I don't think it matters. Just look at some of Microsoft's buys: Yammer (Java), Skype (not sure but not .NET), Hotmail (FreeBSD), etc. Traction is the key.
Sign up for Bizspark and you don't have to worry about licensing for 3? years.
Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
21–30 of 103 posts
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#22It doesn't matter at all. In general investors have no clue about coding.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#23If you are technical founder then go with what you know. No questions here. Regarding licensing, you will anyway then run on Azure so licensing costs might not be so terrible.
If you not a technical founder and your goal is being acquired than technology does matter. For example, if you are in the market where, Oracle or Salesforce are potential acquirers then do not use .Net. Be more SQL / Java oriented.
And if your end-goal is getting revenue and profit, then it does not matter.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#24It doesn't matter at all. In general investors have no clue about coding.
They do hire "deal breakers" (experienced programmers which work in a basement of a VC firm whose only job to convince VC not to invest :-)). At least they had them in early 2000s. Not sure if that is case now.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#25You should never forget your licensing costs if you ever need to scale to "internet scale". However, it's more important to get a product out the door than to have a hugely scalable thing. If .Net is the best tool for your team to do it, then use it and work out the scalability issues later (you may consider keeping an eye on migration costs - it's easier to add app servers than to scale a RDBMS) and always having a plan on how do you turn what you have into what you'll need. You may even be very successful and not need to change too much: the Stack Exchange folks run a lot of their infrastructure on Windows.
I make my PoCs with Python on Google's App Engine. It's zero management and any individual idea is far more likely to fail than to be an overwhelming success, so it's reasonable to think about costs if and when the idea gains traction.
Another thing you should consider is how the stack you pick will affect your ability to hire great talent in your region.
Note: I really hate .Net (and Windows) but these are not decision one makes based on passion.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#26If you are technical founder then go with what you know. No questions here. Regarding licensing, you will anyway then run on Azure so licensing costs might not be so terrible. If you not a technical founder and your goal is being acquired than technology does matter. For example, if you are in the market where, Oracle or Salesforce are potential acquirers then do not use .Net. Be more SQL / Java oriented. And if your…
Yes, it probably won't affect your revenue. Your profit however is likely to be affected; how much depends on your architecture and scale.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#27I have experience with this. We started a company based on a product written in C#, and were acquired by a company by a company whose product was predominantly written in Java. It was never really a concern during the acquisition.
The software world is so diverse now that you could never predict who would be interested. If you ended up writing your product in a JVM language, you may end up with a Ruby suitor, etc. It's always best to just use the tool that you'll be most productive with, and will result in the best product.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#28I think it wouldn't hurt and if anything would allow you to find developers easier than if you did it in Rails, Node.js, Scala, or Go.
There are a ton of developers doing .NET or Java EE for large companies everywhere. Having that talent pool available is more convenient than having to recruit in more obscure platforms.
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#29I've been in this situation a couple of times before. It won't make a blind bit of difference initially but if you expand, so will tooling and deployment costs and investors don't like that. Anything that takes off the bottom line is a problem. Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else. We'r…
> Microsoft licensing, particularly dev tools and SQL is incredibly expensive and an order of magnitude more expensive on deployment and diagnostic time than anything else.
Oracle? SAP?
Re: Ask HN: Would a .Net back-end put off potential acquisitors?
#30Thinking about potential problems with an exit before you've even started building something is frankly ridiculous. Just start. What anyone might buy in a few years time if you're successful will be very different to what you build now because you will learn things about what the customer wants along the way. Whether that's shifting to a more appropriate language is something that only time will tell.
Completely agree. Remember, PG and team wrote Viaweb in Lisp because that is what they were comfortable with. They got acruired by Yahoo because they had the users and the best product in the market. The fact that it was built in Lisp did not deter Yahoo at all.
Stackoverflow is built on .Net and nobody is questioning that now.
It could turn out to be an advantage that the others keep writing you off as 'destined to doom' because you are on the .Net platform.