What sort of language would you ask for?
- modern functional language with
- development and debugging tools as good as state of the art for imperative languages and
- a large and well maintained set of libraries that
- run on all major platforms and
- have a liberal distribution license (BSD/GNU/Apache/etc)
Each one of those domains is going to have different requirements, and each one of those would be better served by one language as opposed to another.
It would be like asking people, "which human language is best for communicating". Well, if I had to describe many different kinds and varieties of snow, I'd probably choose an Eskimo dialect. If I had to describe many different levels of respect, honor and shame, I'd say Japanese. If I was to communicate in the business realm, I'd have to say English. And, if I had to talk about hunting tapirs in a rain forest, I'd probably use a dialect native to tribes in the Amazon.
With all due respect to PG, the idea of One True Language (tm) is a myth as far as I'm concerned. Langauges are tools. Different languages have different strengths and weaknesses. Familiarize yourself with enough different tools so you can make intelligent decisions, and then use the most powerful language/tool for the job at hand.
The point was to see if there was anything startups might have in common, in their language needs. Maybe the answer to that is "nothing", but I wonder.