Which is the more successful business now?
I agree that you aren't a success until you are making money, but I don't think that it's important to be profitable always.
Lots of plumbers are more successful today than lots of YC startups.
What is also probably true is that it is very hard to go out of business as a freelance plumber. It is very easy to go bust as a tech entrepreneur. The flip side of that: on a steady income, the plumber gets more opportunities to grow her business than the tech entrepreneur --- she can stay in business, turning different knobs, indefinitely. You hope that the tech entrepreneur's individual opportunities are much more valuable, but that depends, doesn't it?
There's also the classic factoid that most millionaires got there not by striking gold, but by managing their money well.
Be careful about Geek Exceptionalism. It will burn you. People excelled in business long before there was an Internet.
Whilst like you can do the process you point out, it's likely to take 10+ years to do that. You could also do this same process as a tech consultant and then grow your consultancy business the same way - but that wasn't my point - that's all.
People after all play the lottery every week - though on average they would be better off putting that money in a savings account and waiting 30-40 years...
But hey, I'm still working on my startup, so I guess that just means I'm dumb.
The fact that a handful (almost literally) of businesses have achieved this, and quite a few more make a modest profit in a reasonable time, does not by any stretch mean that these "successes" are going to do the same thing. The whole point of the complaint here is that most of those "successes" won't actually be successful, ever. It's just that in this business, the one that does make it will make it big. But the others will still fail.
If you're the one in a billion for whom "get big fast" works, it's a great outcome. But for everyone else, the other model works a lot more reliably.
We're all one-in-a-billion!
// Agree with the point though - it's like assuming that all runners are as fast as Usain Bolt.
The important consideration is the size of the deficit (in time or money or ownership) a company accepts and what they gain in exchange. And the bigger the deficit, the higher the stakes.
I did not even have a laptop at the time (for network diagnostics and the like) -- I just had my experience.
I've had to learn an awful lot about resource management as a result of doing it this way, and I'm grateful for that.
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I think it's perfectly possible for, say, a company funded by VCs to be profitable from the start of operations, since the money that bought the equity isn't expected to be paid back.
It may even be the case that great business success is always preceded by years of operating at a loss. Let's assume that for the sake of discussion. It still doesn't show that any company that operates at a loss, no matter how large the revenue stream, is going to be a great business success. And it certainly doesn't show that the business, while operating at a loss, is currently a success. Operating at a loss, with a large revenue stream, may be a necessary condition of success, but it surely isn't a sufficient condition.