How the hell do companies raise money without profit?

It seems the trend lately is to spend first, and ask for money later. Companies like Twitter and Box and many other cloud service providers are running this game of providing a free service, at an enormous loss, and then scrambling to monetize later.

I'm not bagging on Box, or Twitter, or any other simply brilliant company of this century, I'm merely pointing out that if your revenue comes from people who invest in your company, and your main means of monetization is a never ending cycle of investment: you're running a Ponzi Scheme, not a company.

Take the following pitch: Our company buys postage stamps, sells them for 75% of what we paid for them, and because of the huge volume we're going to make SO MUCH money once we figure that whole part out.

I bet investors are already emailing me lining up. If you didn't catch the analogy, postage stamps are a means of sending information, much like the tech products most companies now provide. The joke is that these companies are spending exorbitant amounts of money on services they can't afford to provide.

Why can't companies provide a service, become profitable, and scale profits and investments in tandem? Am I crazy or is there something wrong with the world?

Long-tail cloud-based agile scalable innovative management performance groundbreaking breakthrough simple b2b c2c brand. That was a vent of startup buzzwords. Thanks for reading.