[austenallred]

> A company’s financial value hinges on its profits and model of its future cash flows. For the vast majority of startups in tech, this will be zero.

I’m not sure just how true that is today. In my YC batch probably 30%? of companies were profitable or at least eying profitability.

I’d actually be very curious to know what those numbers are.

[davidu]

"Ramen Profitable" ≠ Profitable for most public companies, and even if they did, would be immaterial. I'm sure most of the 30% referenced above are barely profitable.

At Cisco, I operate at a roughly 20% profit margin on a roughly $50,000,000,000 annual business. Most acquisitions are immaterial from a profitability standpoint.

[austenallred]

Gotcha

[philipodonnell]

No offense intended, but the vast majority of startups in tech don't go through YC batches or anything like that.

The vast majority are startups you'd never hear anything about. They're started by a small team or one person, they build something on the cheap, try to market it, fail, then try to sell it. Or a non-technical person pays a coder to build a site but then it doesn't take off or the coder bails, so the non-technical person tries to sell it because they put money in so it must have value.

I have personally done that 3 times (even got real customers on one). I can name 5 new startups that I've head about in the last month just in my mid-sized city. I can't imagine how many are already out there slowly dying that I just never heard about.