We have incurred significant losses in each period since our inception in 2005. We incurred net losses of $50.3 million in our fiscal year ended December 31, 2011, $112.6 million in our fiscal year ended January 31, 2013, and $168.6 million in our fiscal year ended January 31, 2014. As of January 31, 2014, we had an accumulated deficit of $361.2 million. These losses and accumulated deficit reflect the substantial investments we made to acquire new customers and develop our services. We intend to continue scaling our business to increase our number of users and paying organizations and to meet the increasingly complex needs of our customers. We have invested, and expect to continue to invest, in our sales and marketing organizations to sell our services around the world and in our development organization to deliver additional features and capabilities of our cloud services to address our customers’ evolving needs. We also expect to continue to make significant investments in our datacenter infrastructure and in our professional service organization as we focus on customer success. As a result of our continuing investments to scale our business in each of these areas, we do not expect to be profitable for the foreseeable future. Furthermore, to the extent we are successful in increasing our customer base, we will also incur increased losses due to upfront costs associated with acquiring new customers, particularly as a result of the limited free trial version of our service and the nature of subscription revenue, which is generally recognized ratably over the term of the subscription period, which is typically one year, although we also offer our services for terms ranging between one month to three years or more. We cannot assure you that we will achieve profitability in the future or that, if we do become profitable, we will sustain profitability.
It's a pretty silly story. To keep even 10% ownership of Box through their massive dilution would have been extremely expensive. Cuban owned a small position in it. Very understandable how that would not have been worth it for a guy like Cuban (who has demonstrated he's content with a couple billion, and never puts even a small % of his fortunate at risk, having stated over the years that his biggest fear is losing it all).
"DFJ got in early, contributing the whole $1.5 million Series A round in 2006, and participated in every round after to build its 25.5% position. The Wall Street Journal says the latest $100 million round was at a $2 billion valuation, which implies Box will likely be valued higher than that at IPO."
Cuban invested $350K in the seed, so it was just his call.
One of the YC App questions involves detailing a story of a real life hack. I know he didn't fill out the app, but I certainly hope that figuring out public transportation falls above the bar.
Figuring out how to use a system as designed isn't much of a hack...it would be more of a hack if he figured out how to reconfigure the system to route a bus or train directly past the front entrance of the building he was trying to get to.
Do you use ChromeOS or have you installed something else?
If it is a ChromeOS device, I don't believe you. You cannot be an effective sysadmin administrator on a ChromeOS machine unless you're propping up Google Apps and nothing else.
If you have installed something else, the value proposition of a pixel is flawed and your education district shouldn't have paid for it.
You can get an SSH terminal on ChromeOS (either dev-mode or via a Chrome app). You can also get a remote desktop client. That's all you need for the vast majority of system administration tasks. Typically you use your primary desktop to connect to a server to do any other tasks.
And, I would think that for most school work, having a computer that the kids can't break would be an admin's dream.
So, the ChromeOS notebook should work as good as anything for that job.
> My kids can't break their windows machine, because I know what I'm doing and have set up a strong security policy.
In my experience, I find that regardless of policy, windows computers are more likely to break down at one point or another. Curious though, what do you do different to mitigate that inevitability?
1. Secure by default. The default windows configuration is not secure by default - it's a compromise that is used to make it usable for people. You can (with Group Policy) lock the machine down heavily then allow things as they are required. I do this.
2. Good hardware. They have a Dell Precision T3500 rather than some shitty disposable piece of crap. I expect this will last around 8-10 years.
Windows is perfectly fine if you understand it. We have 377 Windows machines and 205 Linux machines in total. Reliability statistics are approximately the same. The only issues we get is with hardware packing in occasionally (usually the HP mid-range stuff and their laptops).
My Pixel runs pure ChromeOS (I have Crouton installed as well, but that was when I was still transitioning into a full time Chrome environment)
As others have mentioned:
-I can ssh into any linux box I need.
As others haven't mentioned:
-I can RDP via chrome app to any Windows server I need (Or more commonly I RDP to a "command" server and do all my other work from there.)
This gives the added benefit of keeping my device outside the general workflow of things. I still have a windows laptop loaded with the same image as the average user, but there's really only for dogfooding.
We are a Google Apps heavy shop - so there's that.
I'm missing the logical connection you make between what my school district should and shouldn't pay for... Should your employers not buy Macbooks?
I'm typing this in chromium on ubuntu/xfce, alongside an Eclipse window open working on some Go code, inside of a crouton chroot, on a $250 Samsung Chromebook that has better battery life than any of my previous laptops. I disagree.
In context to education do you really think they're going to use anything other than the OOB configuration?
Oh and the Lenovo T400 I bought last week (Core 2, 2.4, 8Gb RAM, Radeon HD, 128Gb Samsung 840 pro) lasts 8 hours only cost $25 more and doesn't break if you cough near it.
Where can you get a bunch of outdated Thinkpads with custom hardware installed (in my experience, the T400 released four years ago doesn't come with a 128GB Samsung SSD) for that price? How would a school district go about buying a thousand of these off-market, custom-modified laptops?
UK IT brokers have hundreds of them if not thousands floating around. Mine wasn't even used. SSD costs more than the unit. It doesn't take a genius to source that quantity.
HOwever, the school district should buy a pile of shit dell desktops and bolt them to the desks like they probably did before rather than succumb to a low priced promotional Trojan.
Someone probably gets a promotion for saving the cash but do they realise how inflexible the machine is and how tied onto the vendors' platform it is.
This article has very little to do with Ramadan...Muslims don't fly more often during Ramadan than the rest of the year, do they? 9/11 didn't happen during Ramadan.
Take a look at this objectively.
A brown guy, traveling alone, tested positive for explosive residue while going through a TSA checkpoint. After some brief questioning, they determined that there was a 99% chance that he wasn't a terrorist.
How stupid would we as Americans have felt had we allowed someone to fly on the same day as having a 1% chance that he was a terrorist?
"Traveling alone" = half the business travelers at the airport. "Brown" = most of the world. "Explosive residue" = hand lotion or bug spray. "Brief questioning" = 4 hours, ticket canceled, $700 new ticket cost and apartment search.
This is racial profiling, straight up, and ineffective security. How about you go through this and tell me it's all good.
I (of brown skin) was once taken aside INSIDE a jetway, after clearing all security, and quizzed: how much cash was I carrying? Where did I go to school? And this bizarre national origin totem: who won the World Series last year? I'd have had a better chance of telling them what RSA stood for or who Stallman was than baseball.
We probably travel less during Ramadan than usual, since it's kind of inconvenient to do so. Though maybe some people want to spend it with their families like this guy wanted to spend his holy week with his family, but most people would probably travel before Ramadan rather than during IMO.
