Sorry was merely trying to try back together the tangent thread of "no new startups using PHP" (and the answer, "yes, there are new successful startups") to the original thread without also rehashing the arguments.
There are clearly companies with interesting problems using PHP (the original question) and new companies with interesting problems (the 2nd assertion) using PHP.
None of which is particularly an endorsement for PHP, but rather a point in favor in my opinion that language choice is the wrong question, and candidates obsessed with language choice have an unsophisticated understanding of their jobs (which is not writing code but solving problems).
But if we take Joshua's original question extremely literally, i.e. we know nothing about the founders, their history, their goals, the problem they're trying to solve, why they made the technology choices they did, etc, then I'd be scared off from the company full stop and wonder what the hell was up with their communication strategy.
I also think the data shows that all successful companies are exceptions. Not sure if you can make rules about what success looks like without reasoning about exceptions.
I don't exactly disagree with any of this, but I also think that you're living in a particular bubble of experience. Note that I have a startup driven largely by Java, which is the systems equivalent of uncool langs, so I feel you on the coolness factor.
I had a long convo with someone last night about LAMP stack companies. I actually think that there's a lot of good that you can and should do on a LAMP stack, but if you really wanted to, say, hire me to be your CTO, it would be pointless to hire me to run a LAMP stack. I'm just... not interested. That doesn't make PHP wrong, and it doesn't make me wrong, it just makes us a bad fit. This has literally nothing to do with my experience with Drupal btw, just my general style of development and architecture, what I know how to do, and what I'm not overly eager to learn at this point.
I want for language to not be important almost as much as you do, but I think it is kind of unrealistic to expect that you can grow a startup on a widely unpopular language stack easily. Yeah, ok, exceptions are the rule we should be studying... but most of us won't be able to do a good job getting great engineers to come into a language stack that is believed to be hugely hacky, boring, whatever. That's extra work you have to do branding and selling your startup above and beyond the work to get people interested in it at all. You've done it at Etsy, and if folks are going to follow anyone down PHP lane, it will be ex-Flickr folks. But I wouldn't try it, personally.
No idea why anyone starts a startup based on Python tho. That is even weirder than PHP.