That's what Google did with search isn't it, crowd out the competition and monetise market share.
I think that an expectation of future profits is actually quite low on the list for most of the proprietors. They usually just want a big exit or flotation which they can get without ever having got in the black.
So long as someone can see a way to monetise their tech or market share the actual entrepreneurs don't have to. HP paid £8bn (eight billion pounds-£8,000,000,000) for Autonomy, which had never made profits.
In many ways that might be quite healthy, in that encourages more blue sky innovation and lets people and firms specialise in different parts of product or company life cycles. In many others (ploughing capital into unproductive investment) it isn't healthy.