> Once the dust settles and you have an initial user base, you can start looking into optimizations.
But people never do. Instead they just scale up, get more funding, rinse and repeat. It isn't until the bill gets silly that anyone bothers to consider it, and they usually then discover that no one knows how to optimize things other than code (maybe – I've worked with many devs who have no idea how to profile their code, which is horrifying).
> But people never do. Instead they just scale up, get more funding, rinse and repeat. It isn't until the bill gets silly that anyone bothers to consider it,
Yes because usually the other option is focus on those things you advocate for up front and then they go out of business before they get a chance to have the problems you're arguing against.
Because that's the right approach for that situation. A core skill in engineering is understanding tradeoffs, and in that case you want speed.
Outside of eng, nobody cares if your company has the prettiest, leanest infrastructure in the world. They care about product.