Should an early stage startup use Kubernetes?

Should an early-stage startup use Kubernetes in production? What if the engineers have experience deploying applications on Kubernetes?

I understand there are no hard and fast rules for this. But what are the various criteria that you would look at before deciding that Kubernetes should be used early on?

My personal opinion is to invest in docker & docker-compose on a small VM and scale them out manually. But a friend of mine questions - if you are using docker-compose then why not Kubernetes? You get the benefit of scaling your services without any extra costs(GCP does not charge for master node).