Out of all these "real-time" JS frameworks, to me, Meteor seems the most promising. Looking forward to how it evolves. Congrats and good luck to the team.
I hate to be so negative but I have to agree. I know many people (including myself) who've already written libraries similar to Meteor (derby comes to mind).
This is ridiculous. Meteor hasn't even gotten any real adoption and it has no business model. Why create a business when you can just get investment on promises alone?
Meteor works a lot like Heroku, and that's the monetization strategy.
Currently you can push your Meteor apps to their servers and host/run them for free. But eventually they're going to charge, have add-on services, etc. Just like Heroku, but because these are the guys who built Meteor, it should be better.
It will be interesting to see if anyone else tries to host Meteor apps at all, Heroku/Salesforce should be watching closely.
Was it ever "officially" announced that Meteor was part of YC? I've followed the original launch post but can't remember that mentioned. (I looked back and didn't find anything either)
I find it interesting to see this project as well as Diaspora (S12) and LightTable (S12) be part of Y Combinator, since they're all companies built around open-source projects (IIRC). (with two of them who "started out" on Kickstarter)
Between Meteor and 10gen (which makes MongoDB, which Meteor uses heavily), $50M was just invested. If both companies use their money wisely this could pack a powerful punch!
I am pretty curious on how they are going to compete against other open source 'realtime web' solutions such as derby.js?
Especially since derby.js is distributed with npm and can be used in conjunction with the thousands of existing node.js libraries. Any node developer can integrate derby.js into his existing web app with a little effort and make it 'realtime'. With meteor, not so easily.
Not everyone who can run a node.js server wants to (raises hand).
Think about Mailgun: obviously I'm capable of running a mail server and parsing incoming mail. But they can do it better, at a price that's cheaper than my time, and give me high availability without my paying a sysadmin.
I don't think that's a stellar analogy. Email is a very ancillary part of a web service's business while the data management, analytics, business logic, etc are the very core.
I used both and it seems you're right that staying within the node.js+npm ecosystem is hugely beneficial. I can treat my derby project just like any other node.js project which have made it much easier to push to platforms like Heroku... It was also a lot easier to get a REST API going with derby since it's so close to express and connect whereas I feel like meteor mostly hides the interfaces to node.js packages it uses
My point is that it will take lesser resources (that includes time, HR and yes of course, $$) to use derby.js instead of meteor due to the former being part of the well-established node ecosytem.
I don't have any information on the details of this deal but if it is a typical series A then that 9 million represents a 20-30% equity stake in the company. This means for a 10x return for investorss the company needs to grow in value to ~$360 million.
Heroku (YC08) has been around longer than #22 (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html), but pg's item on fundable ideas might hint at some of his vision regarding abstracted platforms:
Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists.
I realize that Derby also helps build real-time applications, but I haven't heard anything about Derby being in YC. Has there been a public announcement that they are?
If we're just listing frameworks that help build real-time systems, Pusher would be another example.
I've always been interested in building developer tools, I did it at the beginning of my career, 4 years ago, but I've always thought it was a "bad market", a "small one", "there's no money in it".
I've been, secretly, working on a tool while working at a startup and bootstrapping my own startup (my hours are 8am to 4-5am), for the past couple of months, but it has always been kind of a disappointment when I try to think on how to create a business out of it. With these investments - Meteor, 10gen, and the Github rumor - I, definitely feel more encouraged :-)
The plan is always bootstrap - of course - since I don't have a track record, I'm not a ex-facebook employee, nor went to a top CS school.
Since, I'm not from the valley, or any tech hub by that chance, I haven't been able to understand the "industry". I think I get it now, it doesn't matter what you make (money) and the fools that ask "What's the monetization strategy?", you just need to create something very cool that you and other people find useful. I might be wrong but that's my observation.
"you just need to create something very cool that you and other people find useful."
No. You need to convince investors that whatever you have is "cool" and "useful", even if it burns money.
Derby is cool. Express is cool. Knockout is cool. There are so many cool, free, open-source libraries. It has become crystal clear that getting investment is about being on the inside, having a hip website, and valley celebrities saying good things about you.
Thanks for that comment, it expresses exactly how I'm feeling towards this. This is stupid and pointless. Instead of developing a framework I should be designing a beautiful website, fuck features, it's gotta be good looking!
There is no money in developer tools. Maybe libraries, but add on tools, no. First, your market is way smaller than "people". Second: 1. Nobody believes they need your tool. 2. They will convince themselves they can do better in a weekend. Third, your customers will be total assholes, because every tiny bug is something "that never would have happened if you had any quality controls at all." Fourth, the people who will use and benefit from your tool and the people with budgets are generally totally separate, which may have major marketing/sales implications.
