<story><title>The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/moviepass-economy-startups.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>&amp;gt; The king of money-losers, of course, is Amazon, which went years without turning a profit. Instead, it plowed billions of dollars back into its business&lt;p&gt;The key difference with Amazon is that Amazon could choose to be profitable at any time- just raise prices ever so slightly, reducing growth in customer demand, and the stop building out its enormous logistics empire and new businesses. Amazon could have had profits for a very long time, but Bezos understands that re-investing money in the company grows the value quickly. Plus, you only pay taxes on profits.&lt;p&gt;MoviePass can&amp;#x27;t really do that. They don&amp;#x27;t have potential profits that they can just stop re-investing. They aren&amp;#x27;t spending money on investments- they just don&amp;#x27;t have income high enough to cover the costs of their product. And lots of other start-ups have the same problem right now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>djrogers</author><text>No, I think the key difference with Amazon is that they aren&amp;#x27;t losing money on each individual transaction - ie selling everything at a loss.  Amazon&amp;#x27;s non-profits were due to aggressive reinvestment, not pricing.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Entire Economy Is MoviePass Now</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/technology/moviepass-economy-startups.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mabbo</author><text>&amp;gt; The king of money-losers, of course, is Amazon, which went years without turning a profit. Instead, it plowed billions of dollars back into its business&lt;p&gt;The key difference with Amazon is that Amazon could choose to be profitable at any time- just raise prices ever so slightly, reducing growth in customer demand, and the stop building out its enormous logistics empire and new businesses. Amazon could have had profits for a very long time, but Bezos understands that re-investing money in the company grows the value quickly. Plus, you only pay taxes on profits.&lt;p&gt;MoviePass can&amp;#x27;t really do that. They don&amp;#x27;t have potential profits that they can just stop re-investing. They aren&amp;#x27;t spending money on investments- they just don&amp;#x27;t have income high enough to cover the costs of their product. And lots of other start-ups have the same problem right now.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tribune</author><text>Plus Amazon is Amazon. They&amp;#x27;ve essentially been saying to investors for years &amp;quot;sure, we could make more money for YOU, or give YOU dividends, but WE can do better with your money than YOU could.&amp;quot; It&amp;#x27;s worked, of course, enabling them to grow into the gargantuan enterprise they are today. A smaller company without that proven track record wouldn&amp;#x27;t get such a license from investors for long.</text></comment>