I don't buy this theory, because I don't think there are many investors that actually care about the tech stack. If they are, I'd say they're bad investors.
You could create a successful company on any tech stack. It's really like trying to invest in a company based on the way they decorate their HQ. Does it matter at all? Maybe only if it's ridiculously extravagant compared to their revenue.
I have had it be an issue with investors during the due diligence phase. We were very far along in the fund raising process when we got to the technical due diligence. They brought in an expert advisor to discuss our tech stack and he seemed very concerned that we were building on a php/mysql stack.
They pretty much ghosted us soon after that meeting. Though they did not specify that as the reason, it seems most likely that their advisor told them we don't know what we are doing technically.
I've worked in over twenty languages in my career, and you can't pay me to work with PHP anymore, even though there was a brief period where I thought it was the best thing ever as a new programmer. But that's just an artist being picky about his tools.
What matters with a startup is executing, and that means using tools that let you execute well. If you're most familiar with PHP and MySQL, then that's what you should use.
As someone biased against your tech stack, I fully support your decision and think the expert and the investor have no idea what really matters, hence I stand by that they're a bad investor.
That...is honestly shocking. Yes the programmer in me cringes at the though of going anywhere near php/mysql, but the business side of me looks at this stack as pragmatic, well documented, well understood, and easy to hire for.
On the other side I'm evaluating CL for my next endeavor since I personally find it to be my most productive language, but realistically I'll settle for Clojure and even then I'm worried if that is a bridge too far when it comes to the whole funding/due diligence issues.
I'd love to know what their export advisor considers the right decision?
He was an ex-googler, so I'm sure only some combination of c, go, and java would have sufficed.
Php 7.2+ is great for a lot of saas products and is super fast now. and mysql 8 is rock solid and battle tested in a lot of production systems.
Starting over, I would consider PostgreSQL because it has some nifty features. But now that mysql has added json support, I am less inclined and I see a lot of complaints about performance and scaling that I don't think is as much of an issue with mysql. There isn't a whole lot more out there for relational databases (that doesn't cost a ton). And not using a relational database for most saas systems is just crazy talk.
You could create a successful company on any tech stack. It's really like trying to invest in a company based on the way they decorate their HQ. Does it matter at all? Maybe only if it's ridiculously extravagant compared to their revenue.