top | item 23094537

(no title)

kahnjw | 5 years ago

Are we talking about investment strategy or cherry picking data for the sake of arguing?

1. There are plenty of companies on the path to IPO that didn't take 1B+ in VC money 2. The "sharing" platforms are expensive investments because there are so many players fighting for market share.

We're talking about a strategy of fast growth vs slow and steady. All the companies we've mentioned so far invested in fast growth early on, whether from VC or reinvestment.

discuss

order

scarface74|5 years ago

I’m not cherry picking data. Look at the top profitable tech companies today and compare the amount of money invested in them before they became profitable to the Uber and Lyft’s of today.

Amazon is the outlier when it comes to the lack of GAAP profitability for years, but even it was cash flow positive.

Apocryphon|5 years ago

That's a false dichotomy. We're also talking about rates of fast growth vs. unrealistic hyper-growth. I'd argue that as the current tech bubble inflates, we've leaned towards the latter. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23094568

kahnjw|5 years ago

Let's leave it at this then: if capital is completely miss-allocated and a bubble has been inflating over the last 5-10 years as you claim, then we'll hear the proverbial pop in the next three to six months as a rapid pullback in consumer spending unwinds nearly all VC backed growth stage companies.