At the time, there was the pervasive notion that a business didn't need to make a profit to be valuable as a public company, as long as it had a large number of

At the time, there was the pervasive notion that a business didn't need to make a profit to be valuable as a public company, as long as it had a large number of loyal users. The practical issues of how to make a profit were almost ignored for most companies of that era. So it is not surprising to see that a company creating a new file explorer would be consider valuable, especially if that browser made lots of people switch to Linux (something that many people believed to be possible).