Its every startups story that they are going to lose a bunch of money and eventually somehow make enough money to justify their evaluations. Not only hasn’t it happen with any YC company, nor has it happen with most of the money losing tech darlings like Uber, Lyft, Dropbox, Mongo,ElasticCo, etc. I believe that Amazon retail is profitable or could be anytime they chose, but not enough to justify Amazons valuation in the foreseeable future. Of course AWS is a different story.
That's simply because being profitable means you don't have anything better to do with your money, which signals to investors that you don't see any more growth opportunity. Mongo/elastic could both become profitable pretty quickly if they needed to (by slowing down hiring and expansion) but they don't do that because they're trying to grow as fast as possible, and they have enough money in the bank to sustain loses. Uber/lyft I think are fucked, but that's a different story.
Think of it this way. What do rich people do with their excess money? They invest it. So if you're a company like Mongo/elastic, what do you do with your excess money? Well, invest it back into the business. Both of these companies have years of runway before they go broke or have to go profitable, so it doesn't make sense for them to try and be profitable when there is still so much of the market left in the open.
