josh's clients aren't stupid, they're smart

(over)planning, (over)measuring, (over)architecting....to the "scale" consultant these are no brainers, but they have a huge cost, are hard to do right, and keep developers away from building features. a very-small (y-combinator style) startup, is much better served building out features first, and throw money and duct-tape at the problem until they absolutely cannot squeeze more performance out of their initial stack.

most small ideas will fail. most entrepreneurs know this. its stupid to try to build a service for a hundred million users when you can't attract ten thousand, and since small development groups are just learning about their domain, trying to scale out early will probably just result in throw-away code. don't worry about problems that aren't problems.

i think josh's clients are doing the right thing. first get something built that people want to use. push your stack as far as you can. if in the end you're succesful enough to afford the time to do a rearchitect yourself or pay someone else to do it, thats called success and its a good thing.