Allan Leinwand has an interesting post on GigaOm yesterday about the CTO of a Web 2.0 company making a VC pitch. Alan was surprised the CTO didn’t have a plan for dealing with load balancing, networking and the racks of gear needed to deliver the solution.

“The Internet is like electricity. We plug into it and all of the things that you mention are already there for us. We don’t spend any time at all on network or server infrastructure plans.” was the CTO’s response.

Allan was an early employee at Cisco and CTO at Digital Island, so I’m not surprised he’d ask someone about their networking plans. “I’m old school,” he confesses.

IMHO, though, expecting the CTO of a Web 2.0 startup to have a networking plan misses the point. In the 90’s web startups had to have a CTO with knowledge of routers, switches, load balancers, vpns, caches and servers because much of the infrastructure was new and unproven. A decade later, can building yet another co-lo cage really add value. That’s exactly the reason I’ve been working on utility computing.

As an investor I’d be interested in how the CTO plans to increase the company’s value. Does he know his customers? Does he understand the the problem they’re trying to solve and the existing solutions customers are using. What about the competition? What technological shifts are happening that allow for a new solution. How will the new company change the landscape? What companies will be threatened by them?

In making a decision to invest, networks and servers would only be a line item on the financials.