> Sounds like a good way to get sued by your investors. You can try and anticipate it and you can model the risk and try to mitigate downside risk. You cannot "plan" for it though - it's a factor outside of your direct control. It's not a target you can hit or not hit, you just are prepared and lucky either way.

> Turns out that a Rails App + someone calling themselves a "Serial Startup CEO" on LinkedIn don't necessarily equate to a business.

Rails, like any other tool/framework, works perfectly well for certain kinds of problems. I would say this is very true for the kinds of businesses that most "serial startup CEOs" are solving. Twitter gave Rails a bad reputation because Twitter's problem was exceptionally bad for Rails at Twitter's scale. In most other cases it's just poor engineering discipline, whether it's in choice of tool or how it is used. It turns out that ActiveRecord isn't really a great tool for dealing with 450M+ write transactions per day. Wasn't designed to be.

Rails is powerful and ubiquitous for very good reasons. The tools that often get the most hate end up quietly doing their jobs or, worse, growing up and becoming better and everywhere. JavaScript, PHP, Lisp, C, Java? And that's just a few programming langauges...There's a holy war over Text Editors that aren't ever going away.

It's not a "web 2.0 startup" specific problem we're talking about. Rapid growth is notoriously one of _the most common_ reasons that companies fail (regardless of if that failure puts them out of business or not).