Well said. I definitely agree (you’re absolutely right!) that the product will get worse through that re-architecting for enterprise transition.

But the small product also would not be able to handle any real amount of growth as it was, because it was a mess of tech debt and security issues and manual one-off processes and fragile spaghetti code that only Jeff knows because he wrote it in a weekend, and now he’s gone.

So by definition, if a service is large enough to serve a zillion people, it is probably big and bloated and complex.

I’m not disagreeing with you, I liked your comment and I’m just rambling. I have worked with several startups and was surprised at how poorly their tech scaled (and how riddled with security issues they were) as we got into it.

Nothing will shine a flashlight on all the stress cracks of a system like large-scale growth on the web.