A good portion of the startups I meet and advise want to use the newest, hottest technology to build something that’s cool, but not technologically groundbreaking. I have yet to meet a startup building a time machine, teleporter or quantum social network that would actually require some amazing new tech. They have awesome new ideas with down-to-earth technical requirements, so I kept wondering why they choose this shiny (and risky) new stuff when all they need is a good ol’ trustworthy database. I think it’s because many assume that building the latest and greatest needs the latest and greatest!

It turns out that’s only one of three bad reasons (traps) why people go for the shiny and new. Reason two is people mistakenly assume older stuff is slow, not feature rich or won’t scale. “MySQL is sluggish,” they say. “Java is slow,” I’ve heard. “Python won’t scale,” they claim. None of it’s true.

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