Hello and welcome back to our regular morning view of private companies, public markets and the gray areas in between.
This morning, we take a look at Dropbox's earnings report (Q4 2019) and explain why recent financial performance and plans for 2020 are causing storage and productivity-oriented SaaS player stocks to skyrocket.
While the broader SaaS category has seen huge gains in valuation in recent quarters, Dropbox has not. Together with Box, the two companies focused on file sharing stayed behind as the value of their broader unicorn cohort increased. Why? Mostly slower growth. But with Dropbox Stocks rise 13% this morning before going public, to more than $ 21 – the original IPO price – maybe things will change for either company.
To find out what happened, we will first find out what Dropbox did in the fourth quarter and compare its forecasts with market expectations. In the end, we translate what we learned from public SaaS companies for their private startup brothers. As always, we look for market signals in public companies that affect the collection and evaluation of startups.