Dropbox is now cash-flow positive, so there’s no rush to go public

Dropbox, the cloud-based service used by more than 500 million people for storing and sharing their data, has reached cash-flow positive stage, its CEO, Drew Houston, said today.

Speaking at the Bloomberg Technology Conference in San Francisco, Houston said the financial milestone means that "instead of being funded by your investors, you're funded by your customers,” and that the company can now control its own destiny.

It doesn’t mean that Dropbox, which is privately held but valued at about $10 billion, is profitable — just that the money coming in is sufficient to preclude the need to go back to investors for more cash to fund operations. It last raised money in 2014: $350 million in a round led by BlackRock, Fidelity and T. Rowe Price.

Houston said he’s in no hurry to raise more: “[Being] cash-flow positive is really important because cash is oxygen and if you keep having to go to investors to fill up your scuba tank, then you can run out.”

Dropbox has appeared to be in a bit of trouble in recent months as investors have marked down the value of their holdings in it. Also late last year it shuttered apps that ran atop the Dropbox service: Mailbox, an email app it acquired, and Carousel, for storing and arranging photos. Houston cited them as bets that “didn’t work out.”

As for an IPO: “That's the thing about controlling your destiny and not needing to raise money. We can do that on our own timeline."

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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