Auditors are required to issue such statements when there is no line of sight to the company being solvent (and no one can guarantee that the company can close a financing round.) I'd venture a guess that almost every startup at a similar stage to SoundCloud would have the same issue if they are audited.
Soundcloud is almost 10 years old. At what point a company stops being a startup? At what point it stops being feasible for a company to operate at a loss?
Are these meant to be rhetorical? You decide when you're going to stop calling it a startup. They are venture-backed and founded within the past decade. I'm going to call them a startup.
As for question number two, I'll let you count how many publicly-traded companies aren't profitable that have been around for decades.
I didn't register an opinion on whether SoundCloud should or shouldn't be profitable, I merely said what GAAS[0] requires an auditor to do.
There is operating at a loss because you are reinvesting (see: Amazon) and there is operating at a loss because your business isn't viable. Soundcloud is somewhere in between those two extremes.
Very true--Amazon would never have a going concern statement issued in its audit, because it voluntarily reinvests what would otherwise be operating profit. I was thinking more along the lines of a company like Sprint, where they are only solvent through issuance of debt and outside investment.
