Comment by mikeryan
15 years ago
I actually would be surprised if Dropbox exited via IPO. I think their offering fits in with a lot of large companies profiles. Dropbox could easily fit into a portfolio of Google, Microsoft, even Cisco.
explaining Cisco - Cisco seems to be trying to break into the "Digital Home" market with things like FlipVideo and some other video services. Dropbox would make a great cloud storage play for media services.
They are obviously swinging for the fences, especially with Sequoia involved. It's fair to expect that they would aim for a 9 figure exit. IPO or not.
Interesting case about Cisco. I would've also thrown in Apple because of their huge war chest and select big acquisitions. Dropbox could easily outdo MobileMe. Then again, I'm sure Google wouldn't mind getting a GDrive finally.
But then, there's facebook!(Sure, they got Drop.io, but facebook loves grabbing startups away before Google get to them)
Dropbox uses Amazon S3 for their storage. Google and Microsoft have their own cloud storage backends - if they did acquire Dropbox, they would probably throw away most of the technology, making an acquisition somewhat less likely.