Box

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• neutral assessment Aaron Levie

  the industry is moving so fast. How do I make decisions right now that I'm going to be stuck with in a fast changing space. So a lot of it is actually like, can you get your architecture set up for like optionality in the future?

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  you need to be able to swap out different parts. These are the kinds of conversations that we have.

• neutral assessment Aaron Levie

  the hurdles unfortunately are much more like practical considerations. Like literally like, I can't just, you know, turn on an AI thing that looks at all my data. And then an employee can ask the question because guess what? It's all of a sudden going to reveal, you know, secrets in the organization that they shouldn't have had access to, but there were over provision for access like five years ago.

• neutral assessment Aaron Levie

  there are a lot of customers where they're now ahead of the technology based on the set of use cases that they have.

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  I'm talking to the people that are talking to us, which means that by definition, they're leaning in, they're a little bit more forward thinking.

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  On our end, you know, we, we have a, we have, um, one of our first kind of agentic use cases in, in just the fact that it's not kind of a single, you know, one shot, uh, in the model, um, is just, we extract data from documents. So then you can, you know, say, Hey, here's a contract, here's an invoice. I want to, you know, read the document, put that into a database and then automate a workflow around it. That's, you know, clearly got, at least in our world product market fit, like, like, like m

• bullish fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we just did the math and then we said how are we going to get to the kind of scale that this category needs and the only answer the only mathematical answer was you got to give it away

• neutral assessment Aaron Levie

  that's a pretty bold call... the concept that you would give away a product for free to Enterprise it's fairly R

• neutral assessment Mark Andreessen

  how fast do you need to grow to win in the Enterprise

• bullish endorsement Aaron Levie

  we think that that fremium in the Enterprise is actually even cooler than than absolutely than premium in the consumer St

• mixed assessment Aaron Levie

  Mark was right and wrong... he was right about one and wrong about the other... he was right on was selling to businesses... wrong was the fremium model

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  like what we're trying to do um like workday that's like the fusion where it's it's how do we take the ideas from the consumer internet and the consumerization of the Enterprise but apply those in a way that the CIO of of you know Proctor and Gamble can feel comfortable deploying

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we started box and um as a really really simple way to to you know get TI your content from anywhere and the problem actually that we were solving was was slightly different than than Dropbox it was actually more around how do you make it really easy to share

• bullish prediction Aaron Levie

  we're actually launching some products that will um let you be more selective around who can see your content

• bullish endorsement Aaron Levie

  if you can make your product intuitive enough that gets them to engage and understand

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  you have to have a a a security model that better understands how work is is is changing and how our information is changing

• bullish fact_claim Aaron Levie

  a lot of what we do goes into okay any device any software make sure the data is safe

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  the most important thing though for them is not the device it's not even the software it's the data back up that data versions protect that data protect it make sure it doesn't get leaked

• bullish fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we have million users that have done that and they they bring the product into work they solve their problem maybe maybe it doesn't bottle up to be a a big enough need where they need our Enterprise Edition so then they just stay on the free product or but maybe the Enterprise it buyer realizes that they need to move into this new world of of you know it infrastructure and then they want the Enterprise Edition

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  when you apply that to a business model that is sort of a Next Generation business model of freemium where people can bring their own technology into work it dramatically changes the entire kind of Enterprise selling and distribution and adoption process which is then Bottoms Up

• neutral assessment Aaron Levie

  over the past kind of three to five years I'd say has been just this massive transition where you know not only with the cloud but the number of devices that we can work from with the change in work and habits that we have where we want to share we have this new crop of technology companies that are emerging and we we're but one of them

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we were specifically trying to solve a problem that we were running into as just individuals with our data and we wanted to access it from anywhere and so we built this product that we didn't think about Bottoms Up tops down we just thought of how do you build technology that an individual can love

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  you can kind of think about it as Microsoft SharePoint if SharePoint worked right

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  we have a partnership with with box so you can do things like when you're inside box you can easily push a file into yammer and have a conversation about it

