What is sustainability for Toyota? It's some combination of sales volume at profit margin such that they can afford to pay for their fixed costs, factories and such. IE, earn more by selling cars than it takes to make cars.
The financial definition is derived from the business one, because debt. Car companies borrow money to build/tool factories. Toyota would need to earn a return greater than interest to be sustainable.
For a facebook (or a patreon), what does sustainability mean?
Facebook don't have factories. Costs are what the CEO decides they should be and the CEO decides based on how much revenue is coming in.
Currently, FB is on about $60bn pa. If you look at their current cost structure, even critically, you'll probably conclude that facebook needs tens of billions to be sustainable.
Except.... You obviously don't need $50bn pa to make a social networking site. If the ass fell out of online advertising (not likely), fb might collapse, but social betworking would continue to exist.
If you told patreon toda that: "your revenue is $15m forever, no matter what you do," would they conclude that patreon is unsustainable and must be shut? Toyota would. I suspect Patreon would find a way to sustain the service.
While I don't know how much Facebook needs to exist, it isn't zero. All those server have to be bought - just like Toyota can get a loan to build a new factory, facebook can get a loan to build servers and the building to put them in (note can, in both cases there are non loan options for funding as well). Facebook needs to pay people to wire all those servers up. Facebook needs to pay people to mitigate all the attacks on their servers. Facebook needs to pay power bills for those servers. The CEO doesn't get to decide any of the above costs - they are what they are and not paying them will put Facebook out of business.
The CEO can decide how much to put into new features, and what those features are. Not putting enough into R&D is a path to disaster long term.
What is sustainability for Toyota? It's some combination of sales volume at profit margin such that they can afford to pay for their fixed costs, factories and such. IE, earn more by selling cars than it takes to make cars.
The financial definition is derived from the business one, because debt. Car companies borrow money to build/tool factories. Toyota would need to earn a return greater than interest to be sustainable.
For a facebook (or a patreon), what does sustainability mean?
Facebook don't have factories. Costs are what the CEO decides they should be and the CEO decides based on how much revenue is coming in.
Currently, FB is on about $60bn pa. If you look at their current cost structure, even critically, you'll probably conclude that facebook needs tens of billions to be sustainable.
Except.... You obviously don't need $50bn pa to make a social networking site. If the ass fell out of online advertising (not likely), fb might collapse, but social betworking would continue to exist.
If you told patreon toda that: "your revenue is $15m forever, no matter what you do," would they conclude that patreon is unsustainable and must be shut? Toyota would. I suspect Patreon would find a way to sustain the service.