That's a chicken and egg problem though, especially in a place as driven by fashion as the technology startup scene in Silicon Valley. Training a decent developer to be effective with Perl is fairly easy (use my free book on the subject!).

Getting attention because you didn't use Node or Clojure or Erlang or Ruby or Python or Java is trickier.

(I've been at this long enough to remember hearing from VCs "Your product has a Perl backend and a Python frontend? Oh... would you consider rewriting it all in Java? Java has more buzz.")