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I guess the question is then, would VCs give money to startups who say "We're using JQuery and PHP" or to startups who say something like "We're leveraging AI a
by vinyl7 5y ago
I guess the question is then, would VCs give money to startups who say "We're using JQuery and PHP" or to startups who say something like "We're leveraging AI and machine learning to deliver product via MERN stack ontop of AWS to give us web scale architecture"
- bcrosby95 5y agoDo VCs care or even know about tech stack a startup uses/intends to use? AI and ML is one thing - it can mean a product that couldn't exist without it. There's nothing about MERN vs PHP that indicates that though.
- mst 5y agoI remember quite some years (somewhere between a decade and a decade and a half) ago having to do some truly horrific things to make things work on AWS that would've been trivial and far cheaper at the time if we'd just bought a decent server and stuck it in a colo somewhere - specifically because my customer's investors were all-in on AWS as the only possible way to do things. I'd note that today putting that workload on AWS would probably be a pretty pleasant experience - but yeah, sometimes investors absolutely -do- care in ways that you'd really rather they didn't and you just have to suck it up.
- Spivak 5y agoI think this is a really warped view of VC funding who sorta kinda in a passing sense care about the tech stack but where the focus is almost entirely on the business side. I was at a company that bought a tiny little (originally) VC funded shop that actually was maybe 1K lines of PHP total. The secret sauce was they found a desperately underserved market that just needed something to collect and organize data between unconnected parties that took hours to do manually. Damn thing sold itself because it cost nothing to run, had essentially no maintenance costs, and made their users about 10k/user/mo from the hours it bought them back.
- Nextgrid 5y agoBusinesses like the ones you speak of are gems in a sea of crap. They exist, and in that case tech stack definitely isn't important. But for the rest of the "crap", AI- & blockchain-powered crap is more shiny than other, more boring crap, at which point the tech stack might be more important.
- lumost 5y agoVCs care that an early stage team will be able to execute, and to a lesser extent be able to innovate. Telling them that you use a 20 year old tech stack that few junior (aka cheap) engineer's know or want to know doesn't inspire this confidence. You would get a similar read from VCs if you said that you use Haskell, Erlang, or up until quite recently - Rust. There is something pretty comforting to an early stage investor of "We use Java microservices on mainstream cloud provider". Says that the team isn't ancient, isn't avant guard, and that they will be able to hire people. Worst case, an acquirer won't mind buying the leftovers or acquisition hiring the team.
- mbesto 5y ago>"We're using JQuery and PHP" If their MRR/ARR/MAU/DAU or whatever are strong then absolute-f'n-lutely.