Of course, Facebook ran circles around their competitors. Myspace, friendster, left in the dust. Friendster infamously was left in the dust because its VC lade

Of course, Facebook ran circles around their competitors. Myspace, friendster, left in the dust. Friendster infamously was left in the dust because its VC laden board was more interested in striking cool deals than allocating the resources necessary to make the site fast enough, so that e.g. simply logging in didn't take a minute or more. They, not a founder, were calling the shots, and while I don't know the Myspace story, I note they were bought by the monster sized News Corporation a year and a half after Facebook was founded, and during the period where their relative market positions flipped, so blame it on Rupert Murdoch if you want ^_^, but the chances they had nimble management after the acquisition are very very low. Getting back to Friendster, as a DEC published history of microcomputer companies in the '70s put it, the ones who survived at minimum did an adequate job of everything essential, from all the different bits of hardware (no one ever bought DEC for the quality/price-performance of their disk drives), to documentation, to support etc. So no matter how powerful your language is, if you don't, for example, run it on enough servers, or architect your system so that's even possible, you're not going to succeed.