I.e., it's all made-up resume-driven development funded by woo-huffers with too much money that needs to be thrown somewhere.
There are enterprise B2B niches where a single small shop can service hundreds of clients, without needing uber-scale (see: you will never exceed 1mil concurrent users).
You can run everything on a single bare metal server if your dev team knows how to not waste resources (see: no ORM/toy databases, sane/strong-typed and compiled back-end language, use a mature package environment and tools, etc.).
Give a decade, and you can then cash-out when a bigger enterprise B2B shop buys you out. It's not an adderall-fueled manic-depressive roller coaster of a time; but it's honest work.
Best part: the only problem I've ever hit with scaling was people being stupid with their databases.
There are enterprise B2B niches where a single small shop can service hundreds of clients, without needing uber-scale (see: you will never exceed 1mil concurrent users).
You can run everything on a single bare metal server if your dev team knows how to not waste resources (see: no ORM/toy databases, sane/strong-typed and compiled back-end language, use a mature package environment and tools, etc.).
Give a decade, and you can then cash-out when a bigger enterprise B2B shop buys you out. It's not an adderall-fueled manic-depressive roller coaster of a time; but it's honest work.
Best part: the only problem I've ever hit with scaling was people being stupid with their databases.