Well, the second sentence of the talk excerpt reads: "When you're writing software that is only going to run on your own servers, you can use whatever language

Well, the second sentence of the talk excerpt reads: "When you're writing software that is only going to run on your own servers, you can use whatever language you want." If you're not distributing software then the GPL doesn't apply. A web-based start up can use as many GPL-based libraries as they want.