Hacker News Reader

Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

I could start a business with a similar growth trajectory. We can mail people $100 bills for a low low payment of $10. I just need $500 billion dollars of startup capital and I can show you a 10x yoy growth for a few years.

View on HN

I'm in. I would like to predicate the entire US economy on your business model.

That sounds fun but this is people paying for real products and services. The demand is there (and it's growing faster than any other commercial technology in history). They just need to work on inference (and potentially training) costs. I think that's clearly achieveable.

For the record, growth plays have been common in Silicon Valley for many decades. It's how we ended up with all the major tech companies we see today. Of course, it's high risk, high reward.

Except Anthropic had an operating profit in Q2, and your scheme never would.

You're just parroting a headline. They did not actually make a profit in Q2 when you take all of their expenses into account.

You’re just parroting another headline. Adjusted operating profitability is still a milestone.

Tech companies are capital intensive. AI ones especially. Not a surprise that they don’t have GAAP profitability after 5 years.

If they, through standard accounting practices, cannot show they are profitable how do we know they are profitable? I assume they can't just say "we are profitable assuming you ignore the costs we paid to build up XYZ". I'm guessing they could pre - rent compute for 10 years or something and maybe that's all on the balance sheet but you'd just amortize that and I think that falls under GAAP?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com