Success Quote by Terry Semel

In the late-90s and early-2000s tech economy, “profit” briefly became an impolite word, like bringing up rent at a dinner party full of dot-com dreamers. Terry Semel’s line is a corrective, and it’s calibrated: not “profit is everything,” but “nothing to be embarrassed about.” The target isn’t consumers; it’s the industry’s own status anxiety, the idea that serious innovation should be spiritually nonprofit, sustained by hype, user growth, or the promise of future dominance.

Semel, a Hollywood-to-boardroom executive who ran Yahoo during its struggle to define itself against Google, is also defending a particular model of corporate legitimacy. Profitability is framed as maturity: a business that can pay its bills, reward investors, and keep the lights on without perpetual storytelling. The subtext is almost parental: stop apologizing for success, stop treating revenue like a vulgar byproduct, stop confusing attention with a sustainable enterprise.

There’s a quiet provocation here, too. “Embarrassed” implies an audience that judges. Semel is pushing back on cultural pressure inside Silicon Valley and media-adjacent companies where idealism is a brand asset and monetization can look like selling out. He’s insisting that markets aren’t a moral failure; they’re a measure of whether anyone values what you built enough to support it.

Read another way, it’s preemptive reputational management: profitability doesn’t absolve a company from scrutiny, but Semel wants to reset the default assumption that making money is inherently suspect.