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Comment by timjahn | Hacker News Reader

"What this change does do is it brings us into a profitable situation.”

In the same article, we find out they were founded in 2001 and bought by eBay in 2007. In 2009, the original founder buys the company back and runs into problems. And NOW they're hoping to be profitable.

It must be the "not being from/around the Valley" part of me, but I don't understand businesses that operate for years without turning a profit. Yeah, I suppose after X years you MIGHT be a Google or Facebook or whatever. I guess that's just not the dream for me.

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It was so brave of you to criticize a company on Hacker News for not being profitable.

This comment contributes nothing to the conversation. Leave the "So brave" comments at Reddit.

If you have something informative to say, I'd like to hear it.

The claim by the parent is that they aren't just some new startup, but that they've been in the game for quite a while (12 years by parent's numbers) and are just now expecting profit. This isn't exactly the same as a blanket criticism of startups that aren't profitable due to the sheer magnitude of time for StumbleUpon.

>I don't understand businesses that operate for years without turning a profit.

The article is just stating that StumbleUpon wasn't profitable recently but will be after making staff cuts. They may have been profitable at various points in the past.

Virtually all of the huge web successes went for long periods of time without profits so not worth being surprised by this.

A lot, yes, but not "virtually all".

As a counter-example, one of the biggest logistical problems that eBay had early on was opening envelopes full of cash fast enough.

Spoken like a true chicagoan :)

Maybe they seemed hotter back in 2009, before the browser, from my estimation, became much less of the platform from which to bookmark from? It's already a pain to install the plugin manually...It must be much more annoyance to have to open up a separate mobile app to use the service (which, on iOS, I assume kicks you into the generic Safari viewer).

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