• bullish endorsement Don Charlton

  I would love to sit inside um the the Boiler Room at box you know I I just think that that's a great company in terms of building out um software as a service infrastructure you know u i I really admire that company

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  Yammer, Box, Survey Monkey, huge stalwart names, you know, you go to bed easy at night, they're going to crush. They are crushing. They're going to You stay stalworth, but they'll be in the future. I think you see that before. They're monsters. Yeah. Pure storage monsters. Yeah. Monsters in the making.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  you know we have this underlying goal when we started the company I'm a product guy at heart we looked at the two building blocks of payroll I think we talked about this a year ago when we last chatted yeah um you know for the employee it's receiving their pay and really the conduit that lets them literally receive their salary and for the employer it's how they acknowledge the contributions of their employee and reward them for their hard work you take those two building blocks um there should

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  we actually offer every customer that signs up two months free right now oh great um had no one we had no one stop using us once that expires um the product does its job it's the easiest to use one out there it's one of the most affordable and um customers it's been great

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  everyone needs to care about design and think long term uh according to Josh Reeves follow Joshua Reeves on Twitter at Joshua Reeves and everybody tries in payroll.com especially if you got a company that's under you know 20 30 people like this is a no-brainer and you're in California and if you've got a friend or a family member who's running a small business these are the kind of tools when you point them to it that you're actually helping them you're helping those people because they're getti

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  our goal is to actually work with best of breed solutions that are out there today

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  our goal is to be the best payroll partner uh and best payroll product out there

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  we'll have fairly Nationwide coverage by the end of the year

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  as long as the government has bad UI and ux there's a lot of value to what we're we're providing

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we've created a very simple easy to use product but it's very full featured our goal is to literally take all of the requirements that the government has on a small business owner from a employment perspective and say we'll take care of those details

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I think it's going to continue um and the customer benefits at the end of the day which is which is the best part

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I'm really excited about this trend reaching into both Enterprise which is where I work previously but now really small business which is a space that's been lacking in having access to really high quality easy to use tools for a long long time

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I think there's a big shift happening I think uh ultimately You Know Jack dorsy who I would view as a leader in this shift um even just the concept of how you embed design in a product engineering um sales and marketing organization and make sure everyone cares about the user experience

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  you would think ADP looks terrible so how important is design for startups today

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I mean that was one of the things that first struck me when I met you guys is that the design was just really top shelf

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the business is doing well the the product is extraordinary it's beautiful design is great

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  he raised 6 million back in December from people like Aaron Le Levy rather from box

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we have around 900 people total

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  20 million total users right now yes and about 180,000 businesses uh actively using the service

• mixed assessment Aaron Levie

  we actually think it's growing too slowly but but you know we have uh uh we have a lot more to do

• bullish prediction Aaron Levie

  we're going after what we think is going to be a TENS of billions of dollar opportunity

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  as a startup just competing in the consumer space you would have no additional business model that could fund that so that's why we decided to move to the Enterprise and a lot of that is sort of proven out in the in the in the market

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we store 15 times the amount of data in the same size hard drive that we than we did um uh you know when we started the company eight years ago so we used to buy 300 gab hard drives now we now we can get like 4 and a half terabyte hard drives or rather it was 200 gigabytes and now it's you know three terabytes or whatever so um so for the same dollars we can store 15 times more data and so we're just driving we're we're reflecting that in our product by by giving more space away for customers um

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  our business model is very different ... we can afford to give out more for the end User ... the economics of the storage space were going to be very untenable for a startup um to try and compete in the consumer side

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  we try and work in a compliment way with with Google so usually you know docs and drive are are compared against box on the low end of the market ... if you are a major you know financial services company ... the set of processes you need around your content is going to be very different and that's where we've invested our time and energy as opposed to Google which is going to more build purely horizontal consumer grade

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we don't say you can go run box on premise inside your data center ... I don't think we'll be sort of you know trying to go deep in the on- premise World

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  box notes is probably a um is probably more of a one-off in terms of our investment into the end user side of the application we're most of our effort is is spent towards building the platform

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we're not intending to go you know build a complete office suite or build a bunch of other productivity Solutions

