My comment was just addressing the 'artificially supported' comment above. It's not artificial support per se, just that lots of companies, even if they finally make the stage of a year to year profit, may still be many tens or hundreds of millions in actual debt in the form of investment money that they have not remotely recouped. They could have lost millions or actually had billions in gross revenues during that time, but not paid back any of the investment either way.

So, to me, often the term 'profitable' is misleading as it's used. It really translates as not losing even more money. So they don't need to take on yet more debt to keep going. Not that that's not a big milestone of course. But still, it hardly means that they are 'profitable' in the bigger sense in a lot of cases.

Even then, in the tech world, continuing to get folks to pour vast amounts of money that you can't remotely recoup into your company is sort of a strategy, though it's kind of a ponzi scheme in a way. You just have to keep bringing in more investment than you spend, using that to offset year to year loses and to buy other things or fund other projects, until you get enough attention to be purchased by a company big enough that your huge debt isn't an issue.