Yeah that's what worries me when reading all the stories here; it seems that we shouldn't care about the bottomline in startup mode. In my, maybe old, mindset, I try to break even as fast as we can and THEN start growing.
I see a lot of exceptions where this way of company startup would not work, but a lot of them should do it this way imho. The funding => jumping too high method is too much slot machine for me. Especially if you are not doing consumer services/products, it is almost always possible, if your idea has merit, to run a profit even before you built anything. Then funding is a much safer bet.
Looking at the average startup, it seems like insanity is the rule rather than the exception...