Dropbox had initially been built on Amazon’s cloud platform, and the product was growing so fast that the hosting bills had become very expensive. With hockey stick growth would come a second hockey stick, but this time, in file hosting costs. Building out in-house infrastructure48 would save nearly $75 million in just the first two years, and hundreds of millions over time. It was obvious it had to be done. But it would require a tremendous amount of up-front capital to lease and build out data centers, which in turn would push the company to unprofitability for the first time in years.
