
Ask HN: What tech stack do YC startups use? - johan_larson
What tech stack do the YC software startups tend to use these days?<p>I&#x27;m going to guess Ruby on Rails, AWS, Angular.
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nwenzel
Here's a broader look at tech stacks used by startups on Angel List:
[http://codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-an-
ex...](http://codingvc.com/which-technologies-do-startups-use-an-exploration-
of-angellist-data)

~~~
cageface
Love this bit:

 _The likelihood that PHP is being used is strongly anti-correlated with
company quality._

~~~
troymc
Unless you're Automattic (Wordpress.com). Or Acquia (Drupal).

"Acquia… today announced that its co-founder Dries Buytaert was named CTO of
the Year at the 2014 MassTLC Leadership Awards, hosted by the Massachusetts
Technology Leadership Council. Acquia led all companies with four finalists at
this year’s awards…" [1]

Those examples show that PHP _can_ be used, in a core way, by great technology
companies.

[1] [http://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/dries...](http://www.acquia.com/about-us/newsroom/press-
releases/dries-buytaert-named-cto-year-massachusetts-technology-leadership)

~~~
jayzalowitz
Mailchimp? Facebook? Saying php cant be used at a good startup is a bit like
saying you can't start a good company over 35.

~~~
britknight
Correlation in not a death sentence. No one is saying it _can 't_ be used,
merely making a observation based on the gathered statistics.

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pbiggar
Rails. In w10, we were one of two non-rails users, though it seems that has
changed to larger diversity.

Most YC companies use CircleCI, so we get to see some of the diversity. While
I haven't got concrete stats on this, I think it leans slightly more heavily
rails than usual (and usual is about 50%). Bear in mind that that's skewed in
some ways: if they were using C# for example they couldn't use us.

~~~
tel
I thought you guys were using Clojure?

~~~
Kiro
What makes you think they are not?

~~~
tel
Via a complete and total misreading of his answer, actually! The initial
"Rails." stuck in my mind even after he directly noted that they weren't using
it.

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hackerboos
Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8105286)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227071](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5227071)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2223683](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2223683)

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jonahx
I wouldn't assume there is a "YC tech stack". From individual blog posts I've
read there is great diversity among YC companies' tech stacks. I also wouldn't
assume that rails + angular is, or is even considered to be, the cutting edge
of web stacks.

~~~
johan_larson
Maybe. On the other hand, Paul Graham has strong views on what great hackers
are like, which are likely to color his evaluations of candidate companies. It
would be surprising to see a YC company running an Azure/Windows/C#/Visual
Studio/TFS stack. And there are good reasons why someone might do so.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html)

~~~
arihant
I believe Loopt was on C# stack and its founder is currently leading YC, so
I'm sure Paul didn't take stack too seriously when evaluating companies. There
are a lot of good reasons to use Microsoft stack, and I suspect more than a
handful YC companies use it.

Paul said it is advisable to not use enterprise technologies if you're willing
to attract high quality engineers only. He never said it can't be done and it
is never implied that high quality small number of workforce is important to
every business. If you're in consulting, for example, you'd want a larger
workforce you can get for cheap. But I think you already mentioned that point,
just throwing it out there.

~~~
kogir
I was Loopt's CTO and would use Microsoft's stack again, especially now.

Not everything was perfect, but C#, F# and SQL Server are great, updates
rarely broke anything, and security updates came regularly and promptly.

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lpolovets
You can use AngelList search to get some approximate relative counts of
technologies at YC companies. For example, here are the counts for Java and
Python:

Java:
[https://angel.co/companies?incubators[]=Y+Combinator&teches[...](https://angel.co/companies?incubators\[\]=Y+Combinator&teches\[\]=Java)
(15 companies)

Python:
[https://angel.co/companies?incubators[]=Y+Combinator&teches[...](https://angel.co/companies?incubators\[\]=Y+Combinator&teches\[\]=Python)
(31 companies)

I basically used this same technique for the CodingVC blog post that was
mentioned elsewhere in the thread.

