
Meteor (YC S11) gets $9M in funding - dko
http://gigaom.com/cloud/scoop-meteor-gets-9m-in-funding/
======
lr
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.

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tbergeron
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...

Some investors have very poor judgement.

~~~
west1737
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.

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dsrguru
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.

~~~
shykes
I disagree with your comment in 3 ways:

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)

~~~
dsrguru
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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Timothee
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)

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netvarun
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.

~~~
qeorge
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.

Its an easy sell.

~~~
pbreit
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.

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igorgue
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.

~~~
dreamdu5t
"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.

~~~
danneu
Not to mention the allstars behind Meteor itself.
<http://meteor.com/about/people>

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talbina
Parse, Meteor, and Firebase are all YC companies and all of them are working
on this.

~~~
pbreit
And <http://derbyjs.com/>

~~~
jaredsohn
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.

~~~
pbreit
My bad...missed that it was YC companies.

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makmanalp
Why do they need 9 million, really? That's about 10 programmers for 5 years,
with a competitive salary and benefits, plus office costs.

~~~
prostoalex
To employ 10 programmers for 5 years with a competitive salary and benefits in
an office of some sort?

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tbergeron
Yes, to develop a tool which will get no revenue after? This is completely
pointless.

~~~
robryan
Red hat/ MySQL etc model I guess.

~~~
nl
It's more likely to be the offer-hosted-version model rather than the
Redhat/MySQL model.

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spullara
#1 issue is security #2 issue is this:

[http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=...](http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=%22Meteor+is+an+ultra-
simple+environment+for+building+modern+websites%22&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8)

Doesn't have this page on it:

<http://docs.meteor.com/>

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fourstar
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.

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soapdog
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?

~~~
wamatt
I asked the same question on #meteor. Apparently security is coming in the
next 2 months.

But currently... it's pretty insecure.

~~~
dagw
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.

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benatkin
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!

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siavosh
Didn't even know that Meteor was a YC company. Does anyone know what their
original product was?

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pkh80
Hmmm, security model is vaporware and VCs are deciding that we (developers)
will really love this library before anyone is even using it.

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nivertech
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.

~~~
dshankar
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.

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chrismcbride
whats the monetization strategy?

~~~
ajross
Clearly it starts by getting someone to write you a $9M check to develop your
Javascript library (excuse me, "platform").

This 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).

~~~
dreamdu5t
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?

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eragnew
Congrats Meteor. That's awesome!

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tferris
Nice, that pure tech ventures get high fundings of well known VCs but thinking
a little bit more about Meteor I come to following conclusion:

First, we do not really know the first payment/milestone, maybe it's just $1M.

Meteor itself is an amazing technology, very well marketed by obviously smart
guys—their Marketing pitch few weeks ago was just awesome and far beyond any
other new JS framework. And I understand that Meteor gets very positive
feedback here on HN due to their great communication skills and YC affiliation

But it has severe drawbacks:

=> While employing Node as core they surprisingly ignore the well established
npm package manager which is one of the best package managers around. This is
bad and there's no excuse because it leads to fragmentation of the still young
JS server-side landscape dominated by a lean and modular-driven Node which is
just the smartest way to establish a real ecosystem—the one-size-fits-all
approach is aged and that's Meteor. I assume they did their own package
manager due to their upcoming business model (which will be introduced very
far in the future if their ecosystem is once established), maybe they'll take
license fees or demand support fees or whatever of everyone who wants to
actively participate as contributor in the ecosystem. They couldn't do this
with the npm. And by choosing this path the can lock out competing frameworks:
if Meteor would just be a package in the npm ecosystem the opportunity costs
of changing to other realtime frameworks in the npm world wouldn't be that
high because changing the framework wouldn't mean changing the entire
ecosystem.

=> As long client-side JS is delivered unprotected to the browser you will
never have the one-code-base-or-name-space-covering-front-and-backend
approach. This approach doesn't provide any security—client code could do any
shit to the server side—and others who tried made great products too but
couldn't get any traction (nowjs i.e.). You will need always to separate both.
They promised to come up with solutions like authentification or signed data,
but then we have again more communication overhead than we would have if just
separated those layers. This drawback isn't as huge as the first one, it's a
technical challenge and thus, I appreciate any efforts to solve this problem.

Meteor was at the beginning a great tech demo, now they want to get serious
and I doubt (and hope) that they won't succeed. Mentioned drawbacks are the
main reasons I won't use, support and even advise against Meteor (as much as I
like these guys and YC but sorry). They do not seem to contribute in any way
to a great and existing ecosystem called Node but using it as their core to
build a new competing one with monetization reasons in mind and a severely
flawed architecture. Now, they obviously need and will use the money for PR
and paying/incentivizing devs building the ecosystem and this competition
between ecosystems (pure Node/npm vs Meteor) which is basically about winning
the best devs will lead to further fragmentation and at the end no large
ecosystem could be established and server-side JS failed. No, thanks.

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tferris
$9M, wow. Enough money to become the next Rails.

~~~
dmix
Rails didnt have the pressure to be a $45 million dollar company (investors
expect a 5x return don't they?).

Although, thats what Google paid for Android.

~~~
smilliken
$9M was the total raise, not the valuation. Presumably the exit would have to
be much higher than $45M for a 5x multiple.

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Estragon
Congratulations, guys.

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corkill
Congrats! Meteor this is awesome, glad this will help them move along faster.
Right alongside the mongo funding this week.

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rdl
Wow, pretty awesome that YC is getting great companies like this.

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majke
Congratulations indeed!

