I don't think you're wrong. It's a personal choice based on one's perceived strengths. Some people don't think it's a lottery. They think they can replicate success.
Personally, I do think there is skill involved unlike a lottery. But, I still think there's a fair amount of luck, too. In the end, I'm not sure I would start another company that didn't have the option of becoming profitable right away.
That's a good question. If you can create a startup that's profitable day one, that's great.
But, there are lots of businesses that need a fixed cost base that only turn profitable after millions of users. But, they turn very profitable with tens of millions of users.
If you restrict yourself to just ideas that are profitable day one, that's great though you may miss out on some great ideas.
Assuming both parties are rationale, I would suggest the timeframe be more based on completion of a goal (e.g., transition someone else to the role or complete this project you were working on) rather than a specific time like two weeks.
Definitely not 100% conclusive evidence. But, after sending it to our almost 1,000 friends and families and seeing just 2 urls submitted after a week, we knew it was going to be widely used. After all, these are people very motivated to try the product (or I guess they could secretly not like us...)
While revenue fell in half, gross margin just increased 50%! In other words, this is just perception and has no bearing on the performance of the actual business.
Also, headline seems to imply that COO left because "revenue fell in half". There's no reason to believe that.