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we knocked off one horizontal category that we think can highlight um how lot maybe inspire a little bit exactly and and and really just continue this trend of we have an all new set of applications that we're going to use in the workplace

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  we think there's a huge opportunity for you know 100,000 applications like box notes and what are what's the architecture that they're going to need um those types of applications going to need for this mobile Cloud you know era

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  you have $280 billion $290 billion in Enterprise software spend when and about 95% of that is on the desktop in the Legacy model so you're going to have hundreds of billions of dollars of of sort of Market um you know and and budget be created for these new applications

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  we launched a product three weeks ago called box notes which is exactly like this

• bullish prediction Aaron Levie

  we would love for there to be you know three major platforms and the business like ours and I think most startups you you gain leverage by there being fragmentation in the marketplace because any one of your you know traditional incumbents can go support their platform very deeply but they can't support all of the the platforms

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  it's been an amazing kind of Boon for us

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we have about uh 40 to 50% of all of our activity on mobile

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  mobile actually ended up being the real Catalyst for why we are even relevant in the Enterprise

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  it's basically the exact opposite of Microsoft SharePoint um so it's meant to be simple and easy to use and it's cost effective

• bullish assessment Josh Stein

  he was a pioneer in hardware. He had he he had, you know, he had to completely reinvent the business. His he had complete investor abandonment at the worst possible time. And you look at what he's built today and it's incredible. I mean, it's an icon it's I would say both the Jambox and the Upper iconic products.

• bullish fact_claim Josh Stein

  he's got you know BBC and Al Jazer and you know Yeah. There are people spending serious money for this. Hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on on the product.

• bullish assessment Josh Stein

  he had done pretty much exactly what he said he was going to do. That's that's great. So as an investor that's what you're you're making a guess about the future. So someone who puts an anchor and says, 'Here's what I'm going to do over the next year.' If they actually go do it, I'm much more likely to believe the next two years.

• bullish fact_claim Josh Stein

  Box is doing great. I mean, they're just, you know, they've been growing at 100% year-over-year. Um, you know, plus growing 100% at nine-digit revenue scale. Wow. Is something that we don't see all very often. And, you know, they have 97 or 98% of the Fortune 500 is paying customers.

• bullish assessment Josh Stein

  I actually think they're pretty different companies when you get down to it. You know, I think um the needs of the consumer space and the needs of business and enterprise are are pretty different. And I think um in particular the uh Dropbox is really based in the sync metaphor and I think sync is not really ideal from a business standpoint. So if you have a bunch of secret documents, you generally don't want to sync them to a thousand laptops, each of which can be stolen. Yeah. or intercepted ve

• bullish assessment Josh Stein

  first of all, it's a great product. Like these guys, you know, it was three people. Um, they'd raised a couple hundred,000. They'd been at it. They had like, let's say like almost 20,000 of MR of monthly recurring revenue. Um, so they have people really using the product. I used the product. It was super simple to use.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  one of the two, three top hottest startups uh in the United States right now, Box.

• neutral assessment Mark Cuban

  Aaron's super smart and he's going to do great, right? But you've got to I in my mind I always have a semblance of you know what am I going to what am I going to feel good about? And you also have to realize this wasn't two years ago. This was nine years ago, right? It's a pretty crazy idea.

• bearish assessment Mark Cuban

  I just thought that was going to cost too much money and he was going to end up having to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to eventually do tens of million in revenue.

• bullish fact_claim Mark Cuban

  The com the product worked great. only the reports he was sending me were all and he was taking money out and I can't really go into a whole lot of detail because the authorities are involved but just you know he was using things in ways he shouldn't have been using things we finally figured it out and um now he's no longer involved with the company I got back involved in the company took back control of it um and now they're they did more in revenue this past month than they did the previous ye

• bullish assessment Mark Cuban

  It's not just and then we're able to seg. So when you have a group of people, you have to be able to count the number of people in the group. You have to be able, you know, did these people go from this frame over here and is it the same person that went over here? So it's cool. Yeah, it's it's advanced stuff and it works.