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tomblomfield
From my experience - Ruby on Rails, some kind of Javascript framework (Ember,
Backbone, Angular), Postgres & Redis as data stores, hosted on Heroku.

As you scale to the point at which Heroku is expensive, move over to AWS.

~~~
johan_larson
Any idea why Google's App Engine isn't more popular?

Too many restrictions? Too expensive?

It's used quite a bit by other AngelList companies:

    
    
       App Engine 295
       Heroku     969
       AWS        388

~~~
atmosx
Because Google's App Engine might not be around this time next year, while AWS
will most probably be there 10 years from today.

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sandGorgon
Are there any startups using Java (not JVM) based web stacks (not backend or
API endpoints). Any comments/experiences would be welcome !

~~~
eduardordm
Hi!

I use Rails in my company, which is not a startup anymore, but we are using
java in a new venture.

Our stack in this new company is based on spring (spring-boot, spring-data-
rest, etc) and angularJs. We are very happy with it. Spring security and
spring-data-rest are amazing.

I love Rails with all my heart since it's what we use since 2005, but I have
to say I'm impressed by the advances in Java in the last year or two. That
said, if you are doing SPAs Java can be more productive than Rails.

~~~
sandGorgon
I'm a rails guy myself - how has your experience been in things like
migrations, asset pipeline and integration of things like Coffeescript?

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lgieron
The ubiquitousness of the assumption that software startup == web startup
saddens me.

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nickthemagicman
Is php ever used?

~~~
e1g
As an anecdote - in my circles I observe that PHP is very popular among people
who started working in web ~2000, while ruby is popular among those who
started in ~2007. Nothing to do with seniority etc, I think it's simply the
default choice of whatever was in vogue at the time when the person started
hacking, and by now many PHP guys skew older and are out of the startup game
(i.e. working in established companies on established products).

As another example, I'm still astonishingly productive with PHP for backend
APIs and rapid development projects. The symfony/Doctrine community has done a
phenomenal job at bringing world-class tools to the language.

~~~
legohead
As a young person, when I was examining possible choices for development, I
chose what was fast and stable. At the time that was C & PHP, and maybe even
perl.

I don't see how the young people of today decide to go with Ruby, with it's
terrible performance, and especially last year with it's slew of
vulnerabilities. If you like the beauty of Ruby, use it on your own stuff or
for learning. But using it with intention for a production environment? I just
don't get it...

~~~
johan_larson
It's not Ruby. It's Rails. Ruby on its own is just a slightly more flexible
Python.

Rails was embraced because it provided a clear way to write DB-driven web apps
with minimal configuration, following a strict pattern. And a lot of people
sort of like strict.

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cpncrunch
I'm not a YC startup, although my product was forked by a YC startup.

I mostly pure javascript (no frameworks) on the front-end and
C++/perl/php/mysql on the back-end. Incredibly reliable and stable.

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jjbrow10
Here at Enplug we use a wide range of tech.

Server: C#, Databases: MongoDB and SQL Server, Messaging: RabbitMQ, Clients:
LibGDX and Java on Android, Web client: AngularJS

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swah
The tools that everyone else usess, skewed to the "new, modern side" would be
my guess.

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aswanson
Interesting that bootstrap is negatively correlated with success.

~~~
tim333
Yeah, I guess maybe it's good for knocking things together quickly but a bit
generic looking for your masterpiece.

~~~
notduncansmith
If you don't change the default styles, sure. It looks decent enough that you
can get an MVP into production without having to do much other than a light
top coat for branding. Later on, you may want to invest in more heavily
customizing some elements, but Bootstrap will pretty much stay out of your
way.

Source: Senior front-end dev that puts around one app per month into
production using Bootstrap (some more heavily tweaked than others).

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arthurquerou
SailsJS,Heroku, Angular @ MotionLead

~~~
mackwic
I like SailsJS a lot but didn't have the chance to experiment it on a real
project. How well does it scale ?

