Tech companies have recently come under scrutiny for being overvalued and scaling their losses instead of building an actual business.
That’s a little ridiculous (almost like judging, say, an electric car company for its inability to manufacture cars.) It’s lonely at the top. We should let the haters hate and focus all our energies on protecting the beautiful tech bubble from unreasonable criticism. Here are 7 great reasons why profitability is for weirdos and boring people.
1. It makes predatory speculation much harder. It’s virtually impossible to pump and dump a tech company from nothing to IPO unless it’s overvalued. And where’s the fun in funding real businesses? Almost as lame as being honest on your LinkedIn profile. I mean, who is that boring?
2. It slows down your growth. Yes, losing more money every month is much more effective in achieving growth than actually growing your business. Losses are the new profits and allow you to generate flash floods of clickbait ads containing half-truths such as ‘the app that all CEOs love’ or ‘this startup is harder to get into than Harvard.’
3. It diverts your time away from fundraising. Stop trying to be an entrepreneur and start wining-and-dining investors. Fundraising is a full-time job; why waste your precious time on building a commercially viable product when you can just defer this issue until your post-IPO penny stock phase? By that time it’s not really your problem anymore, anyway.
4. It turns you into a commodity. Almost all businesses in the world make money, so why be like them? What about originality and changing the world? Screw all those capitalist crooks, and focus on evocative, lucid-vision narratives. It’s about making the world (more precisely, your world) a better place, dammit!
5. It constrains you. You want fluorescent pink walls in the office, a pet elephant, and Michelin-star canteen food but you can’t have that. Why? Budget issues. What’s the point of dedicating your privileged first-world life to fashion yet another gimmicky consumerist pyramid if you can’t have some fun along the way?
‘Lean’ is a word you ask an up-and-coming artist to spray paint onto your fluorescent pink office wall. It’s an idea that applies, if at all, to your employees. Lean makes everything worse when you take it too seriously. Think lean foie gras or lean caviar. Gross.
6. It makes you unattractive as a company. Nobody wants the truth. Stop conspiring to find ways of making your innocent target audience give you their hard-earned cash. It’s unsavoury, like telling your tinder acquaintance about your bloating issue on the first date.
Do you really think VCs want to know how you manipulate innocent users to pay for your products and services? Do you believe they actually enjoy paying for things? Make them all happy by making it free. Start caring about bettering humanity, and stop all that endless greed. Today’s consumers expect your investors to pay for their lifestyle – it’s all about customer-centricity.
7. It limits the extent of your favouritism. With profitability metrics in the mix, it may become harder to justify hiring your 19-year-old brother as Senior Vice President of user engagement (even if he’s good at social media.) Why take that risk?
Honestly speaking, stop thinking about profitability. It pollutes your mind and distracts you from what really matters. Be bold, spend as much OPM* as possible, keep pouring oil onto the hype fire and by all means, start a fund (with OPM*, of course) once you’ve been bought out, to perpetuate the scheme.
OPM = other people’s money = the best money in the world.
Added Podcast Alert!
To understand more about the impacts of profitability in a tech company or any company for that matter, tune into my new podcast “Present to Future” hosted along with Pak Teng Chow, founder of Blockspace Asia, which talks about trends in the tech world and aims to clear up some of the biggest doubts around it.
Please let me know what you think or any tech trends that you would like us to cover !
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Image Credit: Frank Busch
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