• bullish assessment Mark Cuban

  So these guys count in real time. They're really cool sensors. Um, and they're adding new features, weather and all that.

• bullish assessment Mark Cuban

  It's a company called Motion Loft, which I loved. It's a sensor based company. Motion Loft. Motion Loft. Um they do they do real time counting. So you put a sensor on the outside of a building say in New York um San Francisco wherever and it just counts people cars and bikes in real time and so the the information is invaluable.

• bullish endorsement Mark Cuban

  I use this app we had we had created right now. It's on iOS called Cyberdust, right? Um two words, c yb e r space dust. And the whole point is if I want to talk about a company, I I I got sued by these idiots that um said that I stole their idea for a mixed martial arts thing that we put on Access TV and they sued me on it. Right. We did discovery and our lawyers talked to him. They said, 'No, it's all We know that it's all bullshit.' And we lied about the whole thing, but you're still going to

• neutral fact_claim Jeff Lawson

  box is using us for two- Factor authentication right when you try to log in box and you're from a computer they've never seen before that maybe is in Afghanistan right and they say like yeah it's in China right well we just sent you a text message to you know verify your identity

• neutral assessment Matt Epstein

  we just we just did a half a half a billion dollar um B they look for the hockey stick whether that's users for something like Crux um or or or Revenue uh for something like Scout and and that needs to never stop right that's they're they're investing in that to see that 10x over whatever period of time

• bullish fact_claim Matt Epstein

  now today we are about 12 about 1,200 people I think a little over 1,200 people so going from you know me to to and two Founders to 1,200 people and two and a half years is just something you kind of have kind of have to be through to get it

• bullish assessment Matt Epstein

  we've essentially gone from a little over let's say been around about 2 and a half years now now and we've gone from approximately 0 in Revenue uh to uh over 21 million this year and and hopefully on track this year to go from 21 to 100 and so if this were a pissing match which it's not but I like winning pissing matches uh we would essentially be you know essentially one of the fastest growing SAS companies ever

• neutral assessment Jason Lemkin

  there's nothing more competitive on the which is like storage and file sharing I mean box more Enterprise

• mixed assessment Jason Lemkin

  box is one of the best SAS companies of all times but it's also in the single most competitive space and it has a low average deal size like the ticket size is low

• neutral fact_claim Jason Lemkin

  box was doing pre IO it was spending two years wow to get a customer on the theory it will keep them for three four five seven or 10 and then it will do upsells and upgrades so if the person is going to be a $300 a year customer we can spend $600 a year acquiring acquir in sales and marketing which is a little scary it's aggressive and box isn't that anymore box went public it scaled it back and Box is doing 300 and something million in Revenue now so it all worked out right

• mixed assessment Jason Lemkin

  when box or Facebook do their events they lost leaders to you know build the platforms and those guys are printing money

• bearish assessment Jason Lemkin

  they've also lost much of mobile right yeah so think it the big guys for ass sass they're doing what they have to do to stay in the game to keep their products current um but they're they haven't innovated in any interesting way

• bearish assessment Jason Lemkin

  it's hard for me to believe that that's going to have a material impact on Revenue the problem is these guys are just h by the materiality threshold

• bearish assessment Jason Lemkin

  the big guys for ass sass they're doing what they have to do to stay in the game to keep their products current um but they're they haven't innovated in any interesting way or like Oracle or sap they're buying all the old stuff because it has scale

• neutral fact_claim Jason Lemkin

  it's not even true with box anymore you know for box less than 1% of their revenue today is premium

• neutral fact_claim Jason Lemkin

  look at box like and box is a great company like basically the whole senior management team just turned over again okay SVP of engineering left S Sales left all of them Aaron at 390 million in revenues got to pick pick himself up and go recruit his sixth management team it's box was founded in 04 so we're 12 years out right that's hard

• neutral fact_claim Adam Nelson

  in the case of box it was file actions in the case of Dropbox we were we were looking at that file actions also as well as daily active users because there was a product that we really wanted people engage with as well

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  The trend that you just described is actually probably a net tailwind for us. So the more places, the more places that data is going and people are generating content and you have all these different places to store things, actually, the greater the challenge it is for an enterprise. So if you, if you think about you're a bank and, and there's, you know, files going into

• neutral assessment Aaron Levie

  And then we, you know, really just acknowledge that for our play, we had to be an enterprise software platform, and build up this idea of having a cloud content management platform end to end for the full lifecycle of your business.

