It wasn't "doesn't scale to 10-100X bigger" but "doesn't burn themselves and their teammates out 6mo from now and needlessly risk a stressful & prolonged sev0 w

It wasn't "doesn't scale to 10-100X bigger" but "doesn't burn themselves and their teammates out 6mo from now and needlessly risk a stressful & prolonged sev0 when one of the 1-2 people who did weird things gets COVID / goes on a honeymoon / leaves for netflix". Spending time on needless infra (scale you don't need, AI you don't need, infra you don't need, things could have been postgres as in this case, ...) both prevents building useful stuff ($-generating features/experiences/...) and increases operational cost (maintenance, debugging, ...). Both the lost revenue growth and the increased costs are compounding. Imagine a maniac steadily piling on a bit more technical debt every day and eat a bit more of the seed corn every day instead of growing it. A good phrase for this is "playing house": http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html