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Running a standard cloud installation is button-pushing. Building and running a nonstandard/bespoke datacenter, even if unwise, requires a lot more ability. So it's not a surprise the people doing the latter were able to learn to do the former. Now they're still high-ability, but know how to push an additional set of buttons, so they're worth more than either your run-of-the-mill button-pusher or what they were before.
Total tangent, but a good story.
Early in my career, I was in a low level position that randomly physically placed me in the same room as four high-end infra guys. These dudes had been building complex system for decades and really knew their shit. They had a lot of opinions.
Two of them came up with a very nonstandard and bespoke way to manage the huge cluster we were running. The other two came up with a different very nonstandard and bespoke way to manage the huge cluster we were running.
The first group worked for at least the two years I was there to get permission from the higher-higher-higher ups to implement their solution. IIRC, they built like a mini deployment using old servers to demonstrate the feasibility. They wrote innumerable contingency and rollback plans. I left before it went live, but I heard they, eventually, got permission for a scaled down version of what they wanted. I think they got a kind of pat-on-the-head employee-of-the-month reward, as well as a paid trip to some cloud infra conference.
The second group left, raised some money for their idea, and then got their shit deployed across all of the operations of a massive specialty data center company. They're both giga-rich now with multiple layers of fuck you money.
To me, this is the triumph of markets of an individual firm. If your firm doesn't like your idea, but you have high enough conviction, it could be worth risking it to try to get your idea out there. Now, the odds of success are against you, but I find it far more disheartening to have the eventual mitigated success of the first two guys, rather than a potential start-up flame out.
I design things. Anything I design on company time is company IP and supposedly they'd sue me if I left to make my business selling their IP.
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Risk vs. Reward and all that, right? If I'm at a point in my life where I'm not responsible for others and have a bit of a safety net, the gamble is a great idea. If I'm the sole provider for others, well... maybe sticking with the safer route is better for me and those that rely on my income.
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