[tensor]

I actually did start a company using Clojure. All these points are true. Yes, it helped filter candidates in the early days, and also helped attract people to jobs that might otherwise not be that interesting or competitive. It's difficult for pre-funded companies to compete with the FANG companies.

However, there were negatives. At the time the Clojure library landscape was less mature. Clojure developers would also tend to abandon projects to create "the next best version" which made migrating and keeping up with the libraries of the day difficult. Most of the libraries were very rough around the edges too. On the other hand we could use any Java library which was a boon.

As the team grew, it became harder and harder to hire people in larger numbers. Especially in a single timezone. Also it became apparent that many of the people who were very happy in the early days, were increasingly less happy as we added standardization and protocol to our dev process. As some commenters pointed out many of the people attracted to Clojure liked playing with the latest and greatest, and things were "boring" when they couldn't work with whatever the latest fast changing trend in the community was. Trying to teach people Clojure also an issue. For some it was challenging, and for others, they were not really interested in using it.

It was a good learning experience, but I don't think I'd do it again. There is something to be said for using "boring" technology for the majority of your tech stack.

[kochb]

I also founded a company which built a large portion of our backend on Clojure, using it through Series C. Your experience matches ours verbatim.

[brokenkebab2]

I must note switching from novelty to boring phase is a crisis which every growing project will come through once it starts to expand its workforce. I saw it in teams with very average tech stack many times.