Lumen & Laravel: A choice of speed and package support

In my startup we can't wait for our backend to be built "the right way" as the Java dev would like it built.

We have two experienced Laravel devs who could knock out our backend in 2 weeks tops. The application is to serve as an API for a frontend (Angular/React) application we intend to hammer with quite a few requests per second.

We know we'll need to make use of packages from the Laravel ecosystem but we aren't liking the performance benchmarks...

We've been looking at these packages: https://github.com/irazasyed/larasupport https://github.com/tymondesigns/jwt-auth https://github.com/nbobtc/bitcoind-php

I'm double guessing our design decisions right now - anyone with more experience want to weigh in and tell me to leave the Java dev be or run with PHP until/if we run into a problem with requests per second.