There are many ways to account for stuff when you’re not a public company, so…. I’ll leave it at that
One of the biggest ones (and very publicly) for small companies to be EDBITA adjusted profitable - the Trump tax cuts also changed it so that R&D especially for engineers need to be amortized over five years, which means that one of the largest expenses for any tech company won't show up for quite a few years. For a rapidly growing startup, revenue of $10M and employee costs of $40M would be a real loss of -$30M per year, but on paper there's been a profit of $2M.