Speed and comfort are much appreciated during the early days of a startup. Being able to move fast is the key to success for many startups and one of the easiest ways to achieve this is by picking the technologies we feel the most comfortable with. It’s not a coincidence that most startups use the programming language that the founders were more fluent in, or the technology stack that founders were familiar with.

Finding the perfect tool for the job becomes a less relevant task, what matters is picking the tool that will help people move the fastest. This is a debt worth accumulating until the real value of the startup starts to come up. Optimizations that don’t have a direct impact in the life of the project (cost, disaster recovery, healthy lifecycle, etc) will be a distraction from the real goal.

This is true not only for startups, it also applies to big companies wanting to open a new line of business and win in a market.

Stay in your comfort zone for as long as possible to help you move fast. There will be a time for you to pay the debt. Until then, optimizing for speed is likely going to produce more value. As usual, the color range is quite wide, find the right combination and shade that applies best to your case.