Unless the the startup already nailed the startup part and is at $5-10M/yr or will flip with 0 revenue, you have no lunch to be eaten, just aspirations. Your biggest competitor is your internal non-business efforts that distract from experimenting with what gets people to pay in a repeatable way. Only after you have built a working revenue machine -- which (depressingly) can simply be VC revenue and hoping the music doesn't stop -- do you have a lunch to worry about. Luckily, as Twitter and friends show, once you have made that lunch, you can turn even the biggest Ruby fail whale and php ball of mud into engineering for scaling & doing tiny feature iterations.

Unfortunately, shiny engineering won't solve drastic product market fit iterations, and consumes the limited time & $$$ for achieving it. That's a lot of otherwise good habits and instincts to unlearn for engineers who never really had to go from idea to paying end users and instead needed to ride an existing monopoly and not break it: FANG, bigco, bank, consultants, etc. In a disturbing sense, a small # of new grads can fit in better on a startup team than a loud FANG cohort b/c most know how to do a bunch of small projects without being distracted by post-growth table stakes. (And you avoid the former-consultant "don't care about the end-customer, just the boss/politics" problem b/c of passion for the startup's mission vs. the tech.)

I've come to appreciate either:

Team 1: Staying tiny with people who demonstrably get that or are otherwise mission-focused (vs. tech-focused) until you do hit growth,

Team 2: Or massively over-fundraising and over-hiring (with high risk of fast death) simply to deal with sales/marketing/engineering that is only at say 10% efficiency of Team 1