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Comment by mgfist | Hacker News Reader

That's not true. Road to profitability and market cap are what matter.

Hypothetical: One business is making $100million in revenue, is losing $20million a year but has enough market cap to grow 10-100x and is spending most of its money on R&D/marketing, while a second business makes $1million in profit on $10million in revenue, but you've maxed out your growth and there's no more market cap, I'd rather be business 1, as you're on the road to potentially make hundreds of millions in profit later on.

i.e. I'd rather be Amazon some years back when they weren't profitable than some mom and pop online business that makes enough to pay the mortgage.

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Market cap is just the number of outstanding shares * price.. It says nothing about the quality of the business. Your explanation doesn’t make sense in that regard.

Even now, looking at the results, Amazon retail is not a great profitable business. It’s still low margin. No one could have predicted AWS - the true success story.

And look no further than YC backed companies. Have any of them become profitable? Even the one company that has gone public - Dropbox - isn’t looking to good these days.

OP meant total addressable market (TAM).

Yes my b.

Yes I meant TAM as the other person commented.

Further more, even if amazon retail still isn't profitable (I haven't checked the numbers) AWS still wouldn't have spawned without it. Think of it as a pivot, even though they still kept amazon retail.

I'm not really sure what your YC comment has to do with things.

Its every startups story that they are going to lose a bunch of money and eventually somehow make enough money to justify their evaluations. Not only hasn’t it happen with any YC company, nor has it happen with most of the money losing tech darlings like Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Mongo,ElasticCo, etc. I believe that Amazon retail is profitable or could be anytime they chose, but not enough to justify Amazons valuation in the foreseeable future. Of course AWS is a different story.

That's simply because being profitable means you don't have anything better to do with your money, which signals to investors that you don't see any more growth opportunity. Mongo/elastic could both become profitable pretty quickly if they needed to (by slowing down hiring and expansion) but they don't do that because they're trying to grow as fast as possible, and they have enough money in the bank to sustain loses. Uber/lyft I think are fucked, but that's a different story.

Think of it this way. What do rich people do with their excess money? They invest it. So if you're a company like Mongo/elastic, what do you do with your excess money? Well, invest it back into the business. Both of these companies have years of runway before they go broke or have to go profitable, so it doesn't make sense for them to try and be profitable when there is still so much of the market left in the open.

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