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

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.