Nobody ever mentions profits. That hasn’t changed
That said, if you can spend $1 to get $1 of ARR, or even $2 to get $1 of ARR, and your company is doing 100% net revenue retention or better, then you likely will make more money over the long term selling equity, going unprofitable to spend on growth, and getting paid back over then next 12-24 months due to the nature of compounding growth / exponentials.
Plenty of public companies have had several years in a row of >100% net retention. When Dropbox filed its S-1 it had a graph showing that every quarterly cohort of customers who had signed up had continued to grow massively in value over time, and i imagine the majority of successful SaaS co's could show a similar chart.
Uber would have been wiped out by now if it came out 20 years ago. Burning cash on the promise of future profit that still hasn't come around is a recent concept. Even companies like Standard Oil and Walmart would make money from other streams when they are putting a price squeeze on some competitor. It blows my mind how much slack these companies are getting, probably just because companies operating this way are a dime a dozen these days so there is some safety in numbers if TINA of places to invest in tech.
If you have evidence Standard Oil ever sold anything at a loss please share. I don't know about Walmart but everything I've read suggests that Standard Oil won by getting better at manufacturing faster than its competitors and passing on those cost savings to consumers. Less efficient companies failed, as those selling worse products for high prices are wont to do.
I mean yeah they succeeded because it turns out that for a commodity just having one large network for everything is more efficient (and if you own everything, no middlemen!). But that's just an argument for nationalising commodities.
All that Standard Oil profit year after year came from somebody.
Because the government is so great at efficiently doing things and selling things I can totally see how you'd make the leap to nationalize all commodities.
To elaborate on my earlier comment: Salesforce has been unprofitable during almost its entire 20+ year existence and it’s worth over $200B. It uses debt and equity to finance growth much more quickly than using profits to do so and thus has grown extremely fast. Do you believe Salesforce is in imminent danger of failure?