To add to it, without external funding _any_ innovation would be stifled by existing players. If you can't even get low millions in funding, existing corporations with tens of billions of free money will eat you alive.
Organically growing a business; bootstrapping sounds fine, until you try to do something that potentially has any global impact.
It's funny to hear this in this context. Fly is treated as one of the few potential successors to Heroku, and Heroku raised very little money while remaining the number one choice for most devs here (based on sentiments). And then an existing corporation with tens of billions of free money came along, bought Heroku ... and ran it into the ground. So I don't buy that you need to fundraise or else be outpaced, at least not by big corporation.
To be fair, they do call out in the article that they're hosting on their own hardware. Afaik Heroku has always been hosted on AWS which is a lot less capital-intensive than buying hardware.
Also, Heroku was acquired in 2010. I know that the prevailing sentiment around here is that the acquisition was a mistake, but Heroku has been owned by Salesforce for 13 of it's 16 years of life...
Organically growing a business; bootstrapping sounds fine, until you try to do something that potentially has any global impact.