[taylorhughes]

(CH employee here)

The job of the cofounder is to create a thing that people want, which has nothing to do with performance. The first goal is capturing lightning in a bottle with social products. Performance doesn’t matter until the lightning is there, and 99%+ of the time you never have to worry about performance, because you don’t get the lightning. So, probably the correct choice is leveraging the tech stack that gives you the best shot at capturing the lightning. Django seemed to help!

[jimsimmons]

Don’t sweat it buddy. People here just want to stand on your toes and feel taller. Classic HN.

Velocity of development is priority #1 and having something that needs to be scaled is a monumental achievement.

[mst]

Plus, if he could've predicted the pandemic that far in advance there would probably have been plenty of not clubhouse ways to monetise that prescience ;)

[lmilcin]

This is just silly excuse.

The job of the cofounder is also to anticipate possible risks.

And building your company on an astronomically inefficient technology sounds like a huge risk to me.

Those 1000s of servers are probably a very significant cost with such small technical staff. Just by choosing the right technology for the problem, most of that cost could have been avoided.

Django has nothing special in it that would allow building applications faster than in a lot other frameworks that are also much more efficient.

So it is just a matter of simple choice.

Nobody expects people to write webapps in C++ or Rust. Just don't choose technology that is famous for being inefficient.

[jimsimmons]

Python is not astronomically inefficient. Instagram serves like a billion users with it. Job of a cofounder is to build what people want. You can always scale in Silicon Valley by hiring people like you. You can’t build another viral app like clubhouse by hiring from the same crowd.

This may hurt you but the truth is scaling and software engineering is highly commoditised. That’s the whole point of being in the valley. You can hire people for such things and forget about it.

Clubhouse is not a tech company. They don’t have to care about being the best at infra

[lmilcin]

> Python is not astronomically inefficient.

Well, it is. It is a fact.

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/03/07/costly/

> Clubhouse is not a tech company.

When you spin 1000s of nodes you need some tech competency.

Or in other words, if it blew one day and there would be a link to writeup on HN, people would be asking "They had 1000s of servers and nobody competent to maintain it?"

[vilified]

You sound just like the average sports fan commenting after a match about what x player should have done, shouldn't have done, blame it on decisions, style of the trainer, owner etc.. But you're just that.. a fan yapping about how they could do better.

[chimen]

So Django is an "astronomically inefficient technology"? I would just stop if I were you.