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are you glossing over the whole "aws bill isnt structural infra spend" thing?! they spend 104% of revenue on ONE cloud provider and costs scale linearly with r

• swyx 1y ago
  the entire point is that stressing sustainable business practices here at this point in a startup's life is extremely short sighted and is the kind of shitty analysis that gives HN a bad rep. pull up Uber's financials leading up to IPO. unsustainable and everyone knew it. they work it out after because they burned money and eventually achieved a sustainable moat. this is why venture exists. HN doesnt like venture which is, well, ironic given the domain we're on. a better negative argument i'd rather see looks like this - "ive run these aws numbers against the typical spend path of pre IPO startups who then later improved their cost baseline and margin profile and even after accounting for all that, Anthropic ngmi". thats the kind of minimum sophistication you need here to play armchair financial analyst. ed zitron, and everyone involved in this entire thread, incl myself, have not done that because we are lazy and ignorant and dont actually care enough about seeking the truth here. we are as unprepared to analyze this AWS spend as we are to understand their 1b -> 10b revenue ramp in 2025. you havent done the work and yet you sit here and judge it unsustainable based off some shitty "leaks". dont pretend that ed's analysis is at all meaningful particularly because he conveniently stops where it supports his known negative bias.
  • watwut 1y ago
    Afaik Uber numbers were significantly smaller.