Startups & Product Management 🚀

• 10 min read – Back in 2008, Dropbox achieved product-market fit quickly by fulfilling a strong customer need for storing data in the cloud. Conversely, today Dropbox feels a lot more like a feature than like a complete product (think of equivalents like Google Drive or OneDrive, who offer data storage as a feature within the ecosystem of Office365 or GoogleDocs). What’s the future of Dropbox, and how might the competitive landscape evolve for them? [via Stratechery]
• 7 min read – Dropbox has been challenged head-on by giants like Google and Microsoft and has lived to tell the tale. The reason: a laser focus on delivering value for their customers [via NextView Ventures]
• 7 min read – A teardown of Dropbox’s key performance indicators places their valuation at $10bn [via Spark Capital]
• 9 min read – Benchmarking Dropbox’s KPIs against Box: Dropbox generates more than twice as much revenue, but grows at the same rate. Gross margins are almost the same, but Dropbox generates about 2x more in gross profit per dollar in sales and marketing spend than Box [via SurePath Capital]
• 3 min read – Dropbox’s shareholders benefiting from this float [via Virginia Backaitis]

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

• 25 min read – Optimizing for Customer Lifetime Value, mitigating Uplift Decay, and Optimizing Competitively are three novel ways to push an optimization program beyond the limit [via ConversionXL]

Cryptocurrencies and Finance 📈

• 5 min read – Telegram triples the price of its next ICO funding round to $2.55 billion [via Forbes]
• 5 min read – The crypto market has come down by ~60% since its January peak. But nothing has really changed in the fundamental analysis of the sector [via Fred Wilson]
• 4 min watch – A video that explains the shift towards the decentralization mindset enabled by Blockchain [via Upfront Ventures]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 45 min listen – Dropbox has filled for IPO arguably too late. By the time they have done so, storing data in the cloud has been commoditized and plenty of competitors have arisen, capturing valuable business segments like B2B. Dropbox will continue to create value for their users but the question is, can they continue to capture it? [via Stratechery]

Interesting Reads 🤓

• 6 min read – No one wakes up thinking, “I am going to make bad decisions today.” And yet we all make them. Thinking about the problems more clearly, and looking at them from the outside in can help avoid the mental biases that undermine good decision making  [via Farnham Street]

Before you go, please consider:

• Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing that people find value in it
• If you don’t want to miss out on upcoming editions
  Subscribe here