You're confusing "business" with "investment".
Business is the act of making money right now. Buying stuff, selling stuff, providing services, and making enough money to keep the lights on. That's really important stuff. That's how we pay our mortgages and buy food and XBoxes. When you're running a business that stuff should always be front and centre. It's what's important to employees, and the economy, etc.
Investment is the act of using money now in order to increase the amount of money you have in the future. Profit, product, and metrics right now are much less important if you're thinking about what happens in 1 or 2 or 5 years time. A company with a good-but-not-great product today could be the next Apple if they're able to realize the potential of the market - that's what investors are looking for. They don't really care how much a business is making today if they're thinking about where it could be in 5 years time.
No idea what type of business you're running. Businesses always looks ahead (unless it's a scam-and-run operation, of course). And investment is also business.
However, the incentives have now been twisted beyond all recognition.
It doesn't even matter if the business will have profits, it matters if the business will look to future investors like it will have profits.
"Dude! We could make so much money if we made X!" - but do you actually care about X? Why is money the only reason people are setting up business and solving problems? It should be secondary, a happy side effect of solving hard problems (which people will thank you for with money.)
Are you upset that the gas station operator doesn't have a hobby about gas?
To wit, I'm not going to be upset if tech support takes 3 minutes to process my question and reads out an answer from a pamphlet in monotone if it is indeed a solution to my problem. And there is some software that I use _despite_ its pain points because it solves problems I have.
They didn't build the business. They're an employee.
[1] actually there is. It’s called “academia” and from what I’m told it’s pretty miserable to be in
PS: have not heard a good word about academia from numerous friends in it. Might be regional (EU) but still...
Who said anything about hard problems or "big investments"? I never said that. Why are you saying that?
That's the wrong reason to set up a business, but the right reason to simply get a job.
> “Hard problems”
Who said anything about hard problems? Are businesses only designed to solve hard problems?
Product storytelling doesn’t mean smokes and mirrors.
They’re buying businesses so it seems like criticizing them for caring about high profit is misplaced.
> important growth metrics
> product storytelling
Yup. Everything that's wrong with (predominately US) modern business culture.
Product doesn't matter, storytelling is. Nothing matters, inflated growth metrics do. Profit doesn't matter unless it's high (for some definition of high), but even that doesn't matter if you have hyperinflated growth metrics.