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we basically did this like over a three month period pivoted the company and said, we're going to go out to the enterprise market. And that was that was sort of that kind of no hedging decision. And then we basically became an enterprise software company. So that was back in early part of 2007, late 2006, pivoted the company.

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  we compared that path, which was like, oh God, like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple. It's a race to the bottom... So we kind of saw that trend in 2006, 2007. We then looked at the enterprise market and we were like, oh my God, for some reason, we stumbled into this market that we never knew existed, which is enterprise spending millions of dollars just to manage their documents.

• bullish fact_claim Aaron Levie

  we were the first company of the new era, you know, sort of six years later, right around kind of the Facebook, YouTube sort of web 2.0 period. And we said, okay, let's let you store files in the cloud. And we're going to do a really big idea. We're actually going to give you a gigabyte of storage for free.

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  they're at least 100 times more dense than than the hard drives we bought when we started the company.

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  we've obviously been proven right on the cloud over peer to peer, specifically for our use case.

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  when we started box, we actually were also building a side product called Whirl, and Whirl was going to do peer to peer file sharing. So if you had a, if you had a corporate network, and everybody installed Whirl, you would basically be able to virtualize normally what would be in a server, because everybody would be just sharing files.

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  the third thing in particular in enterprise software, um, there's this one idiosyncrasy where your customers actually want to literally know like, how are your financials doing? Are you going to be able to manage my data for the long run? And so there's almost a kind of credibility brand transparency element to being public that ends up being uniquely helpful in enterprise software. That's not really the case in, in consumer like Airbnb or DoorDash doesn't really matter if these companies are pu

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  at a certain revenue scale, let's say a hundred million in recurring revenue, 200 million recurring revenue, you, you have enough predictability, uh, predictability in the business model where, um, you can, you know, operate at scale as a public company, I think with a high degree of forward looking, you know, kind of visibility and predictability and so that's good because that's sort of like job number one of going public is, is really make sure that you've got the business model locked in. Nu

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  not pointing any fingers at box's market cap but i think aaron levy kept that company in the news and in people's minds for years when it was in the wilderness and to your point about having a manifestation or a place you're going they've actually done relatively well in the current gen ai era and they've read how the growth and they've made it through the trough of despair but would that have happened without someone like a like a keith like like an aaron out there kind of beating the drum i do

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  one of my favorite companies, Box, because I've talked to the CEO, Aaron a bunch of times and he's just charming, has been talking ad nauseum for the last couple of quarters, maybe years at this point about helping people who have their data stored inside of Box, which is a traditional enterprise... They have a bunch of data in the cloud for their customers. And so they're building tools that I think are kind of aligned to what you're describing because they already have the data. So why not hel

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Aaron Levy said it could be 50% for customer support.

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levie

  um no but i'm not trying to ruin your questions only

• bullish fact_claim Aaron Levie

  what one scenario we gave it like our earning script from from one quarter and we said um uh you know if you were warren buffett um how would you improve this earning script and um it's like a random use case like nobody in the entire world would ever have you know asked that question of an earning script but all of a sudden it starts to amp up the cash flow message and the share repurchase message and the capital allocation message and so now you know when you're preparing to go in front of a w

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  most of the the work that went into to box ai was you know these are like 1am sessions um you know with the the the team or cto on like okay can we how do we solve this and and how do we figure this thing out we hired a we hired an intern at at midnight on a saturday um and and just you know some some kid at stanford that was just like online and ready to rock right away

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  when you have a good demo like this your mind starts to just come up with ideas yeah i was immediately like who in the organization has to approve this and uh i wonder if i connect this to my email and i can source 100 leads from the database who haven't been contacted

