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Comment by raviparikh | Hacker News Reader

Plenty of people mention profits! Companies are rewarded for efficiency and profitability (more so than they were 10 years ago). E.g. see the massive valuations relative to ARR and growth that Zapier, Mailchimp, and Calendly all achieved over the last year.

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.

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>Companies are rewarded for efficiency and profitability

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.

> Even companies like Standard Oil and Walmart would make money from other streams when they are putting a price squeeze on some competitor.

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 it's _the_ Standard Oil. They used their massive market domination and control of every step of the process to just destroy competitors.

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.

> But that's just an argument for nationalising commodities.

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.

Standard oil raising prices on customers in a monopoly and cutting prices to the point of not making a profit in markets with competitors was one of the central arguments of the U.S. government prosecution in the antitrust case. In the case of walmart it has been engaged in a price war with Aldi in certain markets in the past decade.

Seems unlikely, seeing 20 years ago we had just come out of the the dot-com boom. I'd say this has been the norm since the 90's.

If it had been the norm since the 90s I would be ordering cat food from pets.com today rather than chewy.com. That site had like one unprofitable year and that was enough to close doors in 2000, even though this was clearly a brilliant idea. The concept of buying runway didn't exist then.

It worked for some and not others. Amazon and eBay were losing money for years.

The big question is, if customers are going to stay over a long run. Also the assumption is that SAAS companies are to keep growing, while I see them all converging on the same market / same dollar spend (CRM, Support, Workflow). There will be consolidation at some point, and it won't be pretty.

> The big question is, if customers are going to stay over a long run.

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.

The article mentioned profits not once. Everything you just said is the bullshit companies say to get investors to pretend profits don’t matter.

Yes, I could have mentioned profits in the article, but I wouldn’t say that profitability (or lack thereof) is one of the primary things that has changed between 2013 and 2021, and the article is about changes.

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?

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