I will just say that people very much are saying that. You're pretty much saying that as demand for you goes up and down elsewhere, the profitability of your business goes up and down. And if someone wants to make your business unprofitable, they can just offer you a hundred million dollars to go work for them and drop it - even if you continue on the business, it's suddenly unprofitable.

This is obviously totally false.

Let's do this thought experiment.

Say I would accept this if the author said that true profitability is only the amount that the company would clear if you spent less than a minimal frictional amount of time hiring someone (from company revenue) at rock-bottom wages, to keep running the company.

but if we accept this, notice something interesting. What if the way to get someone at rock-bottom wages is for the company to issue some shares (which means a percentage) and pay the worker in those shares?

Can the company still be profitable (though you're diluting the profit) on those terms? From your point of view, OF COURSE!

The author is talking about the point of view of an investor. ("Stop telling me your company is profitable.") He's not arguing from the point of view of what's worth your time: "stop thinking that if you're profitable it's worth it for you to do that."

The two are totally distinct. If the company has someone on payroll at $0 because they think their work is worth investing in exchange for the 30% equity they have, then the profit the company generates for the 70% stakeholder who doesn't have to put time in is simply 70% of company revenues minus company expenses such as hosting.

That doesn't mean the person who is working for $0 and equity isn't getting screwed. But it also does't mean the company isn't profitable.

The whole article is completely wrong and I've told you why here and in my other comments.

Would you buy a company for a thousand dollars that had paper profits of five thousand dollars a month and will for the next two years, but actually this isn't "real profit" because the founder, who had been earning five hundred thousand as a President at Microsoft, put five years of labor into it unpaid?

Of course you would buy it. That's real profit the company's making. It doesn't have to recoup the founder's lost opportunity cost over the ENTIRE life of the company in order for it to be a profitable company.