Technology

Does your technology stack matter?

Despite spending most of my career in tech companies, I'm not the ideal person to discuss this topic. I've never truly focused on or shown enough curiosity about tech-related topics—from programming languages to software architecture to system infrastructure—as much as I probably should have.

One thing I have learned, though, is how decisions in this area impact many aspects of your venture's growth and operations. Take programming languages, for instance. The language you choose will influence not only your product's quality but also your ability to recruit engineers—and how quickly you can do so. If you opt for a widely used but not necessarily popular language, you'll have a larger pool of engineers to choose from, but they might not be the most talented ones. On the other hand, if you go for a more niche or unconventional language, it will likely take more time—and possibly cost more—to build your engineering team. However, you increase the chances of attracting motivated and eager engineers.

The quality of your product—and consequently its value to potential acquirers—will also depend heavily on the technology stack it's built upon. This is where having the right technical co-founder is crucial to determine the most suitable stack. I'd argue that choosing your tech stack is the next most important decision after defining your big idea. Therefore, it's crucial to dedicate ample time to this decision and carefully select your founding team with this in mind.

My first technical co-founder stayed with flyiin for just over six months. That's not much time to contribute to a venture, is it? Especially when one of those months was spent negotiating his exit. However, he did make one significant contribution: choosing a programming language that would turn out to be one of our biggest assets.

When we began building our consumer-facing Air Travel Marketplace, we outsourced the work to a software development shop in Budapest. This shop was known for being one of the few to use an emerging programming language called Elixir. Due to its nature, Elixir was—and still is—highly relevant for products that need to send and receive numerous transactions from third-party APIs concurrently. This was exactly what flyiin needed, as our product and tech platform aimed to connect a large number of airline APIs through which we hoped thousands of request and response transactions would flow every minute.

Elixir became a key foundation of our company, particularly after the lead developer from the Budapest agency became my third and final technical co-founder. flyiin soon became a known brand in the Elixir developer community, helping us attract talented engineers throughout our journey. These engineers would go on to build an Airline DirectConnect Platform, which ultimately caught the attention of Priceline. The robustness of our platform, combined with our engineers' expertise in Elixir and their growing domain knowledge, provided our company with an exit opportunity when we were on the brink of failure. I am not certain we would have achieved the same success had we opted for a more conventional and less suitable tech stack.

Key Takeaway #13

Your technology stack choice significantly impacts your venture's growth, product quality, and team building. Dedicate ample time to this decision with a suitable technical co-founder, as it's one of the most crucial after defining your big idea.