Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble

by Dan Lyons

Old-guard tech CEOs seem baffled by the phenomenon of companies that operate for years in the red. “They make no money! In my world you’re not a real business until you make some money,” Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, said about Amazon in 2014, a year when the company lost $241 million yet saw its market value climb to $160 billion. Oracle CEO Mark Hurd, another old-guard business guy, expressed similar astonishment about Salesforce.com. “There’s no cash flow,” he said about that company in April 2015. “What are they worth right now? $35 billion?… It’s crazy, just crazy.” That was nothing. A few months later Salesforce.com was worth more than $50 billion.