The Amazon comparison is broken. Every few months, someone defends a cash-burning startup by invoking Amazon's years of losses before it dominated e-commerce and cloud computing. Not Boring's Packy McCormick wrote this piece specifically to dismantle that reflex, arguing the analogy is lazy, frequently wrong, and masks the structural differences between Amazon's capital deployment and what most loss-making companies are actually doing.
The piece is worth reading for the mechanics of the argument, not just the conclusion. McCormick walks through what made Amazon's losses defensible: deliberate reinvestment into infrastructure with compounding returns, not operational inefficiency or unproven unit economics. The distinction matters because it is the difference between a company building durable leverage and one simply delaying a reckoning.
The question the full piece forces you to answer is specific: when a company burns cash, what exactly is it building? If you cannot name the asset, the Amazon comparison does not apply. Read it to get the framework, not the verdict.
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