Do you know how many public VC-backed companies founded in the US in the last 15 years are meaningfully profitable? One.

Here’s a list of some of the most prominent venture-backed companies which went public in the last few years, along with the net income of each company in 2022:

  • Doordash (food delivery): –$1.36b
  • Uber (ridesharing): –$9.14b
  • Snowflake (cloud computing): –$796mm
  • Roblox (online gaming): –$924mm
  • Palantir (big data analytics): –$373mm
  • Coinbase (crypto exchange): –$2.62b
  • Rivian (electric vehicles): –$6.75b
  • Crowdstrike (cybersecurity): –$183mm
  • Draftkings (sports betting): –$1.38b
  • Peloton (home fitness): –$2.83b
  • Datadog (cloud monitoring): –$50mm
  • Robinhood (stock trading): –$1.03b
  • Pinterest (social network): –$96mm
  • Beyond Meat (plant-based meat): –$396mm
  • Snap (social network): –$1.43b

I’ll stop there, though the list is several hundred long. Nearly none of them are profitable.

If you’re curious about the one profitable business, it’s Airbnb, which started in 2008 and achieved profitability last year ($1.89b). Impressive.

To be fair, there are a few businesses which are close calls. Zoom, accelerated by the pandemic, was profitable in 2022 but slipped back into loss last quarter. And Moderna was profitable in 2022 but it’s really a biotech company, not a VC-backed business.

Also, Chewy made $49mm on $10.1b in sales and Figs made $21mm. These debatably count as meaningfully profitable…

I think it’s likely that I missed a profitable business or two. But even if there are 3 or 5 instead of 1, there are many hundreds of companies. It’s still pretty telling if 99% of these businesses are unprofitable instead of 99.9%. Still, please let me know in the comments if I missed any.

It’s worth emphasizing that this profitability dynamic is unprecedented. Historically, the most prominent VC-backed businesses got to profitability quickly. Google, founded in 1998, was profitable in 2001. Facebook, founded in 2004, got there in 2009. Netflix, founded in 1997, made money in 2003. And Apple, founded in 1976, was profitable in 1978.

Today, management of these companies will usually explain they’re not profitable because they’re investing in growth. Fair enough. But in many cases, losses are growing both in absolute terms and as a proportion of revenue, signifying that as these businesses scale, profitability is receding into the horizon.

We are no longer in a growth-at-all-costs environment in which sales growth is rewarded above all else. With raising rates, the stock market is severely punishing companies that remain unprofitable. Yet almost all VC-backed companies–at least those founded in the last 15 years–still are.

Will at least some more of these businesses eventually get to profitability? I’m sure. But the fact that it’s so hard to think of VC-backed companies that simply make money indicates, at least to me, that there’s something off about the venture ecosystem today.