And that's where you make a mistake: sure, the founder can be a competent sysadmin, but the founder simply cannot replace a team of sysadmins. You need to be available 24/7 -- there's always that pressure on your social live that you need to remain available, etc etc etc.
You think you can do it, as a founder, especially when you've got some sysadmin skills, but you simply cannot do as good a job as a team of operations people who are stand-by 24/7. And you simply cannot afford such a team for yourself when you're starting out.
And that's where you make the mistake. Look at twitter. Look at facebook. Look at anything else. They're all broken from time to time, all offline every so often. People are pretty forgiving especially at the start.
I'm reminded of a talk Chris Wanstrath gave where he said:
"Would you pay $100 an hour for an untrained accountant? Because if your consulting rate is $100 an hour and you do your own accounting, that's exactly what's happening."https://gist.github.com/0a2655aed6a26fa15a02
So I guess the relevant questions are:
1. How much is your time worth?
2. How much are you willing to pay for an untrained sysadmin?
You think you can do it, as a founder, especially when you've got some sysadmin skills, but you simply cannot do as good a job as a team of operations people who are stand-by 24/7. And you simply cannot afford such a team for yourself when you're starting out.