Dropbox was able to avoid the sea of red in the market, with shares soaring in their market debut. The cloud storage company’s IPO was the largest tech offering since Snap Inc. went public last year. At their highs of the day, shares were more than 50 percent above their $21 IPO price. They ended the day at $28.48, giving the company a market value of $12.5 billion. “This is a great manifestation of all the hard work and the collective creative energy of our team,” Carolyn Feinstein, Chief Marketing Officer at Dropbox, told Cheddar after shares had opened. “But after today, we go back to being focused on growing a thriving business.” While the shares popped on their first day, the company’s biggest challenge going forward will be converting more of its free users into paying customers. It currently has more than 500 million registered users, but only 11 million of those pay for the service. Feinstein says the company will do that by focusing on building products “that can really, significantly improve our customers’ human experience at work -- how they work together, how they collaborate, how they create.” The company will also use this time in the limelight to inform users of its different functions. “When you think about a moment like this, it’s obviously a tremendous financial event for the company but it’s also...the biggest brand moment that [we] will ever have,” explained Feinstein. “It’s a tremendous opportunity for us to talk about who Dropbox really is and this evolution of the company from keeping files in sync to keeping teams in sync.” Dropbox was founded 11 years ago as a cloud storage tool. Today, it offers a platform for businesses that enables collaborative editing of documents and other files. The company has yet to turn a profit, but its revenues have grown rapidly over the past few years from $603 million in 2015 to over $1 billion in 2017. The excitement around Dropbox’s IPO signals a market appetite for more big tech companies to go public. “Part of the demand is very much the lack of supply [of other offerings],” said Maureen Farrell, reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Additionally, Dropbox “did a really good job on the road show,” explained Farrell. “The potential for profits down the road looks good. There’s some sort of understanding of where this business is going to be and there could be a lot of upside.” Dropbox sold 36 million shares in its offering, raising $756 million. The IPO was 25 times oversubscribed, indicating 25 investors wanted to buy each share that was sold. Its first day success came even amid a broader market sell-off, one that’s hit the tech sector especially hard. Plagued by the ongoing data privacy scandal at Facebook, the S&P tech ETF fell more than seven percent this week, its biggest drop since 2009. For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/dropbox-shares-soar-after-strong-ipo).
