SAN FRANCISCO – Dropbox CEO Drew Houston is sitting pretty. Most recently, the cloud storage company raised $250 million on a $4 billion valuation in 2011, and according to Houston, they haven’t had to spend much of that money.
With 200 million users and 100,000 developers on their platform, Houston has reason to be optimistic about the company’s prospects, which is why a comparison that he made may have raised a couple eyebrows. When asked today at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference what tech company he thinks Dropbox is most similar to, Houston hopped in a metaphorical time machine.
“I think if I had to pick one, one thing that’s interesting is we have had consumer and enterprise crossover and I think Microsoft in the 90s is the company that most comes to mind as having the same massive opportunity in both places.”
Considering that Microsoft SkyDrive is a major competitor for Dropbox, the comparison to the Redmond-based software giant is interesting. But on stage, Houston exuded confidence about Dropbox’s place in the market. While many of Dropbox’s competitors, including SkyDrive, offer significantly more free storage, Houston says that Dropbox’s plans don’t include more free storage.
“We’ve seen a lot of our competitors, big and small, give away a lot more free space, and I think that will attract some people, but most people are focused on other things,” Houston said.
If you’re hoping to get a piece of Dropbox stock, don’t get your hopes up. Houston says they’re not looking towards an IPO yet.
“I’m sure we’ll go public at some point, but we don’t have to worry about that right now,” Houston said.
Previously on GeekWire: Dropbox strengthens ties to third-party apps with new API, developer tools