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we are again we're at the just the starting point of how does that actually get architected

• mixed prediction Unattributed

  we're probably like five years away from from you know society actually understanding how that would all come together and having the technology actually integrated in this kind of capacity

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  so now you can imagine you know you're a sales rep and you're looking at you know a product marketing you know pdf and you really quickly want some ideas in front of a customer of like so what are some use cases for this new technology you know box ai would be this assistant for you to go and quickly you know answer that question

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  that also then dramatically reduces kind of hallucinations um that that you might see because it's not attempting to make anything up um it really is we're really kind of forcing it to stay um you know within the document

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  that's we think that's going to be the breakthrough

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the point is not to train a model on your enterprise data... it's to separate the underlying access controls that people have to information from the ai model which you use as a reasoning engine for that data

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  we're seeing that most cios most ceos are recognizing that ai is a real platform shift... we're seeing you know universal optimism about how to leverage this technology... across our 110 thousand plus customers... there's a lot of excitement

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  every interaction you have with box ai is explicitly your you have to decide to use it... there's no training of the ai model there's no logging of the information that you gave the model so it can train later all of that is done in this very stateless ephemeral way... we have a very very high standard for security compliance data privacy

• bullish assessment Aaron Levie

  we had we've been doing seven or eight years of work in ai um and uh that the challenge was every single use case a customer had you know i i want to understand my contracts i want to understand my film scripts i want to understand my you know blueprint files every conversation we had was a different ai model that you had to narrowly you know kind of train and implement for that one use case and so it never really scaled because it would be like you know be like if we were building on the web an

• neutral prediction Aaron Levy

  I asked him what percentage of work of your teams, your companies, your firms will be done by AI by the end of this year, 2023. ... all three of them came up with the same number, 30%.

• bullish prediction David Friedberg

  here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features.

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  It has reached the absolute top of the iOS app store here in the United States, besting even ChatGPT, besting even Google Gemini, which means that OpenAI has yet another hit on its hand. If you don't know what Sora is, it's a new social app from OpenAI using the Sora 2 model that allows you to create social-ish videos of yourself using AI. And it has a cameo feature, Jason, that lets you put yourself into the action. I'm a little surprised for an invite-only product that it reached the number on

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  I think it's a bad trade. I think when they go public, they might have a hard time sustaining this price. It could go to a trillion based on people being enthusiastic or irrationally exuberant. If you remember those two words from another era, irrational exuberance. We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. I l

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  which people are taking to indicate that they're big believers in the company.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Not a demand issue, a supply issue. Employees in the company didn't put up as many shares as they could have in this tender offer,

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  This is a secondary offering, folks, so it's employees selling their shares. But what was interesting, Jason, is that there was a total of $10.3 billion in authorized sales, but only $6.6 billion traded hands.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it is now the most valuable private company in the world. OK, just squeaking back SpaceX, which we talked about a minute ago, and the tender offer was worth about $6.6 billion in total.

• bearish criticism David Friedberg

  Maybe Midjourney should have done Vibes. Maybe they should have hired 10 more developers to do Sora, right? And make an app and a social network. So they're probably not taking advantage of the moment enough and not putting that work, putting that to work.

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  Midjourney was built by a bunch of rich people. And it was early, and they have a ton of revenue, and it looks like their annual revenue is 500 million, so they're making 12 million per employee. Obviously, that's not sustainable or real. It might be for them for some period of time.

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  I think the entire future of Reddit is to go there and get an LLM search box and then underneath it have, you know, make it look like Google with the search box or perplexity or anybody, Brave Search, DuckDuckGo, DuckDuckGo, have it be a search engine and underneath it have all of the top communities. And then it should be studying you and doing your for you page and serving you up stuff. And they really should just assume that the era of free search engine traffic is going to be deprecated slow

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  So here's a recent chart of Reddit's financial performance as a stock, Jason. Clearly it's taken quite a lot of blows. It was around 240 earlier in the week and now it is down to $208 per share. So yes, a lot of downward pressure there, perhaps from the Google SEO situation.

