It’s a fate that other Silicon Valley start-ups may be facing, especially with the dip in public and private markets for funding tech ventures. Dropbox’s problems have less to do with the strength of its current business than with a delay, so far, in realizing the towering expectations that once surrounded the company. The start-up is like the college basketball star who manages to turn pro but is still regarded with doubt because everyone has now realized he might never be the next LeBron James. What happens to a company once thought to be worth $10 billion when it turns out to be worth only $5 billion, or $2 billion?

According to Dropbox’s executives, nothing too terrible — it can just wait out the market freeze and perhaps grow into its $10 billion valuation. In other words, Dropbox can keep working and may yet turn into LeBron.

“Sentiment about companies goes in cycles,” Drew Houston, Dropbox’s co-founder and chief executive, told me in an email. “Google, Apple, Facebook all went through multiple rounds of this. First, you can do no wrong, then you can do no right. Then people are like, ‘Actually this is a pretty good company,’ and around it goes. So you have to ignore the noise and stay focused on building great products and making customers happy. The rest will take care of itself.”

At the moment, executives said, Dropbox isn’t in any urgent danger. If it were running out of money, it might be forced to raise funds at a lower value than its previous one — a dreaded “down round” — but executives and board members said the company had plenty of money in the bank and was generating enough from operations to fund an expansion into new products and services.

Other numbers are also promising, they said. More than 400 million people use the company’s service — a place to keep documents online, so they can easily be shared and synchronized among different people and different computers — and the service is adding 10 million users a month. Dropbox also has 150,000 business customers, who pay annual fees of about $150 for each employee, and those ranks are growing by about 25,000 businesses a quarter.