My fear (unfounded or not) is that by rebuilding the current site in php it will pose hiring challenges down the road. It feels like most younger developers are avoiding php.
Is this a legitimate concern?
I'm not looking for a flame war here so please refrain leave those comments for somewhere else.
Now if the site is not developed and you do not have a product, I would say do whatever you are most comfortable in to get it launched. There will always be the next great language out there and to second guess yourself now is just wasting valuable time. PHP, while it has its moments, is not a bad language to build a product with. There are plenty of big name sites that got their start as PHP or are still built on PHP. I highly doubt that in the next few years that PHP developers are going to be a thing of the past.
Migrating the site to php would be trivial, the codebase is pretty basic. The technical requirements of V2 of the product will far exceed my abilities as a developer.
He also has extensive CTO experience and just all around is the kind of developer that can take the company to the next level...
The community is huge and there are plenty of mature software and components to use. I would not be shy of using PHP and wouldn't worry about hiring challenges in the next few years.
That said, I would not hang my business on a single technology. Building with a combination of PHP and Node.js should be a good bet as these compliment each other and will provide developers chances to learn new things.