> The author talks about using their own infrastructure and open source alternatives but that's a revisionist fantasy. They would have never gotten off the ground as a start up by buying a bunch of servers and spending time spinning up infrastructure.
"We went from a Skype group of 10 beta testers to hundreds of active users, then thousands in only a few short months."
Getting off the ground required supporting thousands of users. That doesn't require buying a bunch of servers. Rent one basic physical machine from Hetzner or whoever, spend an afternoon setting up PostgreSQL, and you're done. Reactionary, perhaps, but hardly revisionist.
"We went from a Skype group of 10 beta testers to hundreds of active users, then thousands in only a few short months."
Getting off the ground required supporting thousands of users. That doesn't require buying a bunch of servers. Rent one basic physical machine from Hetzner or whoever, spend an afternoon setting up PostgreSQL, and you're done. Reactionary, perhaps, but hardly revisionist.