It would be more accurate to say it had no desired path to profitability.
I have friends who interviewed in 1999, and all of them came away with the same view - they did not know how the company would make money. They all poked at this topic, and the founders were explicit they really did not want to sell ads.
Two of them refused to join because they thought it would fail as a result[1].
So while they did end up doing that, it seems very clear they did not want to go that path if they could avoid it.
If you have actual evidence that suggests this is not the case, rather than the random unsupported conjecture that it was "always their goal", i'd love to hear it!
I've not met a single person who says anything but what i just said - it was not always their goal, they had no desire to do it.
[1] Amusingly both ended up founding and selling companies for over 100m, so they did okay in the end despite theoretically missing a huge opportunity ;)
It’s fascinating to think about how long it took Google to fully embrace advertising. I completely agree with the previous posters point—Google strongly resisted ads, which were everywhere back then.
Then they went full corporate and their real turning point, came in 2007 with their acquisition of DoubleClick, about 12 years after Larry Page and Sergey Brin famously claimed that advertising and search engines don’t mix.
Now compare that to OpenAI. It launched in 2015, nine years ago, but ChatGPT didn’t arrive until 2022—less than two years ago. Google took over a decade to transform its core business with ads and figure out how to become a profit machine.
Let's practice some intellectual humility and acknowledge that OpenAI still has time to work this out. History shows that even if it takes some time, that's perfectly fine.
