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Because they're doing the fancy equivalent of selling $20 bills for $15 and chirping about how high their revenue is. You, me, and everyone else could generate

Because they're doing the fancy equivalent of selling $20 bills for $15 and chirping about how high their revenue is. You, me, and everyone else could generate $inf revenue with that strategy, but that doesn't make it a viable business model.

MBCook 5mo ago
Right. At this point burying money in jars in the back yard and forgetting where some are has a much higher rate of return.
- hparadiz 5mo ago
  Using Google’s own IPO S-1 / SEC filings: Year Revenue Net income / loss 1998 Not reported 1999 $220k -$6.076M 2000 $19.108M -$14.690M Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?
  - parliament32 5mo ago
    I have no doubt there are a handful of positive examples when we ignore the tens of thousands of failed companies along these lines. I have no problem with money-furnaces trading publicly. If people want to invest in those, fantastic, power to them. But they absolutely should not be included in vehicles like pensions and indexes.
  - marcosdumay 5mo ago
    You seem to be ignoring that a loss lead is supposed to lead people into doing something profitable.
  - logifail 5mo ago
    > Do you guys not know what a loss lead is? We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time. Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years. Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)
  - MadxX79 5mo ago
    But Google didn't go public until 2004, when they were highly profitable. Every startup goes through a phase where they aren't profitable... For most of of them that ends when they go bankrupt.
  - MBCook 5mo ago
    Survivorship bias. Also, those numbers are multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the AI stuff going on now.

MBCook 5mo ago

Right. At this point burying money in jars in the back yard and forgetting where some are has a much higher rate of return.

hparadiz 5mo ago
Using Google’s own IPO S-1 / SEC filings: Year Revenue Net income / loss 1998 Not reported 1999 $220k -$6.076M 2000 $19.108M -$14.690M Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?
- parliament32 5mo ago
  I have no doubt there are a handful of positive examples when we ignore the tens of thousands of failed companies along these lines. I have no problem with money-furnaces trading publicly. If people want to invest in those, fantastic, power to them. But they absolutely should not be included in vehicles like pensions and indexes.
- marcosdumay 5mo ago
  You seem to be ignoring that a loss lead is supposed to lead people into doing something profitable.
- logifail 5mo ago
  > Do you guys not know what a loss lead is? We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time. Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years. Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)
- MadxX79 5mo ago
  But Google didn't go public until 2004, when they were highly profitable. Every startup goes through a phase where they aren't profitable... For most of of them that ends when they go bankrupt.
- MBCook 5mo ago
  Survivorship bias. Also, those numbers are multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the AI stuff going on now.