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Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

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Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#51

Post by JoeAltmaier »

joshuaellinger wrote: post #42

Don't worry about suitors - worry about hiring people. Team matters much more than Tech. But, as perspective, MS Dev tools cost about $10K per dev + $3K per year per dev after the first. Engineers costs $100K+ per year. +10% productivity covers the tools. If it costs you a month to retool or saves you a little on salary or lets you hire a little easier, you have paid for the tools. So what matters are things where yo…

Still salary is paid out over time. Tools cost up-front. In a lean startup that could sink you?

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#53

Post by locusm »

allegory wrote: post #47
stirno wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you've tied your entire response to SQL Server rather than the .NET stack so I'll do the same from an ASP.NET aspect.. ASP.NET is moving at an incredible pace, the new vNext bits are planned to be officially cross-platform and you can support any number of database backends from a .NET codebase. I also challenge your assertion that better people seem to use other platforms. You can find people marketing thems…

SQL server is pretty much inevitable otherwise you have to deploy on Linux (don't get me started on pgsql/mysql on windows). Then you have two disparate skill sets to maintain at great cost. Startups need to stick to heterogeneous platforms to keep costs low. Asp.net v.next is currently a bag of promises. I wouldn't put a product near it for a long time. I back this assertion up with the promises of Velocity, EF4, Si…

Care to comment on your .Net/pgsql experience?

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#54

Post by allegory »

locusm wrote: post #53
allegory wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SQL server is pretty much inevitable otherwise you have to deploy on Linux (don't get me started on pgsql/mysql on windows). Then you have two disparate skill sets to maintain at great cost. Startups need to stick to heterogeneous platforms to keep costs low. Asp.net v.next is currently a bag of promises. I wouldn't put a product near it for a long time. I back this assertion up with the promises of Velocity, EF4, Si…

Care to comment on your .Net/pgsql experience?

Unfortunately we don't mix the two. Npgsql is available though and I understand there is an NHibernate dialect available.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#55

Post by mattmanser »

allegory wrote: post #19
srb24 wrote: post #9

If you have a great product that you can get live quickly and works then it won't matter if you even write it in COBOL (don't write it in COBOL though) - ASP.Net & SQl Server (even the free version) also work very well together and have great performance. There are of course licensing costs if you run on Windows and don't use MONO but these shouldn't really be an issue in comparison to all your other costs Also there…

I'd caution against the performance claims. Yes its very good and can take a serious beating but there's a brick wall that requires a pile of tuning and tool purchasing to get over. Oh and the instrumentation and debugging past the bits of code you wrote and the .Net runtime core libraries is utterly horrible. See some of my earlier comments about this matter. I'd rather build on the JVM now thanks to tools like Visu…

99% of startups simply will never hit the performance problems you seem to be talking about.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#56

Post by JoeAltmaier »

mattmanser wrote: post #55
allegory wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd caution against the performance claims. Yes its very good and can take a serious beating but there's a brick wall that requires a pile of tuning and tool purchasing to get over. Oh and the instrumentation and debugging past the bits of code you wrote and the .Net runtime core libraries is utterly horrible. See some of my earlier comments about this matter. I'd rather build on the JVM now thanks to tools like Visu…

99% of startups simply will never hit the performance problems you seem to be talking about.

Yeah but its the ones that matter, that do? The successful ones with traction.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#57

Post by dennybritz »

I'd like to raise a related point. While I think it's too early to worry about acquisitions, a .NET stack may put off early employees. Many engineers want to work with "hot" technologies for professional development reasons.

For example, I would not work for a company whose stack is built on top of PHP or .NET, regardless of pay. Not because these are "bad" technologies (in fact, they are a lot more stable than the hot technologies, often resulting in shorter time to market and cheaper labor), but simply because working with these technologies doesn't benefit me as much personally/professionally as working with some of the upcoming frameworks. I probably wouldn't enjoy my work too much either. To quote rubiquity from another HN thread, "people that work for other people aren't trying to build that business, they're trying to build themselves within that business."

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#58

Post by sixothree »

throwawayforob wrote: post #38

We're a company with a .net stack that is being acquired right now. It didn't come up until their senior engineer said we should rewrite everything in Angular.js and Java. The tech management guys quickly said, "Sure, maybe, but for the foreseeable future, we will SSO between the two systems and plan for deeper integration later." Hands on engineers care a lot about tech choices and sometimes have actual good reasons…

Speaking of SSO.. I work in .Net and we have sold our product to companies who didn't have a single Windows server until the purchase. They SSO in and couldn't be happier.

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#59

Post by ridruejo »

A startup is mostly about managing risk. Assuming that your product is SaaS (i.e. your customers don't know or care what is written on), then in general the risk that your product will not be successful is probably bigger than that it is successful and you have problems with an acquisition. I would worry more initially about what you can be the most productive on and also whether you have access to talent for that particular stack (to grow the team if it starts to take off)

If you are truly successful at some point you will need to rewrite and you can change to a different stack then if it makes sense (it will be painful, but hopefully by then it means you will have the resources to do so)

Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?

#60

Post by sheetjs »

dennybritz wrote: post #57

I'd like to raise a related point. While I think it's too early to worry about acquisitions, a .NET stack may put off early employees. Many engineers want to work with "hot" technologies for professional development reasons. For example, I would not work for a company whose stack is built on top of PHP or .NET, regardless of pay. Not because these are "bad" technologies (in fact, they are a lot more stable than the h…

> a .NET stack may put off early employees.

Any choice may put off early employees. By sheer numbers, choosing .NET gives you a much larger hiring pool than, say, Haskell or NodeJS.

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