<story><title>Box S-1 Filing</title><url>http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1372612/000119312514112417/d642425ds1.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>3am</author><text>Yeah, the gross margins are telling just part of the story -  the sales &amp;amp; marketing scaling with revenue looks scary.  I don&amp;#x27;t think a company with a p&amp;amp;l looking like that would necessarily want to go public.  I see it that they&amp;#x27;ve either 1) exhausted venture money, aren&amp;#x27;t an acquisition target, and see the public offering as funding of last resort because they&amp;#x27;re nowhere close to being profitable or 2) they see this as very close to a market top and are rushing to take the company public before the music stops.  I don&amp;#x27;t like either very much.&lt;p&gt;edit: I should make it clear, I&amp;#x27;m just repeating your point for emphasis in my first sentence.  I&amp;#x27;m in agreement with your whole post.</text></item><item><author>antr</author><text>&lt;i&gt;On the IPO:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nice gross profit margin growth from 67% to 79%, but now we know where vc money went: sales &amp;amp; marketing.&lt;p&gt;Profitability seems very very very far away, and in my opinion Box is not a buy for the average Joe. It seems to me that revenues are extremely dependent on marketing, as per &amp;quot;50% of the net proceeds in sales and marketing activities&amp;quot;. Now that we can hear cloud storage war drums from afar I don&amp;#x27;t see this expense item going down any time soon. This IPO isn&amp;#x27;t going to be cheap, at whatever valuation CS, MS and JP come up with.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;On the VC&amp;#x2F;Tech industry&amp;#x27;s double standards:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Funny how an investors ask and drill down startups on their customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, user &amp;amp; customer numbers, etc. and none of that information is made available on the S-1, the document that should really be the &amp;quot;bible&amp;quot; for any investor. I guess the public market is going  to get the short end of the stick again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>001sky</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;I see it that they&amp;#x27;ve either 1) exhausted venture money, aren&amp;#x27;t an acquisition target, and see the public offering as funding of last resort because they&amp;#x27;re nowhere close to being profitable or 2) they see this as very close to a market top and are rushing to take the company public before the music stops. I don&amp;#x27;t like either very much.&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;They (Box) just raised ($100MM, Dec&amp;#x2F;13) a month or two before this was filed. The market, however, is very ripe[1] and the IPO marketers are likely advising them to take it public. The Last round is basically a mezz round ($2B valuation) and if they flip this thing for 1.5x to 2.0x in 6 months those guys are going to be happy. The cash burn on the P&amp;amp;L is $14&amp;#x2F;month and $350MM would last 24 months, enough to inflect if its a real biz. Closer to inflection, a Secondary raise will generate liquidity for the remaining insiders. Given the uncertainty with the FED&amp;#x27;s propping up of QE, its not a bad idea if you are the #N player to not wait (risk of backwash&amp;#x2F;turbulence if the others take all investor appetite), given that its a two-stage exit for most IPOs these days.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.cnbc.com/id/101425809&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.cnbc.com&amp;#x2F;id&amp;#x2F;101425809&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Box S-1 Filing</title><url>http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1372612/000119312514112417/d642425ds1.htm</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>3am</author><text>Yeah, the gross margins are telling just part of the story -  the sales &amp;amp; marketing scaling with revenue looks scary.  I don&amp;#x27;t think a company with a p&amp;amp;l looking like that would necessarily want to go public.  I see it that they&amp;#x27;ve either 1) exhausted venture money, aren&amp;#x27;t an acquisition target, and see the public offering as funding of last resort because they&amp;#x27;re nowhere close to being profitable or 2) they see this as very close to a market top and are rushing to take the company public before the music stops.  I don&amp;#x27;t like either very much.&lt;p&gt;edit: I should make it clear, I&amp;#x27;m just repeating your point for emphasis in my first sentence.  I&amp;#x27;m in agreement with your whole post.</text></item><item><author>antr</author><text>&lt;i&gt;On the IPO:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Nice gross profit margin growth from 67% to 79%, but now we know where vc money went: sales &amp;amp; marketing.&lt;p&gt;Profitability seems very very very far away, and in my opinion Box is not a buy for the average Joe. It seems to me that revenues are extremely dependent on marketing, as per &amp;quot;50% of the net proceeds in sales and marketing activities&amp;quot;. Now that we can hear cloud storage war drums from afar I don&amp;#x27;t see this expense item going down any time soon. This IPO isn&amp;#x27;t going to be cheap, at whatever valuation CS, MS and JP come up with.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;On the VC&amp;#x2F;Tech industry&amp;#x27;s double standards:&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Funny how an investors ask and drill down startups on their customer acquisition costs, customer lifetime value, user &amp;amp; customer numbers, etc. and none of that information is made available on the S-1, the document that should really be the &amp;quot;bible&amp;quot; for any investor. I guess the public market is going  to get the short end of the stick again.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>not_that_noob</author><text>I agree on the S&amp;amp;M expenses. What&amp;#x27;s scarier is that this is a very competitive fairly undifferentiated market, which means you can&amp;#x27;t live without salespeople. Which means they&amp;#x27;re going to hit the wall at some point, because as it stands right now,  they are spending about $1.40 in sales ALONE to bring in $1 of revenue. Now that&amp;#x27;s scary.</text></comment>