The Real Metric of Insanity
“Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. Cash is reality.”
It’s a quote every founder has heard. It feels sharp, like a rule whispered from those who’ve seen behind the curtain. But here’s the truth no one tells you: this line has misled more founders than it has guided. Because business cannot gets reduced to three neat equations. And founders who try to live by it often die by it.
Let’s tear it down.
Revenue is not vanity. It’s signal and it’s the first proof that the market cares you exist. Dismiss revenue and you dismiss momentum itself. The reason VCs, journalists, and competitors obsess over revenue isn’t because they’re vain. It’s because revenue is the closest thing to social proof we have in business. It tells the world: customers are voting with their wallets. If you don’t have revenue, nothing else matters. And if you do? The game changes.. talent joins, investors lean in, doors open. That’s not vanity, that’s gravity.
Profit is not sanity. Profit can be the very thing that drives you insane. I’ve watched founders shrink their ambition to flash a profitable P&L, only to watch competitors scale past them into dominance. Profit too early is a prison. Yes, extra money gives leverage. But obsession with profit is often disguised consistency bias.. a desire to look rational, to look “responsible.” In reality, building something transformative is irrational. Sometimes the sanest move is to look insane on paper.
Cash is not reality. Cash is a snapshot, a moment in a movie that still gets written. Reality is movement. reality is whether you have the courage to bend tomorrow by bleeding today. Every legendary company you admire once looked cash-suicidal: burning through reserves, betting on markets that didn’t yet exist, sprinting into storms. They weren’t worshipping cash flow.. they were manipulating it. Scarcity wasn’t their limiter, it was their weapon. They bet what little they had on bending the curve.
The actual root is insanity. The founder making $2M a year but broke? Easy to laugh at. But he’s not broke... he’s rich in future time, because he’s buying ten years of moat with today’s blood. The founder making $200K with tidy cash flow? Easy to envy, but he’s not wealthy.. he’s capped. Comfortable but trapped, mistaking discipline for destiny.
This is the hidden layer: authority doesn’t come from playing safe, it comes from defying neat rules. The founders we idolize today were insane enough to ignore the metrics when it mattered most. Bezos bled for a decade with no profit. Musk bankrupted himself with “cash insanity.” Jobs walked Apple straight into death and pulled it back by bending markets, not spreadsheets. We admire them not because they played by the book, but because they set the book on fire.
Metrics don’t build companies. Insanity does. Revenue, profit, cash.. they’re tools. Useful, but temporary. They serve you until they don’t. The only constant? The willingness to keep building when the numbers, the markets, and the neat aphorisms tell you not to.
That’s why I say: the real metric isn’t vanity, sanity, or reality. The real metric is insanity. And if you’re insane enough to keep building when it makes no sense.. you might bend reality in your favor.