I don't understand. It seems like you were pressed for time, not for cash. How could you have served your customers quicker with more money?
> I was building servers one at a time, using the money from the first to pay for the next one.
Is that they were financing the purchase of each new server with the money that they got paid by their customers. So they had to wait a certain amount of time until they had enough money to build each new server. If instead they had bought multiple servers at once, on credit, they could have started serving more customers much faster.
I mean, there certainly was also a time aspect that was independent of that serialization, but a lot of that was also saving money. I mean, I personally argue that buying servers from parts is less time than negotiating a good deal on an assembled server, but we certainly could have gotten tested servers out faster if we were willing to shovel more money at someone. Maybe even if we still serialized the purchase.
If you were selling/leasing compute commodities you were probably more of a logistics company vs tech.