The traditional business mindset says that fancy offices with Aeron chairs are things you buy using profits. If you're not making a profit then everything you do should be laser focused on making more revenue to eventually turn a profit. While VC money obviously existed before the dotcom era, it was usually to buy expensive equipment or to do research - it was never really spent on offices. Consequently when dotcom businesses started landing million dollar seed rounds and spending that money on things that weren't directly revenue generating, or even necessary, people thought it was being wasted.

And, given the number of dotcom startups compared to the number of successes, it kind of was. If those startups had been focused more on making a profit instead of unmeasured 'growth' or some strange notion of 'coolness' then maybe more of them would have survived.