This is what arrogance looks like folks.

also what inexperience looks like :)

There are network effects regarding the portion of outliers that SV captures, but if we're talking about experience alone then I'm skeptical of your claims given how much of SV is driven by freshly minted CS grads.

Where else in the world can you hire the guys who solved exactly the same problem (Monolithic Rails Stack) at companies like Twitter, Airbnb, Zendesk, etc.?

You're making a big assumption, which is that all those good engineers love to live in Silicon Valley and want nothing more than to stay in the area their entire lives. For each one of the engineers who feel that way, there's someone who worked here for awhile but now dislikes the area for one reason or another. Enticing good people to spend a few years in Berlin working for a company like Soundcloud might be easier than you think.

I know a lot of top engineers here and non of them would ever consider leaving before retirement or becoming rich.

And in both cases they would not start working for a startup in Berlin or any other place.

If they leave then for southern france, a cow ranch in the mid-west or Bali.

I don't see them in Bali.

The disadvantage here is money and VC.

Where else you can burn money and not making profits in the name of engineering efforts?

I don't get it. Rails monolith is great for product proof-of-concept. Iterative refactoring and incremental change towards an architecture you see working for similar companies is also really sensible. What would you do differently if you had heaps of money and VC?

I'm replying to the parent disagreeing with him.

I definitely agree with iterative refactoring and incremental changes that SoundCloud did.

If SoundCloud has tons of money that can provide a long-term runaway, they can do major refactor or re-write.

i.e.: if competition _AND_ money are not the issue, why not?