Some technology-savvy venture capitalists are making a big bet on a promising Internet company run by a 26-year-old college dropout in Palo Alto, Calif. Only this time, the object of their financial affection isn’t Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
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It’s Box.net, a startup that offers online storage lockers for personal and corporate information. The privately held company is getting $48 million from a group of investors and financiers, which include two of Facebook’s major shareholders: venture capital firms Meritech Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
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The similarities don’t end there.
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Box is based in Palo Alto, as Facebook has been for nearly seven years. Its CEO, Aaron Levie, is 26 years old like Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard University after his sophomore year in 2004 and moved to Silicon Valley to focus on building what turned into the Internet’s biggest social networking site.
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Levie dropped out of his college, the University of Southern California, in 2005 to think outside the box with Box. It was an audacious decision, given that he had little to go on besides an idea backed by $11,000 that his longtime friend, Box co-founder Dylan Smith, had won in poker games.
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Since then, Box has raised about $80 million, including the $48 million round announced Thursday. Its backers are convinced that the company’s service has a good chance to become an indispensible business tool.
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We think it may be reaching an inflection point, George Bischof, managing partner of Meritech Capital.
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He sees some parallels to where Facebook was in its evolution when Meritech invested in that company in 2006. It was right about the time that Facebook became available to all comers after initially confining the service to college students. Since the change, Facebook has grown from about 12 million active users to more than 500 million today. It now boasts a market…