> service companies are hard to scale, and unlikely to grow their value in a short time. This is not what your VCs have in mind, basically.

It depends on your services I suppose, but I don't think it would be especially hard to generate revenue by selling Nginx training and support. A conference, seminars, books, support contracts, etc.

Sadly just having an official company behind it will be enough to get approval to use Nginx in a lot of enterprises--sign a fat support contract so you can cover your ass and not think about it again.