What's with the absurd valuation?

Are they gonna bump the price to $10 and hope to sell 10 million copies?

Do they hope adding a mail client to Dropbox will bring them.. um.. how many million new customers?

Is it some sort of tax evasion scheme? Or do they plan to flip it to the next bigger idiot for $200mio? Or what, the hell, is the idea here?

I'd really like to understand the rationale behind these kind of deals. Who profits from doing that?

> around $100 million in cash and stock

There was talk of Dropbox being valued in the billions, if the majority of the sale price is stock (say, $90 million?) would that be a high amount of stock for Dropbox to use on an acquisition ($4 billion valuation, $90 million = ~2%?) or does that sound reasonable for something they're expecting to be important in the future?

Can someone please explain the economics behind this deal? Congrats to those involved...but at the end of the day, this just doesn't make much sense (to an outsider at least).

I don't know about 100M, but I can definitely see how Mailbox is worth a lot of money to Dropbox.

Dropbox has always been a company that stood on the quality of its product. It doesn't have the most features (that's probably SkyDrive or Google Drive) and it's not the cheapest, but it works insanely well and it works everywhere you want it to. That, and the headstart they had, is what put Dropbox where it is right now.

Mailbox is a quality-first mail app that fits with Dropbox's quality standards, and it allows them to take their first step into the "feature-rich web storage" field without trying to build out an office suit like MS Office or Google Docs that they clearly can't catch up to. This was a chance to buy their way into the mail game, with what some people would consider the best mobile mail app in the business.

Mailbox is the Draw Something of Email.

Someone commented on that article, that whomever pushed through this deal was worth their weight in gold.

Or ~4700 pounds.

$100,000,000 / ($1,500/oz * 14 oz/lb) = 4700 lbs

Cost? An acquisition isn't a "cost."

However, this one surely will become a cost when they write down the value of Mailbox by $99.95 million.

Whoah. So much for the "acquihire" snark.

Congratulations to everyone involved.

It is a very high number, but people aren't getting that they didn't buy the codebase or the team. They bought the waiting list. If Dropbox had been wanting to get into the email game, a waiting list of 1M people is a pretty good way to start. Sure they could have emailed out a blast to all their users and gotten a ton of traction that way, but they can _still_ do that.

Not to mention, the name Mailbox is a pretty perfect match for Dropbox.

I know that many here are saying that valuation/cost is too big but I'm convinced that this "cloud" is much bigger than people think. And I for one want Dropbox version of email (and cut crappy gmail) - something that is simple and just works.