Please don’t use the “look at Amazon” example. Amazon had positive margins early on and was using cash to buy and build real assets. Amazon also pivoted to an entirely different business where most of its profit comes from - AWS.

No, AWS wasn’t born from Amazon selling excess capacity.

That’s just like saying that if every company rehired its first CEO it could be worth multiple trillions.

> what's the point of great margins if you have no scale

Profit? Niche ownership? Reliability? Durability? Expertise?

It makes sense to worship the Church of Scale in a VC-adjacent forum like HN, but it’s not the only way to business.

The point of profit is profit.

The whole premise of the VC/PE business is profits, just with different risk strategies.

Profit for who? All VCs want is for the company to IPO, because that's when they can get their money back with a nice profit. The company itself doesn't have to be anywhere near profitability to IPO. Look at Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox, etc.

VCs don’t care about profit. They only care about selling to the “greater fool” at unrealistic valuations.

Amazon never made any profit because they were always reinvesting. If they had scaled back to "normal business" levels of ambition at any point they'd have been "normal business" levels of profitable.

Isn't the Amazon the exception that proves the rule