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Comment by DeathArrow | Hacker News Reader

>You know, in ancient times, when Peter Drucker, the Master Yoda of business books, was still roaming the planet (alongside dinosaurs, probably) and writing business books, the definition of a successful company actually included the fact that the company was making more money than it was spending - it was profitable.

I guess some companies like Yahoo were never profitable but some people got rich buying and selling shares.

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Yahoo isn't a good example. They were able to routinely turn a profit after the dotcom bust. Their business was very similar to Twitter's profitable years in terms of margins (pre Elon; 10-20% operating income margins). Yahoo had a gigantic (at the time), successful ad business and a lot of properties to display the ads on.

As of right now, the single greatest example in modern business history is Uber. Although they continue to trim their operating losses and it appears they may reach sustainability ($14.1b revenue with $8.5b operating loss in 2019; trimmed to a $1.8b operating loss on $31b in revenue the past four quarters). Their history of loss generation is astounding. Upwards of $30 billion in operating losses since 2009. Even in an ideal scenario it'll probably take them 10+ years after they finally reach an operating profit to turn that net positive.

Yikes. I knew they’ve hemorrhaged money but I didn’t know it was that much. I ran the numbers once back when their total funding a lot less. And I came to the conclusion that with that money they could have literally paid every cab driver’s salary for a year and given out free rides. But since you need regulators to look the other way, there was enough to literally give every state legislator in every single state a million dollars. And I’m sure it’d take far less. And there was still a sizable chunk left over.

I feel like the startup game for a while now has been… and the numbers are arbitrary but I don’t think the dynamic is wrong… raise about $100 million to get a total of $10m in revenue and then be worth $1b. That’s not business as we think of it.

And some companies are only profitable as-run for the shareholders, temporarily, despite being theoretically sound long-term businesses. Take a profitable company, cut costs to bone, arbitrage off all the goodwill generated by an erstwhile decent product, strip assets, pay executive salaries, bonuses and dividends on the "stunning" short term profits and flit before the emptied husk crashes down on top of the employees that once made it work. Bonus dead-eyed vulture points if it's public infrastructure and the tax payer is now on the hook for double-digit billions to restore the damage you did.

This week, water, but the same happens over and over again in every sector: https://theconversation.com/how-thames-water-came-to-be-floo...

Fascinating. Seems like similar issue risk management issue to silicon valley bank where they didn't account for a jump in interest rates and increase in inflation.

Calling such shameless pocket-stuffing a "risk management issue" seems to rather be like calling a drink-driving accident that kills a pedestrian an "unforeseen kinetic event".

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