Have you ever dreamed of building the next Spotify, Tesla, or Airbnb? You’re not alone. These companies have become icons, poster children for modern entrepreneurship. Their founders are celebrated for disrupting industries, scaling fast, and capturing the imagination of investors worldwide. But there’s something these success stories don’t advertise up front:
None of them made money for over a decade.
Spotify took 17 years to become profitable.1
Tesla? 17 years as well.2
Airbnb? Roughly 12 years before it saw real financial stability.3
During that time, they raised billions, burned through investor capital, and survived only because they had access to deep-pocketed backers and unusually patient capital—things most founders don’t have, especially outside the Silicon Valley bubble.
If your strategy is to grow first and figure out profit later, think again.
Table of Contents
- Cash Is Oxygen, Don’t Forget to Breathe
- The Valley Is Not the World
- Behind the Headlines: What Success Really Looked Like
- A New Lens: Rethinking How We Build Startups
- For Many Founders, It’s Already Too Late
- Let’s Talk About Profit
Cash Is Oxygen, Don’t Forget to Breathe
When I started Accolade Coaching in 2012, one lesson became clear very quickly: cash is oxygen. Without it, businesses don’t just struggle, they suffocate. It doesn’t matter how clever your idea is, how many people visit your website, or how fast you’re growing. If you can’t cover your costs and pay yourself, you’re one invoice away from collapse.
In the world of traditional small business, this mindset is instinctive. You watch your cash flow. You chase invoices. You focus on sustainability, because you have to.
But somewhere along the way, the startup world adopted a different belief system: growth before profit. Revenue is nice, but optional. Profit? That can wait.
This mindset isn’t accidental, it’s rooted in Silicon Valley culture, where startups are encouraged to scale fast, raise often, and dominate markets before figuring out how to make money. And while that works for a select few operating inside that privileged bubble, with access to elite investors, billion-dollar funds, and a forgiving media narrative, it has spread like gospel to founders across the globe who don’t have the same safety net.
From Sydney to São Paulo, Lagos to London, founders are burning through cash and chasing hockey-stick growth because that’s what the Valley says winners do. But in most ecosystems, the cash runs out long before the users pay.
The Valley Is Not the World
Silicon Valley is a one-of-a-kind ecosystem. It’s not just a place, it’s a self-reinforcing machine fueled by capital, connections, and culture. Billion-dollar funds, serial founders, risk-tolerant investors, world-class accelerators, and a media engine that celebrates disruption at any cost, it’s all baked into the environment.
But here’s the truth most people don’t say out loud:
“Unless you’re in the Valley, you don’t play by the same rules.”
I’ve seen this firsthand in my work here in our region here across APAC. Most early-stage founders I’ve spoken to aren’t sitting on million-dollar seed rounds or pitching Sand Hill Road. They’re bootstrapping. They’re pitching local grants. They’re balancing a side job to make their runway last. And when things get tough, there’s no safety net of eager investors waiting to bail them out.
And yet, many of these founders are unknowingly trying to copy a model that doesn’t fit their reality. They read the same TechCrunch headlines. They attend startup events where unicorns are idolized. They believe they need to “scale fast” and “raise early” or they’re doing it wrong.
But here in this region and in so many other places like it, the rules are different.
There’s no margin for endless experimentation without income. No hype rounds to keep you afloat. If you’re not building toward profit, you’re building on borrowed time.
Behind the Headlines: What Success Really Looked Like
From the outside, companies like Spotify, Tesla, and Airbnb look like unstoppable forces, market-defining, culture-shaping giants. But dig beneath the headlines, and you’ll find a different story: one of survival, reinvention, and long, painful roads to profitability.
Take Spotify. Today it commands hundreds of millions of users worldwide, but for most of its existence, it lost money, lots of it. Caught between pleasing users with free access and paying royalties to artists, the company burned through capital for 17 years before finally turning a full-year profit in 2024. That kind of patience only exists in ecosystems where funding flows freely and investors are willing to wait.
Then there’s Tesla. What many forget is that in 2008, it was on the brink of collapse.4 Elon Musk had just enough capital left to bet everything on the launch of the Model S. It worked, but only after a decade of volatility, bailouts, and belief from investors with unusually deep pockets and high tolerance for risk.
Airbnb? It was born during the 2008 financial crisis, struggled to get traction, and famously funded early growth by selling Obama-themed cereal boxes.5 It wasn’t until 2022, after years of navigating trust issues, regulatory battles, and the pandemic—that it reached consistent profitability.
