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Few profitable, public, venture-backed US startups in past 15 years (twitter.com/ballmatthew)
11 points by legerdemain on April 14, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments


A bit of an exaggeration, there are many profitable public companies with low or negative net profit (accounting profit after depreciation/amortisation) this is tax reduction strategy that high growth SaaS companies take because investors look at ARR growth rather than margins, competition is bruising so investing in product is more important than managing for profit in the long run, ie if your product fall behind you can't ever be very profitable in the future. This is aruagbly better for customers too, money into the product instead of being taken off the table to investors/tax. But these companies have positive free cash flow which generally means their cash on hand increases each quarter (not bleeding with a runway). Datadog Crowdstrike, ZoomInfo, Snowflake, Workday


For context: VCs make much more money by flipping money-losing concerns that have high growth rates, than by building profitable companies. The resulting behavior is predictable.


Embarrassing really and the public markets have no growth alternatives so they will keep betting on these things.




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