• bearish assessment Jason Calacanis

  People were saying that the stock is down because of this, like 5% or 10% because Reddit typically appears in the lower rankings. So this is, could be a big part of this future story, which is the impact of SEO and scraping and content creators and how do they get traffic to their website? How do they get traffic to their website?

• bearish fact_claim David Friedberg

  that they no longer had the ability to pass on the tag, you know, like search results equal 100. And that tag is how people who were doing SEO and how people were doing scraping and any kind of, you know, understanding how Google ranks things, they would load that page one time. Now you have to hit next, next, next, next. You got a low 10 pages, you know, and so you can no longer hit their API and get a hundred pages. That's significant. So a bunch of websites like Reddit, I think Reddit, you ca

• bullish assessment David Friedberg

  So getting continued growth and having more users sign up for free and then funneling the free users into the paid product. And then, of course, I'm sure these browsers will have advertising built into them. The other thing that's interesting is these browsers are a backdoor for training data. If Reddit and Hacker News and Tech Meme do not allow an LLM to scrape their content, right, or to otherwise produce it, well, I'm running a tool on my computer and I'm scraping the website. I'm opening the

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  So the cost of capital for AI companies is very cheap right now. So it probably does not matter if they've raised hundreds of millions of dollars, if they lose an extra $1 or $2 million a month at this point in time.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  And in that setup, if they lose a lot of money on inference costs in the interim, do they really care? Because they're going to sell the company anyways.

• neutral prediction Unattributed

  I thought it was relatively bold of perplexity with a company that, you know, presumably loses money to take on more costs. So I was trying to sort out the why here. I'm curious if they're trying to angle for an acquisition, because as you said, if every major LLM company wants to own a browser, why not go buy one from a company that has already proven its ability to attract millions of people to its browser and maybe grow your overall market share?

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  And then I use Claude as my LLM for Comet. So, you know, when you start thinking about this, like it's, I have a Claude Pro account, obviously. And so you have to be able to service your customers. Then you have competitors coming. OpenAI, chances on Polymarket of OpenAI launching a browser... So we'll be sitting here by the end of the year. And I think every LLM will have a browser to do this.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  I don't think it's as good as, it's not as feature rich as Comet is.

• mixed assessment Unattributed

  I think they probably did this right. They knew it was, when you use the Comet browser or any of these AI browsers, I think your utilization of AI goes way up. It's just front and center in the browser. So you're probably costing them more money and they probably were concerned. ... Anyway, that was probably their concern is can they handle the amount of traffic coming in and can they handle it profitably? ... That's probably why they took a little bit of time to launch this.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  i do think that yeah i mean if you actually look at salesforce they they're growing at 10 to 10 to 12 percent so why why is salesforce that has all this amazing data you know it's a database company right ultimately crm company and they're they're only you know they're they're down 40 for the year um and i think you know it really is that investors are chasing after growth fundamentally and you have that with you know uh samsung and sk hynix and and micron you have um you know i think vcs chasin

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they're trading at a 3.4 x trailing price sales multiple

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  i think about a company that as we all know box with aaron levy they have tons of customer data they're expanding into workflows they seem to be accelerating their revenue a little bit

• neutral fact_claim Aaron Levy

  Well, we just did a convert, so we're probably 600 or 700 million.

1. 2028-03-21 we're actually launching some products that will um let you be more selective around who can see your content · Prediction · pending
2. 2028-03-20 we would love for there to be you know three major platforms and the business like ours and I think most startups you you gain leverage by there being fragmentation in the marketplace because any one of your you know traditional incumbents can go support their platform very deeply but they can't support all of the the platforms · Prediction · pending
3. 2028-03-20 we're going after what we think is going to be a TENS of billions of dollar opportunity · Prediction · pending
4. 2028-02-05 here's how it would work with the New York Times and chat GPT or Grok and Disney, whoever you authenticate with your Disney plus at chat GPT or vice versa. And then it unlocks these features. · Prediction · confirmed

VentureSignalScore 0/100 for box, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage