I remember reading that Friendster founder was complaining that there were facing a lot of technical issues and investors were not letting him invest effort in

I remember reading that Friendster founder was complaining that there were facing a lot of technical issues and investors were not letting him invest effort in fixing them. IMHO, if your investors need to be involved in seeking approval for handling scaling pains and on top of that if they reject it - there are deeper issues within the company (management issues, politics, technical incompetence, leadership issues). So to clarify my point - any team could still screw up technical execution. However there is no reason that given a good team and support from within the company, a product can't be scaled.