The Startup Bubble Has Burst, But Let’s Keep Pretending It Hasn’t!
Forget profits—raise more capital! Discover why “most funded” lists glorify the exact behavior that caused the last startup collapse.
For the briefest of moments the Southeast Asian startup scene seemed to be having an epiphany. A collective pause. A moment of reflection. Had the past decade of reckless spending, baseless valuations, and venture capital-fueled lunacy finally come to an end?
It was looking promising. Founders were suddenly throwing around words like sustainability and profitability without bursting into laughter. Investors began whispering about unit economics. The extravagant off-sites in Bali started getting replaced with Zoom calls in normal office settings. Was the industry… maturing?
Nope. False alarm.
Because just as we were daring to believe that a shift was underway, a certain tech media publication decided to crank the FOMO machine right back up to full volume. Their contribution? A ranking of the 50 most funded startups.
Yes, funding. That flawless, never-problematic, completely reliable measure of success. Forget profitability. Forget sustainability. Forget whether the business even works. How much money have you convinced people to give you? That’s what really matters, apparently.
Funding Over Fundamentals: The Eternal Startup Illusion
In the golden age of startups, the only things standing between a wide-eyed founder and a multi-million-dollar seed round were a half-baked idea, a deck filled with hockey-stick graphs, and the ability to say “scalability” at least five times per pitch. Those were the days.
Back then, due diligence was for suckers. Market research? Optional. A clear revenue model? Actively discouraged. The only thing that mattered was growth. Not real, organic growth, mind you, but the kind you achieve by setting fire to venture capital cash.
Nobody dared ask, “Hey, but does this actually work?” That kind of skepticism got you laughed out of the room. In the pre-reckoning era, profitability was an archaic concept. The real winners were those who could raise bigger and faster than anyone else, all while nodding sagely about “disrupting industries” that often didn’t even need disrupting in the first place.
But alas, reality had the audacity to intervene. Layoffs swept through the region. Valuations shrank fast and investors were asking annoying questions like, “When will you be profitable?” and “Why is your CAC higher than the GDP of a small country?” The mirage was fading.
Or so we thought.
And then… this list.
This brilliant piece of journalism, resurrecting the same tired metric that got us into this mess in the first place. The “50 most funded startups,” celebrated as if funding equals success rather than what it truly is: a very expensive, very public vote of misplaced confidence.
GMV, TAM, and Other Nonsensical Acronyms That Got Us Here
For years, startups in Indonesia and Southeast Asia have operated on a single, beautifully simplistic strategy: make everything look bigger. Not better, not more efficient, and certainly not profitable. Just bigger.
Gross Merchandise Value (GMV)? Inflate it. Sure, 90% of those transactions are heavily subsidized by investor cash, but why let a little thing like unsustainable economics get in the way of a good metric? Never mind that if you stopped burning money on discounts, customers would disappear. As long as the GMV graph points up and to the right, you’re golden.
Total Addressable Market (TAM)? Expand it. The trick is creative optimism. You don’t just sell to a niche; you sell to everyone who might, at some point in their lifetime, vaguely benefit from your product. If your app helps restaurants source ingredients, your TAM is every human being who has ever eaten food. See? Instant billion-dollar market.
Burn rate? Maximize it. If you're not bleeding millions per month, are you even innovating? The faster you burn, the more “aggressive” and “visionary” you appear. And if you run out of money, just raise more. If that fails? Well… at least you had a good run.
Then there’s EBITDA; an annoying little concept that traditional businesses obsess over. Profitability? That’s for corporate dinosaurs. Startups run on “vision.” And by vision, we mean a vaguely defined aspiration to “disrupt” something while hoping that, eventually, someone (preferably someone else) will figure out how to monetize it.
And now, instead of calling out this madness, a tech media outlet has decided to glorify the “most funded” startups. Seriously? We just had a reckoning, and we’re already doing this again?
The FOMO Economy: Investors Never Learn
Venture capital is often framed as a world of data-driven decision-making, rigorous due diligence, and careful financial modeling. In reality? It’s closer to a game of musical chairs.
It happens every time. Investors start off skeptical, telling themselves they’ve learned from past mistakes. They whisper about sustainability and responsible investing in a brief moment of discipline, like a gambler vowing to quit after one last spin of the roulette wheel.
And then? Boom. One company raises a massive round, the valuation looks absurd, but if some fund is backing it, surely everyone else should too? Suddenly, restraint is out the window, and capital is deployed at breakneck speed because, well, what if it’s the next unicorn?
Meanwhile, founders catch on quickly. Who needs profitability when you can master the art of the pitch? Forget business models, just sell the dream. The money will follow.
Then the inevitable collapse. Layoffs. Panic. “We should have focused on profitability sooner” press releases.
But the cycle never ends. Just as the dust settles, a new wave of startups emerges, and FOMO kicks in all over again.
And tech media? Instead of breaking the cycle, they immortalize it with lists like “The 50 Most Funded Startups.” Because apparently, burning the most cash is now a competitive sport.
Congratulations, You’re the Most Funded! What’s Next? Bankruptcy?
What exactly are we celebrating here? Should we start ranking people based on who has the highest credit card debt? Maybe we should give out medals to the largest mortgage holders? Nothing screams “success” like a financial burden with no clear path to repayment.
Imagine the awards ceremony:
“And the winner for Most Capital Raised Without a Profitable Business Model goes to… yet another startup that still doesn’t know how to charge its customers!”
Somehow, we’ve turned fundraising into an end goal in itself. A startup isn’t seen as successful because it generates revenue, controls costs, or turns a profit. No, success is now measured by how much money it has managed to extract from eager investors.
Funding is a liability. Every dollar comes with expectations, growth targets, investor check-ins, and the looming pressure to deliver returns that may never come.
Yet, here we are, handing out participation trophies for “most funded” as if it means anything other than “most pressure to perform.” Meanwhile, the truly successful companies that don’t need to raise are ignored.
But of course, that wouldn’t make for a flashy headline, would it?
"50 Most Profitable Startups" wouldn’t get the same clicks as "50 Startups Best at Playing the Funding Game."
And so, here we are again. The same boom-bust cycle playing out like a bad sequel.
Layoffs? Check.
Bloated startups scrambling to find a real business model? Check.
Investors suddenly pretending they were always “cautious” about that last funding round? Check.
The script never changes, but the characters do. The latest batch of overfunded, underperforming startups will crumble, and a new wave of “visionary” founders will step in to repeat the exact same mistakes.
The tech industry doesn’t want to learn. It wants to rebrand its failures as necessary growing pains. When things go well, it’s brilliant risk-taking. When things go south, it’s an unfortunate market correction. But somehow, no one ever takes real responsibility for the burnt investor cash and laid-off employees left in the wreckage.
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