It's more like a company that has validated product fit now needing to figure out how to scale economically.

Apple didn't start manufacturing with mega Foxconn contracts. They had to figure that out along the way as their scale demanded.

However I share your sentiment: doing things the same way but cheaper is usually not the solution. Doing things differently (in-sourcing) might be the path forward.

Figuring out how to scale is not just a part of a storage startup, it's the whole thing.

Apple created something people wanted and sold at a price that would still make money if it was assembled by hand. They didn't form a company around a commodity like data storage.

Data storage is a commodity. Everyone already has some, online storage companies already exist. If you don't know how to store a lot of data and your company's whole purpose is to store a lot of data, it sounds like something that should have been worked out before making the company.

No. They are already managing 10PB, planning for which would be very stupid when just starting up.

Why would planning to be able to execute the single focus of your startup be stupid?

I tend to agree. If you are a storage company, I’d think that part of your secret sauce should be how to store tens or hundreds of petabytes of customer backups economically.

Maybe I’m wrong though. Perhaps the real secret sauce is the end user experience and the kind of storage you use on the backend doesn’t matter at all.

However I bet that the “cloud storage space” is pretty crowded and lots of people shop on price more than anything. If your business model is all about price, then finding economical storage is critical to your company and needs to be part of your core competency.

If price isn’t that important, perhaps it doesn’t matter... the “winners” would win no matter how expensive their storage solution is.

But honestly.... I feel like part of your core competency needs to be managing the storage system.

I also tend to agree. I think AWS is great and use it as my default solution, but if I was starting a company that had high bandwidth and/or storage requirements, I would be looking for other solutions from day one.

A rule of thumb for performance is every 10-100X involves changing up your fundamentals

It's a bit different nowadays that a lot of scaling tech is commoditized, but still means things like negotiating new contracts, finding & fixing the odd pieces that weren't stressed before, etc.

(congrats on hitting the new usage levels + good luck! we're at a much smaller scale, but trying to figure out some similar questions for stuff like web-scale publishing of data journalism without dying on egress $, so it's an interesting thread...)