I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw that number.
What could a startup do with $48 million?
It’s an incomprehensibly large number of dollars.
I was reminded of a similar investment I heard about a long time ago. A company named Firedrop, that had a product that looked like a loser (it was, in fact a loser) raised something like $90 million from Kleiner, Perkins, which was then the leading venture capital firm.
It didn’t make sense until I realized that KP had raised a fund of over $1 billion. How could they explain that to their investors? Where would they find companies to use that much money? So (I guess) they parked big buckets of money in several of their startups, with no plans to spend it or invest it. I don’t know if that theory was correct, but the fund, the investor and the company are long-gone.
It would be really interesting to get some ideas of what a company like Box.net will do with so much money.
