This isn’t criticism or sarcasm — I’m genuinely impressed, but also very curious about the rationale behind it.
- no company generates revenue in its first second. Even if you start a lemonade stand tomorrow, you'll have to buy some lemons first. The time-to-revenue might be very short, but it's never zero. Therefore, making no revenue for 1 day or for 10 years is not a step change, but simply a point on a curve.
- Capitalism is basically a long history of creating vehicles with increasing sophistication to bridge that gap: provide funding for ventures that have returns in the future. This is intrinsically difficult, and it's easy to waste money, but it can work immensely. This started with the Dutch inventing limited liability corporations to fund ship expeditions, and today's VC is essentially an extension of that.
- It has worked well in the past to bet on companies that don't optimize for time-to-revenue, but something else – famous examples being e.g. Amazon, Google, Meta, who all lost lots of money initially.
Hence there can be companies that make no money for quite a while. And it can even turn out that the vast majority of the companies that make no money for a while never make any money. Accepting this risk is a feature, not a bug.
Yea, it's called investment. If you want to get rich overnight play lottery or start gambling.