|
Great insight and thoughts on Houston and Dropbox. Dropbox would have floundered at Apple. Even a loose competitor, Box, where Aaron, the co-founder, owned around 5.5% (after all exercised stocks) post IPO, that still was over $100M while he got to continue running the company through now. Apple buying Dropbox for $800M back in 2009-2010 would’ve given Houston $300M or so I am assuming? I’m sure even if he eventually came out with much less, even less than Aaron, continuing to run the company for over a decade more is far more fulfilling. And of course Houston is a billionare from Dropbox since it went public a little over two years ago in 2018. — I remember thinking Snapchat, namely, Spiegel and Murphy co-founders as being a bit crazy to not sell Snapchat to Facebook in late 2013 for $3B when Instagram was bought for $1B 1.5 years earlier. However the two remaining founders had taken $10M a piece in the previous 2013 funding round. So like you said about $20M being insane as it would be for me. A lot easier to turn that down with all the possibly upsides and millions in your bank account. Even with Snapchat not exploding the way it was thought it would later on:
- a year after rebuffing FB, they raised almost $500M at a $10B+ valuation in late 2014.
- 2.5 years later, in early-ish 2017, they went public at $30B+, raising $3.5B.
- Tencent became the next big company to have a large stake in Snapchat. After being a previous small investor. Gathering 12-18% of the company by late 2017/early 2018 when Snap stock was doing pretty badly.
- Today, the co-founders still have super voting rights and Snap stock is back to being above $30B while seemingly everyone copies them. They unethically (IMO) kicked out the third co-founder for a while by then, like Twitter did before them, but less ruthlessly in the end since Snap’s 3rd guy, Brown, still made out very well. Twitter’s Noah Glass on the other hand...it’s just too sad. No less seeing the worst Twitter guy of them all, Dorsey, getting all this praise for his recent big donations with almost no mentions of how he began his lies and consolidation of power [at Twitter] |