Shoddy architecture and even a bad product can be compensated by marketing, hype or a good sales team, while the most pristine architecture and codebase will not help you at all without any customers.
We technologists often focus on the technical aspects, but in many domains they are the least important part for a startup.
It is true that having a nice tech stack can make doing your thing easier, but it can also distract you from doing your thing well.
Tech stack is important but (customer) money in the bank is importanter.
Your daily reminder that FB started with PHP. Ship and sell first, the rest can be done later (yes your customer doesn't care that you rewrote your backend to use nanoservices in Go deployed to hundreds of lambda functions).
Also, I've seen the same stacks succeed and fail. The only common thing I can see is:
- when the tech team fully understand the stack they're using - when the tech team fully understand the product and business they're building (and can make appropriate trade offs)
There are a bunch of basic tech things. E.g. the underlying infrastructure has to be performance, scale, secure etc. There's also the issue of choosing a tech you can actually recruit for.