Yes as a programmer. No as startup guy. For me, it's like learning to do multiplications instead of just adding and subtracting. You will still get the same answer at the end.
For a startup, you don't want to your programmers to learn cause its a heavy investment in terms of time. Adding and subtracting works just fine so they often advocate that route. You definitely get to the end goal, but when it comes to learning new things, you are never certain what the outcome will be.
We started with Scala when we were a startup. It's worked out very well for us: our orchestration layer in Scala has been maintainable and scaled well as the organisation grew, and the power of Scala has meant each change is small and focused (i.e. doesn't have the verbosity and boilerplate of Java).
Im currently at a startup and we're trying to introduce more Scala into the pipeline. I agree that languages like NodeJS can speed up time to market slightly but we are taking a huge hit for it right now as we try to scale with 5x/10x load. I really wish we introduced more Scala/Java up front.
For a startup, you don't want to your programmers to learn cause its a heavy investment in terms of time. Adding and subtracting works just fine so they often advocate that route. You definitely get to the end goal, but when it comes to learning new things, you are never certain what the outcome will be.