The story behind our new logo

Quote of the Day

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'"

Dropbox Will Be One of the Biggest Tech IPOs in Years

Dropbox, the company known for file-sharing, is confidentially filing for an IPO. Which, ironically, means it’ll keep public eyes and ears out of any SEC filings leading up to its initial offering.

Bottom line: We don’t know when Dropbox is officially IPOing, but it could be soon.

And that’s a pretty big deal considering (at a $10 billion valuation) it’s one of the largest private companies in the world to delay a public offering. Other honorable mentions include Uber, Airbnb, and WeWork.

So how did we get here?

You can thank MIT student Drew Houston, who back in 2006 kept forgetting a flash drive on his way to class. Just your classic “forget your homework, start a billion-dollar company” situation.

And his solution—a cloud storage system allowing you to drop files in a folder and access them anywhere—revolutionized file-sharing.

Case in point: when’s the last time you used a flash drive?

Dropbox turned all heads and necks in the Valley—including one, very turtle-covered neck, Steve Jobs’. After Houston played Operation on Apple’s file storage code, creating new features that even shocked Apple programmers, Jobs reportedly gave them an offer.

When Houston declined? Jobs supposedly called the business a “feature, not a product,” and that he would “kill Dropbox” with iCloud.

Houston, we have lift-off

Houston brushed off the threat. By 2010, Dropbox passed 1 million users. By 2011—50 million users. And by 2016, Dropbox officially topped 500 million users, including 200,000 businesses.

Sure, the company faced some speed bumps along the way. Google and Microsoft released free cloud-sharing collaborative tools, Google Docs and Office 365, respectively. Then, two acquisitions flopped in 2016—Mailbox, an email solution, and Carousel, a photo-sharing software.

Dropbox also paid a small fortune to leave Amazon Web Services (AWS) and build out its own server infrastructure.

But through it all, the company succeeded. It recorded $1 billion+ in annualized revenue and was profitable before interest, taxes, and depreciation in 2016.

Now, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan will get the nod for an IPO

But as one of the biggest tech IPOs in years, there’s a lot at stake. We all remember this year’s sad Snap Story. And do we even need to mention Blue Apron?

Increasingly, large private companies have stayed private longer as investment funds, like SoftBank’s $93 billion Vision Fund, inject them with all the capital they need. Their logic being: so long as we have money, why deal with the headaches of being a publicly scrutinized company?

Good logic, indeed. And if Dropbox’s stock does its own swan dive, it’s reasonable that the Ubers, WeWorks, and Airbnbs of the world might rethink their own IPO timelines.

We’ll file-share you on the results.

How A Coffee Mug Made Us Think Hard About Equality in the Workplace

As many of you may have noticed, Morning Brew has looked a lot less Morning Bro-y recently. We’re talking about our old logo—the mug sporting suit and tie that has intro’d our daily newsletter for the last two-and-a-half years.

There’s a story behind the change…

Right around the time Morning Brew became a real business (and not just a side-hustle) in late 2016, a very unexpected (and very worrisome) email from a reader hit the team’s inbox.

“I have always loved Morning Brew. You make the business world fun with great storytelling and your humor is really smart. Feels like I’m talking to a friend that knows everything going on in business.

But, I just realized something...and it’s one of those things you can’t unsee. While Morning Brew works to be gender neutral with its story selection and voice, your logo is anything but gender neutral.

And at a time when women are under-represented and mistreated in the workplace, highlighting a suit and tie to thousands of future business leaders is something I’d think hard about. Just thought I’d provide my two cents.”

First, we were confused.

Then, defensive.

But then we realized....she couldn’t have been more right.

And the feedback was consistent.

That was just one of dozens of similar emails we would receive from Brew readers over the next several months: “We love your content and we love what you’re doing, but the suit and tie has got to go.”

Marginalizing a large segment of our reader base is simply unacceptable. Nothing is more important to us than our relationship with our readers.

So while we loved our original logo from a design perspective—and were nostalgic about the memories associated with it—we knew it was perpetuating a terrible reality around the relationship between gender and work.

So where does that leave us? A new perspective and a new logo

Since our very first newsletter, Morning Brew has sought to to get future business leaders excited about the business world through great content. But what does great content matter if we’re not making business great for all?

So our (now seven-person) team put our heads together, partnered with another amazing designer (shoutout to “Branding Ben”), and created a logo that is young, fun, business-y—and most importantly—welcoming to everyone.

Brew on,
Brew Crew

For a much deeper dive into the early days of Morning Brew, our original logo process, and our learnings surrounding the wage/opportunity gap, check out the full story below.

The Breakroom

Question of the Day

Mr. and Mrs. Jones have three children, all under the age of 20, but none with the same age.
Last year, the product of the three ages was 224.
This year the product of the three ages is 360.
What are the children's ages now?

(Answer located at the bottom of newsletter)

Business Trivia

What is the ticker symbol for U.S. Steel?

(Answer located at the bottom of newsletter)

Stat of the Day

10—The number of years it took Taco Bell to develop a single menu item: a taco served in a cheese-stuffed shell (fried, of course) known as the Quesalupa. And all the R&D paid off—during the limited four-month release, the chain sold 75 million Quesalupas.

Breakroom Answers

Question of the Day: 5, 8, and 9 (Explannation)

Business Trivia: X