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Comment by bobxmax | Hacker News Reader

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Do you mean pre-profit/without ever making a profit? I found an article about their IPO:

> Pets.com lost $42.4 million during the fourth quarter last year on $5.2 million in sales. Since the company's inception in February of last year, it has lost $61.8 million on $5.8 million in sales.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/pets-com-raises-82-5...

They had sales, they were just making a massive loss. Isn’t that pretty similar to AI companies, just on a way smaller scale?

We haven’t seen AI IPOs yet, but it’s not hard to imagine one of them going public before making profit IMO.

You'd think after all this time nerds would stop obsessing about profit. Profit doesn't matter. It hasn't mattered for a long time because tech companies have such fat margins they can go profitable in months if they wanted to.

Yes, $5m in sales. That's effectively pre-revenue for a tech company.

They're not claiming that it's like the dot com boom because no one is actually making money. They're claiming that this is more like the dot com boom than the housing bubble, which I think is true. The dot com crash didn't cause Jane-on-the-street to lose her house while she worked a factory job, though the housing crisis did have those kinds of consumer-affecting outcomes.

It's nothing like the dot com bubble because that was based on speculative future value and zero present value. There is more present value in AI than at any point in software in the last 30 years.

The Internet bubble was also based on something real, but that didn't stop it from being a bubble.

For example, Cisco parked at over $500B in market cap during the boom. Its current market cap is around half that, at $250B.

What you're missing is how that value comes about. People seem to think it's an infinite fountain but it's more like strip mining the commons.

We also know that AI hype is holding up most of the stock market this point, including the ticker symbols which you don't think of as being for "AI companies". Market optimism at large is coming from the idea that companies won't need employees soon, or that they can keep using AI to de-leverage and de-skill their workforce

So that $500m in ARR in 3 months is from hype? That's what you're contending?

1. Claude Code is claimed to have hit €500m ARR in 3 months.

2. What is the Claude Code profit for the same period?

3. What is the Claude Code profit per request served when excluding fixed expenses such as training the models?

Who cares? Are you not seeing the exponential decrease in GPU inference costs? H100s costs 3x what they did a year ago.

I'm not sure I understand how B (H100s costs 3x what they did a year ago) follows from A (exponential decrease in GPU inference costs).

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can see cramer "buy pets.com! general revenue is just around the corner"

Pets.com could have traded at a significant multiple of the entire combined revenue of the pet space if investors simply poured infinite dollars into it.

The could have even got into the programming space with all that capital. Pawed Code

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That’s a good point. Pets.com raised $82 million from its IPO pre-revenue (bad) and Anthropic raised $500 million from Sam Bankman-Fried pre-revenue (good)

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I’m admittedly not very good at math. You pointed out that Claude Code got to $500mm ARR in 3 months, but it kind of looks like it actually Anthropic over four years and many billions of dollars to make a product that generates significant revenue (I appreciate their modesty in not bragging about the net profit on that revenue there). I’d say that the users bragging about being able to cost Anthropoid multiple orders of magnitude in costs beyond what they pay them kind of makes the ARR less impressive but I’m not a fancy management scientist

But I’m bad at math and grasping things. If you simply pick a point in time to start counting things and decide what costs you want to count then the business looks very exciting. The math is much more reassuring and the overall climate looks much saner than the dot com bubble because we simply don’t know how much money is being lost, which is fine becau

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