I recently attended infra/STRUCTURE 2026, where I spent several days meeting with executives and entrepreneurs across the digital infrastructure industry. I came away excited by the pace of innovation in the NeoCloud market, the sophistication of the infrastructure being developed, and how quickly these businesses are evolving.

As I listened to NeoCloud executives describe their businesses, I found myself reflecting on my experiences building and operating managed hosting products in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Today’s companies are pioneering new architectures and operating models to deliver some of the most sophisticated computing environments ever built. But underneath that innovation, I recognize many of the fundamental characteristics of infrastructure businesses. They are deploying capital into assets with different useful lives, combining multiple layers of technology into customer offerings, allocating finite capacity, pushing the limits of efficiency and oversubscription, and managing the economics of delivering those services over time.

I have seen many of these patterns before as the digital infrastructure industry has evolved, and they bring to mind an important lesson about building successful infrastructure businesses.

Growth and Scale Are Two Different Things

In the early days of managed hosting, many companies were built around a relatively small group of exceptionally talented people. They understood the technology, knew how to architect complex solutions, understood the economics of their business, and could solve problems that traditional providers were not equipped to handle.

That expertise was often their greatest competitive advantage. But I also watched companies struggle as their success created more demand for the same small group of people. Eventually, some reached a point where adding another customer, something that should have been a reason to celebrate, began to put the entire business under strain. The people responsible for making everything work were already stretched to their limits, and the additional workload began affecting their ability to serve both new and existing customers. Decisions took longer, deliveries became more difficult, and service quality began to deteriorate.

The problem was not a lack of talent. In many cases, these companies had some of the most capable people in the industry. The challenge was figuring out how to extend that core knowledge and expertise beyond the individuals who possessed it.

That experience shaped how I think about the difference between growth and scale.

Growth is adding customers, revenue, and infrastructure. Scale is developing the ability to support that growth consistently and profitably without requiring a proportional increase in people, complexity, and effort.

The companies that made that transition learned to capture the knowledge of their best people and embed it into repeatable processes, software, and commercial logic. Rather than requiring their most experienced engineers and executives to participate in every decision, they built organizations capable of applying the core operating model consistently across an expanding customer base.

The Opportunity for NeoClouds

I believe this lesson is particularly relevant to NeoClouds because of the extraordinary combination of technical and commercial expertise required to build and operate their businesses.

Their founders and early employees are pioneering new approaches to GPU infrastructure, networking, storage, orchestration, and workload optimization. At the same time, they are making sophisticated decisions about capacity allocation, utilization, pricing, and capital efficiency. That combination of technical and business expertise is a tremendous competitive advantage, and the opportunity is to make it scalable.

As these businesses expand, they will need to manage increasingly complex combinations of infrastructure, products, customers, and commercial commitments. Every new offering introduces decisions about capacity, compatibility, pricing, costs, and profitability. Those decisions become harder to coordinate as the organization grows.

What I find particularly interesting is that NeoClouds are already rethinking how computing infrastructure should be designed, deployed, and operated. Should they not bring that same innovative thinking to the business systems they choose to run their companies?

Throughout my career, I have watched infrastructure providers waste enormous amounts of time and money adapting generic enterprise software to their businesses. While these systems can improve operations, they often lack the depth and precision needed to represent how an infrastructure business actually works. Companies compensate with extensive customizations, complex spreadsheets, and cumbersome manual processes, but even after significant investment they are often left with an incomplete picture of their business. That limits their ability to make informed decisions, optimize profitability, and ultimately realize their full potential.

I believe we are entering a new era of enterprise software, where industry-specific platforms and vertical AI solutions will increasingly replace heavily customized general-purpose systems. Rather than forcing businesses to adapt their processes to generic software, these platforms can institutionalize and embed the data models, economics, and business logic unique to an industry from the beginning.

NeoCloud businesses are particularly well positioned to embrace this approach. They have an opportunity to build their commercial operations around software that understands how their infrastructure businesses actually work, just as they are already adopting purpose-built technologies to optimize their technical environments.

More importantly, these systems can become a way to capture and extend the collective expertise of their organizations, enabling better decisions and more consistent execution as the business grows.

Building for What Comes Next

I left infra/STRUCTURE convinced that NeoClouds represent the fastest new segment of the digital infrastructure industry. The technology is extraordinary, and I believe we are only in the first inning of what this industry will become.

But my experience has taught me that building great technology and building a business capable of scaling that technology are two different challenges.

The companies that succeed over the long term will need to do both. They will need to preserve the technical and commercial expertise that makes them special while developing the systems and processes that allow that expertise to reach every customer, every product, and every decision.

For NeoClouds, the opportunity is to build that scalability into the business from the beginning, rather than trying to retrofit it after the complexity has already arrived.