I don't know about "torturous chaos", but there is certainly a point early in the life of any business where a) any silver linings are accompanied by big voluminous clouds and b) many well-meaning people tell you to cut your losses (+) and take the job at Google instead. I've gone through that three times.<p>+ : n.b. They'll say this even if you have no losses.<p>It's also probably true that, for probably any value of X less than maybe 5 years, there is a business who had a graph substantially identical to mine for day 1 through X and then decided on X to throw in the towel.
Sometimes it takes much longer than six months. This is what it looked like for my company:<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/LE2kK.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/LE2kK.png</a><p>Even if 2010 and 2011 are ommitted for scale, the first 3 years of those graphs are essentially flat.
He picked some awfully unusual examples to make his point. By the end of the post I'm still not sure what to take away from it.<p><a href="http://asmartbear.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/balsamiq-cashflow.jpeg" rel="nofollow">http://asmartbear.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads...</a><p>"Torturous chaos for 6 months... before hockey-stick profitability" is the exception. Most startups have to grind it out for years before becoming anything more than ramen profitable.