Fate Of Box Essay

Well the $1.5m Series A investment by DFJ represented around a quarter of the company when it was made in late 2006. Through the torrid years of further capital raisings since, that Series A investment now represents just 5% of the company after it has been diluted. Don't feel too bad about the diminished influence of those Series A shares, they are still worth a little over $95m at the most recent financing price, for a gain of roughly 63x.

The fate of Box is still incomplete. It's unclear whether hiring expensive sales people to sell customers on $3,653 annual storage plans proves to be a wise one. It may very well be if those same customers are coming back in year 10 and paying 100x the amount. Or it may be riding a wave of desperate grasping

In today’s fast-moving market, where the predominant SaaS delivery model means customers can easily churn away to a competitor, building a standout company of lasting value is extremely challenging. But many of today’s current software-industry leaders – newly public companies like Veeva, WorkDay, and Tableau with multibillion-dollar market caps, and fast-growing stars like Box, Dropbox, and Atlassian, which are next on the IPO list – can teach budding entrepreneurs a lot about how to build a global software powerhouse. What have these companies done right to get “into the game” against aging but still-entrenched incumbents such as Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP? I believe these companies, are, very simply, making the right

But in addition to delivering their product via the cloud, software companies today must be much more focused on their products’ usability. Gone are the days of creating complex, on-premise bloatware and then charging millions to install and maintain it. (Yes, that distant wail is the sound of highly paid SAP consultants crying over their soon-to-be lost, multi-year contracts.) Now, enterprise customers want affordable, flexible, Web-centric and easy-to-use software they can access anywhere—including on mobile devices—that mimics the services they use in their daily lives, from Facebook to Netflix to