""You look pedestrian if you can't see the BIG PICTURE and instead focus on a silly thing like revenue," they told me. According to this founder, the standard retort to questions about profitability for the last decade or so has been: "Amazon wasn't profitable for decades ... yada yada.""<p>""They're taken on as a holy grail among social-media people, yet they're completely unvalidatable," she said. "If you're buying the company based on a metric it makes up itself, like daily active users, well, then you're a complete idiot.""<p>""You lavishly pay everyone in equity and it's not an expense until your stock collapses," Chanos said. "Then either you have to issue a million shares or you have to pay people in cash." Cash is something many of these companies do not have, and issuing shares would only help push the stock down further. To Chanos, as far as tech stocks have fallen this year, they still have a great distance to travel before their prices accurately reflect their true financial metrics."<p>""For a bunch of Silicon Valley guys to say, 'We figured this out when no one else has,' is the height of financial arrogance," Chanos said."