For the past few years we've had it had beaten into us that a start-up is an organization searching for a scalable (and implicitly, profitable) business model.

Some businesses are always going to need a ton of capital up front: space travel, medical, semiconductors, etc. Also, social networks for obvious reasons, twitter doesn't counter this argument. There isn't a huge amount of utility gained by you when the company your friend works for is using Box.

I see Box need would need some capital, but I can't remotely put it in the capital intensive category.

Which leaves me thinking that Box simply hasn't yet found a scalable and profitable business model, it's a large company to still be in the search stage.

I get the argument that Enterprise sales is a long process and there's a race against the likes of Dropbox.

Let's say the sales cycle is 2 years. If I have 500 sales people in year 4 and 800 in year 6, I expect those original 500 to be earning twice their wages, at a minimum, at year 6. If they're not doing that after 2 years, why do I keep recruiting at such a rate? I also expect some proportional contribution from sales after 3-4 months, up to 2 years.

Let's call that roughly 600 people-worth of sales, that's a minimum of 1,200 salaries of income. Looking at their numbers they'd have to have gone from (normalise this to their actual numbers) 500 to 1,700 sales people in 2 years (or 250 to 850, etc). In that actually the case?