>As a founder/employee #1, I have a hard time believing anyone would pick tech just to burnish their resume; they should be trying to ship so the company succeeds....What am I missing?

That most startups are Underpants Gnomes, the company probably won't succeed even if they ship.

Even if the company is not Underpants Gnomes and their fundamentals are sound, succeeding or not is still largely luck based.

Maybe the reference to Underpants Gnomes is too dated now? - https://youtu.be/a5ih_TQWqCA

Love the underpants gnomes reference and I agree that many startups will fail. But wow, working at a company you feel in your bones will fail seems to me to be a poor way to spend a career.

Not that every company I've worked at succeeded, but I hoped that every startup I joined as an employee would.

Now, as a contractor or consulting company, you still want the client to succeed, but it's much easier to be arms-length, take orders, and collect your check.

You’re missing the fact that employees who are interested in their own career would be less interested in a Rails stack on their resume.

It was over half a decade ago. But the point wasn't about the particular tech, it was that folks who join a startup, especially if early, should prefer the startup to succeed over choosing overcomplicated solutions, and I don't understand why. A couple of possible reasons:

* they don't think the solution is overcomplicated

* they don't really care about the startup succeeding

* they don't know what the ramifications of picking the wrong technology will have

* they think the risk of learning something new is outweighed by the value to the company (or themselves)

I don't think startup employees are altruistic, but picking a tech you know will have a detrimental effect on your employer strikes me as shortsighted.

I don’t think people want their employee to fail. But given a choice between the most “correct” technology and the most “marketable” technologies. It’s short sighted as employee to choose the most “correct” technology. More than likely the startup is going to fail.

If given a choice between Vue and React, I might prefer Vue. But I would still choose React as a tech lead because I know it is more marketable and you would get more self interested developers and it would be easier to recruit for.

Thanks for giving me clarity into your thought process. I agree the choice between "correct" and "marketable" is a difficult one. Sometimes the most marketable tech is the correct choice. Sometimes the correct choice is the one you and your team knows, even if it is not the most marketable. Sometimes it doesn't matter, because when you are building an app, there are many paths to success.

Technical correctness is not the only factor, there are other kinds of correctness, as you point out with React: "you would get more self interested developers and it would be easier to recruit for".