Ask HN: (No) Microsoft based start-ups?

and Free > non-Free

I don't think it's just a matter of fashion. Only a handful of the startups we've funded use anything from Microsoft.

Because who wants to run Windows on a server?

Yes, you can, many people do, but it's less common, which is why basing a startup on an MS stack is less common.

Well there tend to be two classes of startups. There are the YC-like startups. Which I think are often college grads or recent college grads. College students are generally familiar with open source software. I certainly never touched MS software in college.

The other class of startups are those by relatively successful people who left their current job to start a company. More of the Spolsky model. Here you'll find a lot more MS-based stacks. Usually because they're familiar with it and with BizSpark the upfront cost is relatively cheap.

Of course these startups probably have different funding models, so you hear about them less on places like TechCrunch. Lastly, they are often more enterprise focused as their experience in industry has given them the ability to see gaps in the enterprise offerings (college students don't do enterprise focused startups) -- but they aren't exciting consumer technologies. But a companies like Topaz Bridge are still doing some interesting stuff.

It's just not trendy and the release cycle is very long compared to open source. The long release cycle contributes to the tech side being less newsworthy. Also, the stack is fairly standardized so if you are making a website your stack is going to be either ASP.NET or ASP.NET MVC and it's going to run on the sanctioned VM, and you'll likely be running SQL Server.

Contrast this with the ruby stack you might be running MRI, YARV, Rubinius for your VM, and then for your web framework you might be running rack, sinatra, etc. Thus when someone makes their stack OpenBSD + YARV + Sinatra + Active Record it's newsworthy as the non-standardization likely created some kind of interesting issue they needed to solve. This stuff doesn't happen on the MSFT side of things. If someone says they are doing a MSFT start up the only real question about their stack is LINQ-to-SQL / ADO.NET entities / nhibernate. I already know that the rest of their stack is going to be Win2k(3|8)R2 + IIS + ASP.NET + SQL Server and it's going to be written in C#.

I was considering doing an Win2k8R2/F#/MVC/nhaml/LINQ-TO-SQL start up but my market isn't tech guys so any blogging I did about my unique stack would attract people who wouldn't be interested in the startup.