Facebook is a rather extraordinarily bad example to hold up. They lost money for a short amount of time for a VC backed company - about 4 1/2 years. Asana by co

Facebook is a rather extraordinarily bad example to hold up. They lost money for a short amount of time for a VC backed company - about 4 1/2 years. Asana by contrast is 13 years into losing money. Here is Facebook's early financial history (2004, 2005, 2006 all showed losses): 2007 | $153m sales | -$138m net income 2008 | $272m sales | -$56m net income 2009 | $777m sales | $229m net income 2010 | $1.97b sales | $606m net income 2011 | $3.71b sales | $1b net income By the time Facebook was 13 years old it was running at ~$16 billion profit.