A million bucks doesn't get you very far. I've worked at a start-up that builds robots for 3 years now and I underappreciated just how much money it takes to run a company.

That cool million would pay for what.. maybe 5 or 6 engineers for a year when you account for the cost of salary, a building to work at, resources to work with, benefits, etc.

Not that $850m isn't kind of wild for a pure software company. But a million isn't a lot of cash.

A million may get you 5-6 interns for the year if you include cost of rent and upkeep, along with all other business related costs. Doesn't get you far at all.

If you're running a company that requires 5-6 interns, at what point do you decide to, I don't know, make money?

The fallacy that you have to build to enormous proportions before you make a penny in profit seems only to exist in SV. That's why people question it. The vast majority of business elsewhere try to make money ASAP. Some of them even grow quite large.

The idea is that some business models are more capital intensive than others to implement (like establishing a two-sided market place or building something tangible like electric cars).

Yup. The company I'm was was self sufficient after its first few years. Grew slowly and organically. Funding has only been to speed up that growth once our products were proven.

A million is the annual turnover of a tiny bakery with two or three outlets across town. It's not much at all.