Sounds like you agree with everything I said until you edited my comment down to that sentence.
If there's honestly 40 hours a week of ops issues during the first hire/MVP/market fitting phase. One of two things is happening:
1. Your startup is so wildly successful out of the gate that operations/infrastructure needs to grow exponentially.
2. Your startup has produced something that is complete garbage.
Neither situation is likely, but I'll let you guess which scenario is more common.
A much more realistic scenario is that ops work starts off as 5hours/week and grows to 10, 20, 30, 40 etc.. over a couple years without anyone noticing. By that time you've got a team of 4-6 devs and operations issues have become an annoying interruption to all of them. This is where bad IT decisions happen.
If there's honestly 40 hours a week of ops issues during the first hire/MVP/market fitting phase. One of two things is happening:
1. Your startup is so wildly successful out of the gate that operations/infrastructure needs to grow exponentially.
2. Your startup has produced something that is complete garbage.
Neither situation is likely, but I'll let you guess which scenario is more common.
A much more realistic scenario is that ops work starts off as 5hours/week and grows to 10, 20, 30, 40 etc.. over a couple years without anyone noticing. By that time you've got a team of 4-6 devs and operations issues have become an annoying interruption to all of them. This is where bad IT decisions happen.