This is a workable strategy! Examples include Amazon, Facebook, Workday, Snowflake and practically every biotech company. Some wait until they're profitable to go public; some don't. It's also a strategy that often fails. Lots of less famous examples are out there, too.
It's interesting that Coursera's 2020 revenue per current learner is about $8. I ran the numbers on Stanford ($6 billion budget; 17,000 enrolled students) and the revenue per learner is north of $300,000.
Now Stanford sells a vastly different product than Coursera does. (At least right now.) And the bulk of Stanford's revenue comes via grants, investment income and other stuff including ticket sales. Tuition revenue per learner is far less, though still well into the tens of thousands of dollars per year.
If you believe that over the next decade, the education dollar will be reallocated to the advantage of organizations like Coursera, the way to get rewarded for your prescience is to get in now and smile as you wait for the revenue/learner curve to bend your way.
I'm not minimizing the risks. But if your analysis ends with "they're losing money right now," you're shrinking your horizons to a strange degree.
We don’t know what will happen with tech stocks like these over the next couple of years though as others have said.
If not. You are possibly seeing everything as if you’re the victim or being attacked. My comment did not do any of that. At all.
> tell me. please why a company that loses 40 cents for every dollar they spend should have double digit multiples. you have 1 hour to reply with a fully cited explanation justifying this level of exuberance in a low yield credit bubble driving up valuations while overall the industry has seen a net reduction in profitability.
so I dissed a YC company going public and it gets flagged. The censorship here is ridiculous and this place has turned into a creepy brogrammer pump & dump.