You have it completely backward. Market value / Valuation / Acquisition price == approximately, a prediction of total cumulative FUTURE profits, NOT PAST profit

You have it completely backward. Market value / Valuation / Acquisition price == approximately, a prediction of total cumulative FUTURE profits, NOT PAST profits. Past profits, directly speaking are totally irrelevant, as hard as that is to believe. In fact, taking profits can in some cases mean that the startup was extracting value that could have been saved for the future. That means that increasing revenue can actually directly drop the company's value! Dumb example, imagine that instead of users, the startup possessed literal bars of gold. Now imagine they start selling those at 1% of what gold is worth. The startup is increasing their revenue, they must be worth more! Nope. Their revenue now is preventing the future acquirer from selling those bars at near 100% gold value later post acquisition. More revenue == lower company value, as you can see, in some cases.