well written. I think your fatal mistake even though you folks are smart was not understanding the complete value chain of your business.
What I mean by understanding the economics of the value chain is you've to understand how your customers make money, how their customers make money & how their suppliers make money. From there - you can workout your value proposition - are you saving your customers money (means there's a cap on how much value you can extract) or are you allowing your customers to make more money (how much value you can extract is kinda uncapped - depending on mechanics)
The other mistake - which you correctly kinda alluded to is not understanding the incentives / dynamics of the industry. UK land is tricky since most wealth / power is packed into UK land. hence your part about emotion etc.
final mistake was equating success to raising money. Profit, if not revenue growth is the only measure of success. Raising money is not.
Success is when you get paid. If the product is unprofitable, you lose out on a bunch more money, and your investors lose out on most of their money, but you did your job and got paid for that, and as long as it was a reasonable rate, what's the failure on your part?
I don't think the last paragraph is correct, many unicorns don't generate profit, yet are hugely successful by any other metric. In many cases, generating profit is actually undesirable for tax reasons.
Generating profit is highly desirable for any business.
For tax purpose you need to differentiate between "profit" and "taxable profit". You can try to lower your taxable profit to minimise tax, e.g. by re-investing your profits, but ultimately it is better to turn a profit and to have to pay some tax on it that to have an unprofitable business.
Not necessarily, this is a classic misunderstanding. As a famous example, Uber did not make a profit for 14 years, all the way up to 2023. For taxable profit it's even more severe, they've built up a considerable backlog of losses, so they'll pay very little in taxes for the foreseeable future, even though they're now profitable.
Uber, like Amazon before, had the strategy to forego profit in the short term to focus on growth. Ultimately the goal is to be profitable because that's the point of a business.
I think the misunderstanding is to confuse this for "profit isn't desirable".
Sure you may try to minimise your taxable profit for tax purposes but that means you are turning a profit, and that may be impossible if you intend to pay dividends.
I believe that why they said "if not revenue growth". Those successful, yet unprofitable companies do have revenue growth, or market share growth.