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0 pointstaylorwc10y ago0 comments

Auditors are required to issue such statements when there is no line of sight to the company being solvent (and no one can guarantee that the company can close a financing round.) I'd venture a guess that almost every startup at a similar stage to SoundCloud would have the same issue if they are audited.

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TheLogothete10y ago· 2 in thread

Soundcloud is almost 10 years old. At what point a company stops being a startup? At what point it stops being feasible for a company to operate at a loss?

taylorwcOP10y ago

Are these meant to be rhetorical? You decide when you're going to stop calling it a startup. They are venture-backed and founded within the past decade. I'm going to call them a startup.

As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades.

I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be profitable, I merely said what GAAS[0] requires an auditor to do.

[0] http://pcaobus.org/Standards/Auditing/Pages/AU341.aspx

sosborn10y ago

There is operating at a loss because you are reinvesting (see: Amazon) and there is operating at a loss because your business isn't viable. Soundcloud is somewhere in between those two extremes.

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