I would like to add that you'd be foolish to use my post as a reason for building a system to scale to high levels prematurely. I agree with the original article that doing so bogs you down in needless complexity and wastes time and resources.

At that startup, we built the system to scale to where we were projecting traffic would be within a given time period. If that co-founder going on national television hadn't happened, our original plan would have been sufficient.