I've made money on my ISOs at every startup I was an early employee of. The secondary markets are fairly liquid if you know how to navigate them. None of the companies were in the Bay Area either.
You mentioned that you would write about how SV is different than what's happening at the seed stage everywhere else. What's the tl;dr of that upcoming post?
I think you're under estimating the number of people required to run your own infrastructure. You need people who can configure networking gear, people swapping out failed NICs/Drives at the datacenter, someone managing vendor relationships, and people doing capacity planning.
I think you could probably get the IO performance you're talking about in your blog post from AWS instances or Google Cloud's local NVMe drives, but if you truly need baremetal, I'd recommend Packet or Softlayer. Don't try to run your own infrastructure or in a year you'll be: https://imgflip.com/i/1fs7it