By JONATHON FEIT

Journalists like being salty.  Like many venture investors, we who are no longer “green” have finely tuned BS meters that like to rip off the sheen of a press release to reach the truthiness underneath. We ask, is this thing real? If I write about XYZ, will I be embarrassed next year to learn that it was the next Theranos?

Yet journalists must also be optimistic—a delicate balance: not so jaded that one becomes boooring, not so optimistic that one gets giddy at each flash of potential; and still enamored of the belief that every so often, something great will remake the present paradigm.

This delicately balanced worldview is equally endemic to entrepreneurs that stick around: Intel founder Andy Grove’s famously said “only the paranoid survive,” a view that is inherently nefarious since it points out that failure is always lurking nearby. Nevertheless, to venture is to look past the risk, as in, “Someone has to reach that tall summit someday—it may as well be our team!” Pragmatic entrepreneurs seek to do something else, too: deliver value for one’s clients / customers / partners / users in excess of what they pay—which makes they willing to pay in excess of what the thing or service costs to produce. We call that metric “profit,” and over the past several years, too many young companies, far afield of technology and healthcare, forgot about it.

Once upon a time, not too many years ago, during the very first year that my company (Beyond Lucid Technologies) turned a profit, I presented to a room of investors in San Francisco, and received a stunning reply when told that people were willing to pay us for our work.  “But don’t you want to grow?” the investor asked.