I think it's opposite actually. 10 years ago, it was way easier to raise without any profitability story. Then a ton of VCs got burned, and Paul Graham wrote "

I think it's opposite actually. 10 years ago, it was way easier to raise without any profitability story. Then a ton of VCs got burned, and Paul Graham wrote "Ramen Profitability" (2009), and later "Default Alive or Default Dead?" (2015). Nowadays, you NEED to have a story for how you're going to become default alive, and not rely on investor cash. That's because of what we learned from all of the failures from Evernote's era. Think about other companies that started in that era – Facebook, Twitter, Yelp. The entire strategy was user growth and figure out monetization later. You don't see that as much today. I suppose Uber/Lyft are good counter examples, but they at least had massive revenue along the way, and a great story about future profitability. (Swap out drivers with self-driving cars.)