Second that. I think it only comes with maturity. If there is a small start-up and they have a couple of Ubuntu servers they'd start with just syncing their source repo, running 'make && make installs' by hand via ssh.

After a while if they use python, node or ruby, maybe start generating language specific packages (pip, virtualenv, etc).

Next phase is when the need for upgrade/downgrade transactions comes about, handling transitive dependencies (my package needs another package, which in turn requires a third package to be upgraded, which is a base system package to be upgraded). Now 'make && make install's looks silly and mess up the file system with left-over files. Deployment ssh scripts become a tangled mess and so on. Then slowly they think "It would be cool if there was a system created that can transitively handle package versions, and maybe provide transactions with pre and post install scripts".

If they are lucky, someone will point them to apt or rpms or they'll write a broken version of those things from scratch.