OpenAI just filed their S-1 at an $850B valuation while losing $27B a year. i work in SaaS and this makes my brain hurt.

So i run a small saas company. we have 14 employees nd we are profitable. last year i almost had a panic attack because we lost $8k in one month due to a billing error.

openai is burning $27 billion a year and just filed to go public at a valuation higher than most countries' GDP. twenty seven billion dollars in losses. per year. and the market is nodding along like yeah that checks out.

i genuinely do not understand the rules anymore. my investor told me last quarter that we needed to "show a path to profitability within 18 months or we would have a difficult conversation." openai's path to profitability is apparently 2030 and they are getting rewarded with the biggest IPO in tech history.

i know the counterargument is scale and TAM and winner take all dynamics and blah blah blah. but at some point the basic math of "you lose more money than most companies will ever make" has to matter right? or has that just stopped being a thing?

meanwhile i am over here sweating over our $400/month spend on hubspot nd dench nd debating whether we can afford to upgrade our customer support tooling. different universes.

not hating on openai specifically, their product is genuinely good and i use it daily. just observing that the rules for what counts as a viable business are apparently extremely different depending on how many zeros are involved.