Investments in machinery almost invariably depreciate significantly the moment they are bought, and salaries paid to personnel, electricity to power the lights in your office building, money spent on legal, etc, all lead to zero assets.
It can happen if most of the assets are products the company made, and the company can produce them below market value, but then, why would it have have products in store, and not sell them?
There are exceptions, but they’re easily recognized. On the one hand there’s seasonal demand: companies growing Christmas trees, or producing umbrellas, hockey skates, etc.
On the other hand, there’s companies with long production times such as whiskey distillers or factories building nuclear plants.
Grandparent was talking about the case where CF never goes positive. In that case the company in theory still has some shareholder equity by way of assets. But in reality, especially for something like a software company, there aren't going to be a lot of assets to strip out when you unwind the company.
But that said, it’s not exactly obvious which funded companies will never be profitable. If it was then you’d expect it would be quite hard for them to secure funding. This is simply a conclusion that many HN commenters love to jump to when deriding a particular company, usually without a very good understanding of the company’s financials, or even of finance in general.
In theory that's the case but obviously it depends on a lot of factors, and if we're talking about software startups then they typically would have very little in terms of assets to unwind. Maybe some office furniture or a bit of IP. But most of the cash is going to stuff like employee salaries, leasing office space, and cloud computing infrastructure, so by the time you decide to shut it down there's going to be very little left in terms of shareholder value.