I think we agree. But my point is that statements like that from O'Reilly (and Bill Gates, at other times) allow shallow-thinking people to start formulating ideas that businesses shouldn't make a profit.

Yes, money is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. You can't take it with you, and stored money is useless unless deployed as investment.

But there is no other viable way to that end, as much as people like to pretend there is. When we lose sight of this, we slip into muddle-headed thinking and everyone loses out. Eventually, an unprofitable enterprise will lose staff, investors, suppliers and will die.

It's as though we're all riding a train called 'profit' to our destination, but everyone in the dining car is pretending we're really levitating on a magic carpet of good intentions to our destination, because is is impolite to talk about the train that is carrying us along. The 'train' needs to be brought back into our conversations.

It's as though we've traded the Victorian distaste for discussions about sex with a modern distate for discussions about making money, even though everybody does it as much as they can.

> Eventually, an unprofitable enterprise will lose staff, investors, suppliers and will die.

I agree you can't lay too much emphasis on this. I have experienced it at startup, though the CEO tried hard to get out of the way along, and found the successful exit.

Yet, the worst was not running out of money, but the lack of our vision and will to achieve it. Or the vision might have been false, something good for us, not for customers. Anyway, in 3 years, we have burned out.

So I think the most important thing is something keeps you motivated, which drives you to try anything for the vision relentlessly.