It has definitely become less common to see companies build much outside of cloud environments. And the talent has dried up to an extent as a result. Expertise

It has definitely become less common to see companies build much outside of cloud environments. And the talent has dried up to an extent as a result. Expertise and interest in building outside of cloudland is important to find, but there's also a challenge in finding the right operational mindset as well. It seems more common with more mature "startups" that have done the cost / benefit analysis and realized that the only way to achieve economies of scale for their business is to exit AWS. Dropbox, GitHub, Uber and so forth. Or businesses that simply must operate their own hardware, like CDNs. There are some smaller places that see value in building a low-cloud service from the beginning. One of those companies is where I work, e-mail in profile.