I could go on, but don't want to get too down, but it can be a very hard market.
Really awesome. What would be really cool to see is a demo and example code of an app that has authentication, and user-level permissions on the data. These "everyone in the world can update a global list" demos are getting pretty tiring.
I understand, that YC have no choice, but to invest in competing startups, simply because the large number of startups being accepted in Y-Combinator. They backing many Realtime Messaging companies, such as Firebase, Meteor, Flotype/Now.js, Simperium, Parse, etc.
EDIT: apparently Flotype pivoted from Now.js to something very different from what Meteor and the rest of the gang do.
I work at Flotype, and I'd like to clarify that. Flotype and Meteor are completely different.
We saw the need for something like Meteor two years ago and built NowJS, but we decided to move away from RPC over websockets (NowJS) last year and work on a new technology called Bridge. Data model syncing is done nicely in Meteor, but we decided to pursue a different problem with Bridge (more details in the coming months).
While the vision behind NowJS and the current vision behind Meteor might share similarities, Flotype the company and Meteor the company are working on very separate things.
I can't believe this. Really. Meteor is a bunch of open source projects glued together with some of their own libraries. Their package system which is out of npm is completely arbitrary.
Why not funding other good projects? There's plenty of better framework/libraries that are massively used by the community.
I'm, myself, leading a little node.js framework open source project with similar concepts and I'd never accept to be funded. This isn't a project, there's no revenue opportunities there, it's a tool!
Tools help to develop projects which then make a revenue...
I really don't understand the negativity. They have an awesome team that's built an awesome product. No, it's not finished (hence the money to hire more engineers) and yes, there are competitors (competition proves market need).
I don't know much about how VCs structure their portfolios, but recognizing a need in the market and betting on a badass team seems like a pretty solid strategy to me.
As for me, I'm happy for them. I hope they succeed. I hope them and their investors make a ton of money and it encourages other teams to build more awesome products.
Speaking about meteor, can someone tell me if there is any way to protect the database from the user fiddling with a javascript console? In all screencasts they show how powerful it is by changing the DB with some mongodb-like commands on Chrome Developer JS Console, well, I don't want my users doing that. Anyone knows better?
Maybe I'm being overly pessemistic, but projects that don't start with security as one of their primary design goals tend to not have the best security track records. Security isn't really something you can trivially bolt on at a later date.
As brilliant a business model as Heroku has, trying to do the same with one specific and not-yet popular development language/library/framework seems really unlikely to work out in a way that will justify the 9 million investment. If VCs have this much capital to throw at projects like this, perhaps this is a sign that there would be a market for a startup that makes it easy for VCs to find startups with good potential and for startups to find funding more easily. Incubators are the only attempt I know of to solve this problem, but I'm sure there are larger scale solutions waiting to be thought of.
1) Great developer tools are difficult to build and valuable. If they are popular enough and the business execution is good enough, they can give birth to successful and potentially large businesses. A few examples: Springsource, JBoss, MySQL, Wily, MongoDB, Atlassian, New Relic, Github. Note the diversity of business models, eras and hype factor. VCs know this and are making informed - if risky - bets.
2) I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that Heroku's business model is brilliant. To my knowledge they haven't published any revenue numbers, and they no longer operate as a standalone business.
3) Speaking from experience, I doubt they will end up making money by providing hosting. They are a developer tools company and if they are smart they will remain focused on the developer experience, and let partners worry about uptime, support, SLAs and other unsexy things like that. That doesn't make them any less interesting as a business.
(disclaimer: I work at a platform-as-a-service company)
1) I don't disagree that funding the development of powerful open source tools can have a very positive effect on the success of future businesses, but how does the investor in this tool's startup profit from said businesses? I assume the main way they intend to make money is through enough people and businesses paying Meteor to host their site, and I can't imagine that will be as successful as a host that supports a range of popular languages/libraries/frameworks instead of one that may or may not attain popularity.
2) I don't know anything about Heroku's revenue numbers, but the idea of their business model is a brilliant idea. Offer web startups free hosting until they get traffic (i.e. until they can afford to pay you), and then sell them good enough performance for that amount of traffic. It's essentially a financial abstraction on top of Amazon. Almost any idea that involves giving someone a free service that allows that someone to make enough money to then pay you (when they couldn't have before) is probably a really good idea.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadThis gold rush is so depressingly familiar. But that's not to speak ill of Meteor-the-product, which looks pretty nifty (albeit not $9M of nifty).
