Unless you're talking about a million concurrent users or something, Django actually scales pretty well for medium concurrency.
Here's some basic advice though
(1) Cache stuff. Django has a built-in cache framework, but sometimes I even cache stuff in the process (It's not best practice at all, mind you, and every pro will tell you to stay away from that)
(2) Use the ORM properly! For example, never do something like len(MyModel.objects.filter(arg='blah')) to do things like count entries or see if entries exist. Instead use .count() or .exists()
(3) Unless it's something complicated, I would just use something like Heroku. Easy to scale resources up and down as well as deploy. I typically use AWS S3 as my static host and Heroku as my Django host.
The problem extends beyond financing. As even the article says, successful companies like Shopify are able to raise $$$ from the US. It's also a scale problem. Canada has has, by my count, four micro tech scenes (Waterloo, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa). In a Country with such a small population, there really still isn't a "hub" for tech. With talent so dispersed (and much of it moving to the US as it is), it's hard to get talent for good ideas in one place.
>> There will always be room for businesses that make money, bubble or not
Absolutely. Cycles happen, and for now those of raising money can enjoy the peak. The problem is that with all the fanfare, people forget that companies need to make money.
Makes you wonder why he didn't exit when he had a chance at $6 billion. I doubt groupon will ever see that type of valuation again considering how terrible their coupons have become and how natural competitors in the space like local papers and yelp are beginning to gain traction.