It's probably not the stack I would pick and my initial reaction is always to gasp when I see startups built on Microsoft, but... - ASP.NET can scale, if you d

It's probably not the stack I would pick and my initial reaction is always to gasp when I see startups built on Microsoft, but... - ASP.NET can scale, if you do it right. Aside from Microsoft.com/MSN, which don't really count, MySpace uses it (though they upgraded from ColdFusion, which wasn't much better) and Plenty of Fish, the web's largest dating site, uses it too: http://www.plentyoffish.com/about_team.aspx http://www.plentyoffish.com/about_team.aspx These are probably all larger than the most successful Rails sites. - ASP.NET MVC isn't a horrible programming model. Forget the abomination that's normal ASP.NET with its funky events. If you've used another MVC framework like Rails or Cake, you'll feel right at home. - Microsoft's startup program gives startups the early software for super cheap: http://microsoftstartupzone.com/ http://microsoftstartupzone.com/ - It's all about getting v1 out and releasing early and often. If your team grew up on Microsoft, are you really going to make them all learn a new framework? If you do it right and prove out your idea, you can always rewrite later.