Hemorhaging money is not justified by the fact that 'others did it'.
WeWork and Uber can justify it by pointing out unit costs in stable markets, and say 'look we are profitable there, so all of our losses are due to growth'.
Elastic cannot say the same.
In fact Twilio and Mongo have also been hemorhaging money since the start, and it's going to take a hell of a lot of growth, then massive profitability for them to break even.
Venture Captial is now back to the dot-com bubble game of 'who's going to be the fool holding the bag' - basically, raise a pile of money, give away that money for free by selling at a massive loss, and then get naive retail investors to buy into the myth.
What if I raised $100M, bought some lumber, and sold it at a 50% discount to builders, gosh, I'd have a lot of customers! and then did an IPO -> look at the growth!
Twitter is what, 10 years old now?
They just reported their first profitable quarter ever! And guess what, userbase is shrinking!
They're billions in the hole, i.e. billions away from breaking even - they are a massive net financial loss for investors overall; the trick is of course to be an early investor (make money) and not a later investor (dupe).
This game is not designed, it's just a natural dynamic of a market with bad information and or dupes.
Just like the financial crash of 2008 could not happened if dumb German and Japanese banks were not buying up crap bundles thereby enabling local American banks to re-capitalize and go out again and make more bad loans (i.e. the system would have stopped because banks would have quickly run out of capital unable to sell their first batch of crap mortgages) ... in the same way, this VC game would not happen without rube investors somewhere who will actually pay a fortune for a stock like Twitter. There are many more reasons for this obviously.
Unfortunately, when there is shadiness, low-interest rates, not market interventions etc. - the name of the game is 'leverage' - not 'innovation' really. So it makes much more sense to buy your way into a market, than build yourself into it.
And by the way, this is not to take anything away from Twilio or Mongo as products - that's entirely separate issue. Maybe they are great, maybe they are crap, but we don't know because they are being given away at massive discounts so it's very hard to tell.
Sadly, in shady game of leverage, often 'it's the only way' because if you don't - someone else will. WeWork for example is leverage to the max with 0 wiggle room for risk. If there is a market correction and tenancy drops in any major market, they are wiped. Same for any company that's dependent on crazy valuations.
Companies going IPO while losing tons of money, without clear path to profitability ... is not necessarily a good sign.