In my experience it's often the other way around. CTO/mgmt/HR would rather swallow the perf/cost hit of Cloud because it makes auditing, compliance, support, dr, security, training and hiring easier. Not to mention it usually provides much more flexibility during the PMF stage of a startup (where product roadmap, team talent/bandwidth and execution speed are often much more important drivers than the raw perf/cost ratio of your infra).

There's definitely an argument to move (some) stuff off cloud later in the journey when flexibility (or dealing with flux/pivoting) becomes less of a primary driver and scale/cost start dominating.

"It's insane not to start your startup on the Cloud and even more so to stay on it" paraphrasing something I think I've read on HN some time ago. But I agree, it's best to treat the Cloud as an intermediate solution and once you stabilize and a clearer picture about requirements is available move at least partially to on-prem (especially the more expensive stuff like compute, storage is I think fine)

RDD or Resume Driven Development

Realistically RDD is a very sane strategy for employees. When I read my company's job ads a few years ago I had serious doubts if I would get hired by them because my resume didn't have the buzzwords they wanted. Since then I always sprinkle in some new tech with each new project, not because it makes sense for the company, but for my resume and future employability.

I wonder if there is any honest research into the TCO of cloud vs on-prem. In my team we pay ~100k/month for gcp, management doesn't seem to care, since the whole company is on gcp. But they also didn't care when it was on prem and was using hundreds of servers.