[parliament32]

Because they're doing the fancy equivalent of selling $20 bills for $15 and chirping about how high their revenue is. You, me, and everyone else could generate $inf revenue with that strategy, but that doesn't make it a viable business model.

[MBCook]

Right.

At this point burying money in jars in the back yard and forgetting where some are has a much higher rate of return.

[hparadiz]

Using Google’s own IPO S-1 / SEC filings:

Year Revenue Net income / loss

1998 Not reported

1999 $220k -$6.076M

2000 $19.108M -$14.690M

Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?

[parliament32]

I have no doubt there are a handful of positive examples when we ignore the tens of thousands of failed companies along these lines.

I have no problem with money-furnaces trading publicly. If people want to invest in those, fantastic, power to them. But they absolutely should not be included in vehicles like pensions and indexes.

[marcosdumay]

You seem to be ignoring that a loss lead is supposed to lead people into doing something profitable.

[logifail]

> Do you guys not know what a loss lead is?

We don't know which of today's companies will be successful and/or highly-valued in N years' time.

Check Cisco's valuation on March 27, 2000; it was briefly the most valuable publically traded company in the world. Almost everyone believed it was worth it. Then it fell 88% over two years.

Full disclosure: some of us are old enough to have held stocks during the dot-com boom. Fortunately I was still a student and therefore too poor to have had any significant amount of money to lose :)

[MadxX79]

But Google didn't go public until 2004, when they were highly profitable.

Every startup goes through a phase where they aren't profitable... For most of of them that ends when they go bankrupt.

[MBCook]

Survivorship bias.

Also, those numbers are multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the AI stuff going on now.