> "as one kind of comparison (not definitive by any means, just one that we have the #s to do..): box did around 300m in revenue last year (so less than DB), but Box market cap was around 1.5B at that point, so 5X revenue. if you did the same math to DB, we're looking at around 2B market cap for DB...1/5 of their last raise at 10B =/"

This math drives me nuts!

The logic of directly tying valuations of a private company to the only public direct competitor in the space is flawed (analysis don't use GOOG,MSFT for this). Using the current logic; if Dropbox (private) beats the crap out of Box (public), this would result in reduced growth and reduced quarterly numbers for Box. However, Box's numbers are then used as indicators/benchmarks for the cloud storage space, and then used to price Dropbox.

When you look at Box's valuation, you should be aware that the price is partially because of risk/competition from Dropbox. How much of the price? I have no idea.

To borrow a comment from @barleyworth from another thread:

here are things that actually matter for valuing these sorts of companies:

* cost to acquire a customer (Box's S-1 notoriously had sales+marketing which was greater than their revenue)

* customer churn, or relatedly, lifetime value per customer

* subscriber growth

* margins (i.e. storage costs)

- Full disclosure I am an ex-Dropbox employee.