[kbenson]

I'm pretty sure GP is mistaking valuation for capital. Serving half a billion or more people probably nets you a billion dollar valuation or more these days, but it in no way requires a billion dollars to provide that service in the vast majority of cases.

There is a sweet spot where cloud is good and provides some benefit but, once you're serving hundreds of millions of people and have double-digit millions in investment, you can probably do significantly better cost-wise rolling your own servers. Worst case, you just throw your own hypervisor management system on them and have most of the same features you got from a cloud service. If you're smart, you can probably architect it so you have on-demand overflow capacity from a cloud provider in case there's a spike you can't account for, which is the best of both worlds.

[pard68]

This is how we do it. Two on prem datacenters, one colo, and a handful of on-the-ready cloud providers. We serve far fewer users, but we also are getting 20 to 50k per user per year. Needless to say, at the scale we have cloud is out of the question except in catastrophic scenarios.