your Dropbox account in the cloud. → Read More
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