Compared to the dot-com era, companies are raising negligible sums. Maybe you can get $2M for a failure, but you're not seeing pre-traction companies raising $300M. Similarly, every IPO we've seen has been of a company which actually has real value. Facebook is already profitable and Twitter is seeing real revenue.
Even the Snapchats of the world have a lot more going for them than their dot-com cousins: people actually use them.
Is McDonald's really worth $100 billion?? It's some guys making hamburgers!
Valuation is based on a whole host of things including revenue, brand recognition, distribution, customer acquisition costs, customer retention rates, switching costs, growth, etc. You could start a Dropbox competitor and have none of those. The business matters far more in valuing the company than how hard it is to replicate the product. It's much easier to make a hamburger as well as McDonald's than it is to make a business as good as theirs.
McDonalds' revenue in 2012 was US $27 billion. Dropbox's was US $200 million. Certainly there's a lot of potential upside in Dropbox, but it's risky too - their business could easily be disrupted by unexpected developments. McDonald's is pretty much safe as houses.
So yes, I think the question stands - is Dropbox really worth 10% of McDonalds?
You can have a web-site plus their hard hard drives for less than $1 million.
Now, try also getting millions of users, tens (hundrends?) of thousands of paying customers, tons of possitive reviews from both major outlets and happy users, Jeff Bezos investing in your company (IIRC), hundends of third party apps offering integration with your service, etc...
Oh, and the technology to do what you do, and do it AT SCALE. And also the history of having met and solved tons of technological (OS/use case/etc) obstacles in the process of building your app, now in it's Nth year.
I mean, what are you on about? Just a website and some hard drives?
Dropbox is probably one of the more sustainable companies mentioned in the article, since they have a very large amount of actual paying users and revenue.
That and the fact that Pinterest is actually exploring how to gain revenue. They've used Skimlinks (http://skimlinks.com/) before to affiliate the content posted on their site. Probably the best idea out there.
Compared to the dot-com era, companies are raising negligible sums. Maybe you can get $2M for a failure, but you're not seeing pre-traction companies raising $300M. Similarly, every IPO we've seen has been of a company which actually has real value. Facebook is already profitable and Twitter is seeing real revenue.
Even the Snapchats of the world have a lot more going for them than their dot-com cousins: people actually use them.