[beremaki]

Profit is one of the least ambiguous term possible.

If you pay yourself 100% of your revenue as income you don't make any profit which is your choice.

Profit is needed to sustain periods when revenue decreases and to act when an investment is needed (for pivoting, adapting to evolutions in the market, scaling or whatever move the business has to make).

I don't see what is controversial here for a business, profit is like capitalism 101.

[jameshart]

If profit was completely unambiguous, accountants wouldn’t have had to invent the word ‘EBITDA’.

The article rather ambiguously says:

> Profit is what allows the company to hire employees, grow, and sustain itself—it is quite literally what funds ongoing development

There’s a key distinction between reinvesting profits - using accrued money to develop or acquire capital assets that can grow the company - and expenses.

Cash used to ‘sustain the business’, ‘grow’ (increase sales) and ‘hire employees’, as well as ‘ongoing development’ in the sense of business development, is largely going in the ‘operating expenses’ bucket. It doesn’t come out of profits, it comes out of revenue and it reduces your profits.

But in the case of a software focused organization, engineering staffing costs and ongoing product development can absolutely be reinvestment into developing software assets - but with a lot of caveats.

So it’s certainly a little ambiguous for the original article to claim that all those things are ‘what profit is for’. Often they are preprofit expenses.