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Dropbox Shares Leap in I.P.O., and Silicon Valley Smiles
Dropbox, the file-sharing company and Silicon Valley darling, had a strong market debut Friday, a reassuring sign for the technology industry and for the investors who have billions locked up in other highly valued but privately held start-ups.
Shares of San Francisco-based Dropbox soared above $30 shortly after trading in the stock opened Friday morning. That was 45 percent higher than the $21-per-share price at which the company sold 36 million shares on Thursday night. The initial public offering valued Dropbox at $9.2 billion.
[...] Founded in 2007 by two Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer science students, Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi, Dropbox has never turned an annual profit, despite strong sales growth.
Also at Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and CNBC.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Monday March 26 2018, @02:54PM (3 children)
Look for the companies that turn a solid profit, year after year. Look at their stock valuations. These are usually non-sexy companies, like maybe your local garbage collection service, and they may well trade at a P/E ratio of 10 or less.
Then you see the tech bubble: Stocks selling for crazy amounts, while the companies make very little profit (or none at all). But once the companies reach a certain size, somehow they almost never fail. Instead, they are bought up by the next generation of tech companies with crazy valuations.
It's a strange world...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday March 26 2018, @03:12PM (2 children)
That's what John Scully said to an all-hands meeting at Live Picture.
Having grown bored with rocketing Apple Computer into a smoking radioactive crater, he came to Live Picture to do the same to... wait for it... a... TOOLS COMPANY!
Live Picture's product, also called Live Picture was a way cool graphic editor. But all Scully could think about was that The Street wouldn't value us because we made tools.
So he acquired some other company that made a competitor to QuickTime VR, and had the idea that Our Internet Strategy could consist of little other than a platform for marketing studies in which human test subjects could use their mice to virtually pick up and rotate all around proposed product packages but.... wait for it....
THEY WOULD DO SO OVER THE INTERNET!
He hired a really rude CEO to take us public. Really companies like Live Picture should always be privately held. We did just fine as a private company.
LP did a reverse 7-to-1 stock split, the IPO was cancelled, Kate Mitchell fell on her sword then LP declared bankrupcy.
I have to say though, my stock certificate - and yes I had money to burn so I exercised my options - sure looks cool. It's printed the way money is but on a much larger sheet of paper.
The bankruptcy was bought out by I think MGI, then MGI's bankruptcy was bought out by Roxio.
That was some really cool code in that graphic editor.
"was"
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Funny) by khallow on Monday March 26 2018, @04:53PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @04:16AM
of a bunch of the people he's no doubt be responsible in helping get fired or laid off during downsizing events and you might not have to run back to your room for that pillow :)
If only we could do that with more executive types.