I personally did this for over a year (Springfield, Missouri) in our kickass library downtown. Great coffee shop nearby, quiet, plenty of books (doh) and magazines to read as break entertainment and just fantastic.
I would say that Dropbox (being a really super company with a great product) has issues that are actually even larger than the storage cost.
Dropbox is based on Amazon S3, which means that not only do they have storage costs to a 3rd party that are so to speak 'out of their control' but they are also dealing with bandwidth and transaction costs.
I wish them all the best, however I can imagine this being quite expensive for them considering the amount of free users they have.
Costs of storage are of course declining rapidly, however so far the massive increase in available bandwidth and storage needs for customers is simply growing MUCH faster.
Part of the catch-22 here is also that with decreased storage costs for online storage providers (that increasingly are building their clusters with consumer component hard drives) keeps an even pace with decrease in cost for home-storage and the amount of data users are wanting to upload.
How in the world would they be? Scraping web-content is pretty much Google's entire business model. Is 'slightly' hypocritical for them to even speak out on this in my opinion.
Well in my opinion and how it was founded, the stock market should be a place for 'speculation' based on the success of a company, analysis of the market, micro and macro economics etc.
Companies in need of capital and broader ownership 'go public' to secure funds and take in investors with a monetary and intellectual interest in their business model etc.
(I know this is a 'romantic' view of the stock market)
High Speed Trading does NOTHING for owners, investors, the company or anyone but the traders themselves. Essentially it works on the same principle as a the 'worm' in Office Space (geek reference) attempting to make very small amounts of money in mistakes, miscalculations and very short-time discrepancies in valuations of financial instrument.
I feel very old voicing this opinion but it just seems like the very edge of greed and 'money for nothing' attitude to create giant data clusters aimed at just nibbling away at the corners of financial markets for profit.
100% this. The little interest/dividend you might be able to squeeze out of $200k is by no means worth any of the hassle when you should be focusing 24/7 on your business.
I consider this to be a horrendous idea when it comes to funds with a 'burn rate'. Not to mention that I would personally be completely outraged as a VC/Angel if I invested in a start-up and they turned around and speculated on the stock market with the funds they received.
Well also depending on what your business is, there is also the risk that tying up funds might end REALLY badly. For example if you happen to be hosting your own servers or tangible assets and suffer a major breakdown just a few days of not being able to access enough funds could kill or at least very seriously hurt your company.
I would recommend the Business banking for the full amount. Give that you can 'maximize' your interest/return in other forms of accounts BUT it is much more important to you as a start-up to be able to have cash at hand quickly if an opportunity presents itself AND if you are to negotiate larger deals you might have to prove that you have funds at hand.
In my opinion it's not worth the hassle and small extra income to complicate your capital structure.
I would almost argue that the Marketing team is the ONE thing about Yahoo that is actually working. It's not the lack of smart marketing, it's the lack of smart functionality that is digging the grave for Yahoo!