[dboreham]

Another version of this is : investors don't want to pay for scalability if the business never takes off.

Considering that only perhaps 10% of businesses take off, this isn't a bad approach but it does mean doing some catch-up in the event of success.

It can also be hard to predict exactly where scaling challenges will lie without having the scale traffic to inform you. That is, much time and effort can be expended solving non-problems that never appear.