I agree but I think it's a false dichotomy.
At least with a startup you can count on them to, well, try.
At least with a startup you can count on them to, well, try.
This was one of the reasons I loved WhatsApp so much early on when that seemed to be the way it was going: a healthy >1B USD company with no dependency except on users.
As the WhatsApp story and many other tells us this isn't always safe, but it should be a safer bet than anyone clearly going the "unicorn or nothing" way from the start.
But WhatsApp is an insane success story on its own. Back then, around 20 engineers handling billions of messages per day, with their own servers and spending zero dollars in advertisement and using a non-standard language (Erlang).
They had signalled quite early that they where going to charge money, they had started charging money from at least a subset of users and they were still growing like crazy, 200 million monthly active users since april that year it seems based on the statistics I found.
To me that sounds profitable.