Not to detract at all from your point, but Mongo (10gen) was very, very well-funded out of the gate, and the original idea was a platform-as-a-service built on

Not to detract at all from your point, but Mongo (10gen) was very, very well-funded out of the gate, and the original idea was a platform-as-a-service built on open source apps before they pivoted to the open source database idea.