It's lol indeed, and this appears to be one among many symptoms of this complete nonsense we're living.
It seems to be normal nowadays for a startup to pursue all the sorts of shallow growth indicators instead of worrying about making real money. They are concerned about "runway" not as a measure of how long they will last, but as an indicator to plan the time for another "round".
And I don't blame the companies alone. Investors are usually thought to be smarter people, but they are humans with emotions and dumbness like everybody. The amount of investors who don't understand very well what they are doing seems to be increasing. They are setting (accidentally, as they don't quite know what they are getting into) this sick system of incentives. Companies are basically playing accordingly.
Delaying profits is a perfectly valid strategy, but that implies intent. I guess however most of these modern startups are having no profits because they aren't managing to make them, and not as part of a bigger strategy.
Exactly. Delaying profits means having a knob in your cash allocation (usually sales) that you can turn down and become profitable. If you turn it down and still can't fund the company... you weren't delaying profits.
Pre-profit doesn't just refer to your cash-allocation-adjustment scenario. There's also the broader notion of what you focus on. A company may be pre-profit because they're not prioritizing profitability as a strategic objective early on. They may have no (current) way of turning a dial and becoming profitable, yet still be making the correct strategic decision to ignore profitability for the sake of e.g. growth or product development. Countless now-gigantic, now-profitable companies started as startups who were intentionally (and correctly) focusing on strategic objectives other than profitability.
Talk about euphemisms...