I'd be interested in the yearly/3-year cost data of infrastructure based on a VC's total tech portfolio. I can't believe it to be insignificant. If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware.
The fully-loaded cost of a full-time Rails programmer is, let's say, $15k per month.
An Amazon m3.large with 7.5GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD costs $64 per month if I reserve a year in advance. (And why wouldn't I, given that the proposed alternative is to buy hardware?)
If I wave the magic wand and save 30% on the cost of each m3.large, I save $19 per month per instance.
If my company runs the equivalent of twenty m3.large instances per programmer, 24 hours a day, for a whole year, my magic-wand-powered savings will add up to six additional programmer workdays - about $4600 per programmer. If I start out on January 1 with a year of runway, I'll go broke on January 9 of next year instead of January 1.
So, even if I were to believe in the existence of magic wands, they wouldn't make much of a difference.
If you're a tech startup, your two biggest costs are labor and infrastructure/hardware.
I am aware of many companies where advertising, conferences (throwing their own), laptops/mice/etc, rent, general office overhead, credit card processing, and about five other things I'm forgetting are still higher than infrastructure/hardware, in addition to direct costs of employment. (Obviously, less true if you run Dropbox, but COGS is looooooooooow in most SaaS companies for a reason.)
