&gt; <i>&quot;Clearly Dropbox thought there was at least a $100MM opportunity&quot;</i><p>The opportunity was the team, not the product they were producing.<p>Say you had a room full of math prodigies, but all they were doing was watching TV all day. You hire these math prodigies for $X and put them to work solving math problems - this doesn&#x27;t mean that watching TV is worth $X, in fact it likely means the opposite, that their value is underutilized by whatever they&#x27;re doing right now.<p>So there <i>isn&#x27;t</i> enough money in making email apps, but a team capable of producing a great email app can be put to use doing things that do make a lot of money - but it sure isn&#x27;t making email apps.<p>And that&#x27;s unfortunate, because as users we&#x27;re missing out on a lot of great products. The dark side of the immense growth in software (and immense growth in software salaries) is that entire products and services are no longer economical, even though we&#x27;d all love to see them. The VC system that drives these early acquisitions and acquihires is just one more factor among many that limit the field of what can be economically produced.