This is ridiculous. Meteor hasn't even gotten any real adoption and it has no business model. Why create a business when you can just get investment on promises alone?
Currently you can push your Meteor apps to their servers and host/run them for free. But eventually they're going to charge, have add-on services, etc. Just like Heroku, but because these are the guys who built Meteor, it should be better.
It will be interesting to see if anyone else tries to host Meteor apps at all, Heroku/Salesforce should be watching closely.
I find it interesting to see this project as well as Diaspora (S12) and LightTable (S12) be part of Y Combinator, since they're all companies built around open-source projects (IIRC). (with two of them who "started out" on Kickstarter)
Especially since derby.js is distributed with npm and can be used in conjunction with the thousands of existing node.js libraries. Any node developer can integrate derby.js into his existing web app with a little effort and make it 'realtime'. With meteor, not so easily.
Think about Mailgun: obviously I'm capable of running a mail server and parsing incoming mail. But they can do it better, at a price that's cheaper than my time, and give me high availability without my paying a sysadmin.
Its an easy sell.
Although, thats what Google paid for Android.
Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists.
If we're just listing frameworks that help build real-time systems, Pusher would be another example.
I've been, secretly, working on a tool while working at a startup and bootstrapping my own startup (my hours are 8am to 4-5am), for the past couple of months, but it has always been kind of a disappointment when I try to think on how to create a business out of it. With these investments - Meteor, 10gen, and the Github rumor - I, definitely feel more encouraged :-)
The plan is always bootstrap - of course - since I don't have a track record, I'm not a ex-facebook employee, nor went to a top CS school.
Since, I'm not from the valley, or any tech hub by that chance, I haven't been able to understand the "industry". I think I get it now, it doesn't matter what you make (money) and the fools that ask "What's the monetization strategy?", you just need to create something very cool that you and other people find useful. I might be wrong but that's my observation.
No. You need to convince investors that whatever you have is "cool" and "useful", even if it burns money.
Derby is cool. Express is cool. Knockout is cool. There are so many cool, free, open-source libraries. It has become crystal clear that getting investment is about being on the inside, having a hip website, and valley celebrities saying good things about you.
I could go on, but don't want to get too down, but it can be a very hard market.
EDIT: apparently Flotype pivoted from Now.js to something very different from what Meteor and the rest of the gang do.
We saw the need for something like Meteor two years ago and built NowJS, but we decided to move away from RPC over websockets (NowJS) last year and work on a new technology called Bridge. Data model syncing is done nicely in Meteor, but we decided to pursue a different problem with Bridge (more details in the coming months).
While the vision behind NowJS and the current vision behind Meteor might share similarities, Flotype the company and Meteor the company are working on very separate things.
Why not funding other good projects? There's plenty of better framework/libraries that are massively used by the community.
I'm, myself, leading a little node.js framework open source project with similar concepts and I'd never accept to be funded. This isn't a project, there's no revenue opportunities there, it's a tool!
Tools help to develop projects which then make a revenue...
Some investors have very poor judgement.
I don't know much about how VCs structure their portfolios, but recognizing a need in the market and betting on a badass team seems like a pretty solid strategy to me.
As for me, I'm happy for them. I hope they succeed. I hope them and their investors make a ton of money and it encourages other teams to build more awesome products.
But currently... it's pretty insecure.
1) Great developer tools are difficult to build and valuable. If they are popular enough and the business execution is good enough, they can give birth to successful and potentially large businesses. A few examples: Springsource, JBoss, MySQL, Wily, MongoDB, Atlassian, New Relic, Github. Note the diversity of business models, eras and hype factor. VCs know this and are making informed - if risky - bets.
2) I'm not sure how you reached the conclusion that Heroku's business model is brilliant. To my knowledge they haven't published any revenue numbers, and they no longer operate as a standalone business.
3) Speaking from experience, I doubt they will end up making money by providing hosting. They are a developer tools company and if they are smart they will remain focused on the developer experience, and let partners worry about uptime, support, SLAs and other unsexy things like that. That doesn't make them any less interesting as a business.
(disclaimer: I work at a platform-as-a-service company)
2) I don't know anything about Heroku's revenue numbers, but the idea of their business model is a brilliant idea. Offer web startups free hosting until they get traffic (i.e. until they can afford to pay you), and then sell them good enough performance for that amount of traffic. It's essentially a financial abstraction on top of Amazon. Almost any idea that involves giving someone a free service that allows that someone to make enough money to then pay you (when they couldn't have before) is probably a really good idea.
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...
Doesn't have this page on it:
http://docs.meteor.com/