Valley Investors appraisal of Ruby on Rails?

I think the smartest thing you can do is to listen to your engineers and developers. If you’re concerned that they aren’t able to give you competent advice, I highly suggest you hire a team that is. If they are giving you competent advice and you’re inclined to second-guess it, then I definitely think you should reconsider your position and avoid pushing a management decision down onto a technical team that doesn’t want to implement it. You will likely have even more problems with that approach.

Also, is there a reason you’re going with MySQL over PostgreSQL?

I worked for a company that used Ruby on Rails for all of their web stuff. They were purchased for $76 million: http://mashable.com/2007/09/23/mozy/

I just interviewed with a startup that uses Ruby on Rails that was purchase by Aon Hewitt.

There are a couple of data points for you.

That said, it depends on what you’re doing. Ruby on Rails is opinionated; it prides itself on being so. If you are doing something that is on the “golden path”, it shouldn’t be a problem. However, it depends on what you’re doing. If you are doing something that doesn’t match RoR well, I’d say use something else.

Ruby isn’t a good language for writing a high-performance asynchronous message queue. I think Twitter was silly to try. Ruby is great for other things. It’s all about using the correct tool for the job.

Also, another vote for PostgreSQL instead of MySQL.

@gorillapaws has it right—you should trust your developers.

There should be no scalability issues with almost any language to a few hundred thousand or million uniques per month, if you architecture is well designed. And hosting is so much cheaper than development, that picking a language that your developers enjoy and can maintain with clean code should be your main priority—you can always add a few more servers (they should probably be virtual) and just scale horizontally.

As far as investors, good ones will probably not care, but possibly Ruby on Rails is preferred to ASP for the most tech-savvy in Silicon Valley. More importantly, it’s a different demographic of who you can hire.

The vast majority of Silicon Valley investors don’t have strong opinions about specific technologies. They only know what they hear from entrepreneurs (who they talk to on a daily basis). Even the ones with engineering backgrounds are smart enough to realize that they’ve been out of the game for long enough that they’re no longer experts.

If a VC refuses to invest on the grounds that they don’t approve of your technology choices, trust me, you wouldn’t want that person as an investor anyway. The fact that they think they know more than your team about technology is a strong indicator that they are a control freak and will micromanage your company into the ground. The best investors understand the value of dynamic languages and trust your team to make the right decisions for themselves.

My credentials: I co-founded a company that uses Merb, Rails, and other Ruby technologies, almost exclusively. We raised over $4 million from BlueRun Ventures and Founders Fund. After pitching about a dozen VCs, I can’t recall one who asked what programming languages we used. The closest question we ever got was “Does it scale?”.

Whenever anyone asks why we chose Ruby, I say something like: “We chose the language that allowed us to iterate on our product the fastest because we believe that the measure of progress for a startup is validated learning about customers.”

I would actually cite Twitter as a positive example of this. The team, which started building a product called Odeo, was able to pivot and rapidly iterate on an entirely new product. If Twitter had chosen a different technology at the beginning, the product might have never launched, or it might have launched 6 months later, or it might have never developed into the product that users know and love today. According to Google, twitter.com is one of the most popular websites on the internet, so it’s hard to argue that their choice to use Ruby on Rails negatively affected their long-term success. Here’s a little-know fact: even though Twitter has rewritten many of their low-level systems in Scala, the Twitter REST API, which serves the vast majority of their web requests, still runs on Ruby.

Also, in answering “Does it scale?”, I often didn’t even bother to mention what programming language we used because scaling is primarily about having the right architecture, not the right language. You should be able to scale almost any language with the proper systems architecture. For example, many of largest sites on the internet (most Yahoo! properties) are built in PHP, which is, in the main, slower than Ruby.

Have you considered using Python? @ben‘s point about choosing a language your developers want to code in is very true, and most languages will scale just fine. Personally I would steer clear of ASP because it’s generally a heavyweight that doesn’t run on many servers and go with Python or PHP. What’s wrong with the current PHP implementation you have? I have always found PHP to be fast, reliable, and powerful.