These stories are often told as proof that growth before profit works. But here’s what’s usually left out:
“These companies succeeded not because of the growth-first model, but because they were in one of the only places in the world where that model could survive.”
In Silicon Valley, delayed profit can be tolerated. Capital is abundant. Losses are seen as bets. And investor expectations are shaped by outlier successes.
But try applying the same approach in Melbourne, Jakarta, Lagos, or Berlin and the outcome is rarely the same. The capital runs out. The margins are thinner. The room for error is smaller.
That’s the truth no one likes to admit: the Silicon Valley playbook doesn’t travel well.
A New Lens: Rethinking How We Build Startups
For years, I adopted the same mindset so many others did.
I believed that if a startup had a bold vision, a scalable product, and just enough traction, profit could come later. I designed my programs to coach founders to focus on growth, market share, and momentum, because that’s what we were taught to value. That was the model everyone pointed to. That was “how startups worked.”
But in recent months, I’ve made it a priority to reconnect directly with founders across the region, listening, asking questions, and hearing the stories that don’t make headlines. And what I’ve heard has been sobering.
These aren’t stories of 12-year battles ending in billion-dollar IPOs. They’re stories of three-month runways, overworked teams, and brilliant ideas that never made it. Not because they lacked ambition, but because they never had the luxury of time. Funding didn’t buy them years, it barely bought them weeks. One founder told me their pre-seed round gave them “just enough to hire one person and panic.”
And sadly, these stories only confirm what I’ve witnessed over the years: talented, passionate founders who quietly closed shop, not because they failed to grow, but because they failed to survive. Not because their ideas weren’t good, but because the model they followed was never built for their reality.
It was in these conversations that I realized something had to change, starting with me.
So I’ve overhauled my entire coaching approach. From now on, my mission is clear:
“Help founders build businesses that turn a profit as early as possible—without sacrificing their potential for growth.”
Not by chasing every shiny metric, but by designing models that earn, sustain, and scale. Because real impact doesn’t come from burning cash, it comes from building something that lasts.
For Many Founders, It’s Already Too Late
The more founders I speak with, the more a painful pattern emerges.
Their startups are already bleeding money. Their energy is spent chasing funding, grants, angel investors, venture capital, anything to keep the lights on a little longer. Profit isn’t even on the table. Survival is. And even if programs like mine could help them shift course, there’s often not enough runway left to make the turn.
It’s heartbreaking, because these founders aren’t doing anything “wrong” in the traditional sense. They’re following the playbook they’ve been handed. But the problem is that playbook wasn’t written for them.
Most startup ecosystems around the world have imported the Silicon Valley model wholesale. From pitch nights to accelerator templates, everything is modelled on the idea that growth matters most and profit can wait. But this only works when you’re in a market with the capital, infrastructure, and investor patience to support it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some incredible success stories. Founders who defied the odds, secured meaningful investment, and built amazing businesses. But in all honesty, those stories are the exception, not the rule.
For every one that breaks through, dozens quietly shut down, burned out, run dry, or stretched too thin to recover. The failures far outweigh the successes, not because the founders lacked talent or drive, but because the model they were following was never designed for their environment.
And that’s what makes this issue so urgent. We’re not just talking about ideas that didn’t work—we’re talking about wasted potential, and systems that set promising founders up to fail.
Let’s Talk About Profit
If any of this resonates with you, if you’ve felt the tension between chasing growth and building something financially solid, you’re not alone.
I’ve been having more and more of these conversations with founders lately, and they’ve been some of the most honest, eye-opening discussions I’ve had in years. I’d love to hear your take too.
How are you thinking about profit in your business?
What challenges are you facing when it comes to earning early, or earning at all?
What would a healthier, more resilient startup path look like for you?
If you’re up for a conversation, reach out. Whether it’s just to share your experience or explore what a profit-first mindset might look like for your startup, I’m always keen to connect with founders thinking differently.
Because the more we talk openly about this, the more we can shape a startup culture that works in the real world, not just in Silicon Valley.
Sources:
1. Weatherbed, J. (2025, February 4). Spotify finally turned a profit for a full year, The Verge.
2. Soni, A. A. (2023, November 14). When did Tesla become profitable, DrFranchises.
3. Masson, T. (2023, February 17). Airbnb attains yearly profitability for first time in 2022, Rental Scale-Up.
4. Badkar, M. (2013, February 12). How the most ambitious auto venture in a century nearly collapsed, Business Insider.
5. Prakash, P. (2023, April 19). Airbnb’s CEO says a $40 cereal box changed the course, Fortune.
