I've watched this happen more times than I'd like to admit. A startup launches on what felt like perfectly reasonable tech choices, maybe a shared hosting plan, a monolithic PHP codebase, a MySQL database that wasn't quite architected for growth. Things work fine at 1,000 users. At 10,000, cracks appear. At 100,000, everything breaks and the team spends six months re-platforming instead of shipping features. The tech stack you choose at launch isn't just a technical decision. It's a business decision. And it has a ceiling. The Startup Tech Decision That Nobody Talks About Honestly There's a particular kind of optimism in early-stage startups which is mostly a good thing, because nobody would build anything without it, that leads teams to believe that "we'll deal with scale when we get there." The problem is that by the time you get there, you're often dealing with scale while also dealing with everything else a growing startup deal with. New hires. Increasing customer expectations. Competitors pushing.…