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Welcome to The<\/span> Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It\u2019s inspired by the daily + column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.<\/em><\/p>\n Should early-stage founders ignore the never-ending debate on server infrastructure? Up to a point, yes: Investors we talked to are giving entrepreneurs their blessing not to give too much thought to cloud spend in their early days. But the rise of machine learning makes us suspect that answers might soon change.\u00a0 \u2014 <\/i>Anna<\/i><\/a><\/p>\n If you had a sense of d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu this week when David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) announced that Basecamp\u2019s and Hey\u2019s parent company 37signals was leaving the cloud, you are not alone: The debate on the pros and cons of cloud infrastructure sometimes seems stuck on an infinite loop.<\/p>\n It is certainly not the first time that I heard 37signals\u2019 core argument: That \u201crenting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth.\u201d<\/p>\n In fact, both DHH\u2019s rationale and its detractors strongly reminded me of the years-old discussion that expense management company Expensify ignited when it defended its choice to go bare metal \u2014 that is, to run its own servers.<\/p>\n However, it would be wrong to think that the parameters of the cloud versus on-premise debate have remained unchanged.<\/p>\n As Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh noted in our cloud investor survey, there\u2019s more to on-prem these days than running your own servers. Debate aside, I think most of us can agree that bare metal is not for everyone, which is why it\u2019s interesting to see a middle ground emerge.<\/p>\n \u201cIn terms of terminology,\u201d Ghosh said, \u201cI think on-prem should also be called \u2018modern on-prem,\u2019 which Replicated coined, as it addresses not just bare metal self-managed servers but also virtual private clouds, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nBare metal, rehashed<\/h2>\n