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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> HN/VCs also said Uber was a $150B company...Lyft was a $50B company...Peloton was a $40B company...

Exactly.

The hype squad have been screaming about the valuations of these companies and now look at them as soon as they IPOed. Neither of them are profitable companies.

It just means the VCs, insiders and everyone else who got was in before the IPO made a windfall in their stock and by now cashed out. The news hyping up the IPO to retail investors and left them holding the bags again as the market drops.

I would expect Stripe to delay their (eventual) IPO.

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I find it a little absurd that companies now take longer than human beings to start making money. In that you graduate high school/college at 18-22 and start making money - “being profitable”, so to speak.

There are starups right now that were founded before 2010, went public, and say they will be profitable in 5-7 years time

That’s 18-20 years without a profit!?!

Cathedrals took hundreds of years to build. Basic research can take hundreds of years to put into practice. The Swedish government has a couple of nice national parks that were originally oak forests planted to supply the navy in a few hundred years.

While there are definitely advantages to the discipline of having to make a profit, I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with building a company over long timescales.

Basic research can take a lot less than hundreds of years in special cases. So for me, I got my AI algorithm, my first one, to produce a result I did not already know about within a year of starting the code. It discovered negative modulo. That was it.

But! That was something I myself did not know. Not really important that eg wikipedia already knows about negative modulos getting the last elements of a list.

That was the point of AI. From that day I had much more confidence in the basic premise of the basic research, that this could be done and it slowly would develop.

And why did I come up with a result so fast with my own basic research? Desperation. Solitude, isolation. Silence. Single-mindedness, determination, that AI was all I actually cared about, no secondary reason to live. It got all my resources.

It’s an app that delivers food through contract labor earning minimum wage.

Its not a cathedral or a forest.

> you graduate high school/college at 18-22...

> That's 18-20 years without a profit!?!

Same same, but different.

So basically every YC backed company that has IPO'd

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