Dropbox Raising Massive Round at a $5B-Plus Valuation
Sounds like a round for the founders and employees to sell some shares (called a series f?), unless Dropbox has some major expansion planned to build its own CDN and data centres instead of using S3. The amount of savings at there scale (200 million new files / day [1]) would be huge as data via S3 is already more expensive then running your own bare metal boxes. I would imagine that Dropbox pays some sort of bulk price, but I can't find any information.<p>I don't think the 5 billion dollar valuation is out of the ball park considering that they solve a problem that a lot of people encounter including my mother. Their solution is simple and elegant and seems to work. Last statistics I heard they had 25 million users [1] and growing, while I dont know how many of those users are active subscribers I can imagine the conversion ratio is much higher then normal freemium products.<p>While there has been a lot of anti-Dropbox news in the tech press lately, we need to remember we live in an information bubble that doesn't reach the normal user.<p>[1] <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/billion-dollar-valuatio-club/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/billion-dollar-valuatio-clu...</a>