10 ms·

Meteor Raises $11.2M from Andreessen Horowitz

249 points by debergalis 14y ago

lukeholder 14y ago
Wow, congrats. Great work. Anyone know if they are close to having proper auth in the client for DB work yet?
- zumda 14y ago
  That's exactly what I was going to ask. That's the one thing keeping me from building something serious with Meteor. The rest I tried, and it does look really nice for real-time webapps, as soon as the Javascript development environment grows up a bit more.
- glasser 14y ago
  While it hasn't landed in the master branch yet, you can follow the progress of auth support in the auth branch: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/auth https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/auth See also discussion in the meteor-core list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-core/g4Bsm3yFTe4 https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-co... https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-core/PdwPNpMmlRU https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-co... and https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-core/-KHgLzb6xHo https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-co...
  - tegansnyder 14y ago
    Thanks for sharing this!
- debergalis 14y ago
  Thanks. Yes, we now have an authentication system that lets you define limits on which documents each client can read and modify. It's available on the "auth" branch in the Meteor repository. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Getting-Started-with-Auth https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Getting-Started-with-A...
  - zumda 14y ago
    Do you have an ETA when you will officially release Meteor with auth?
- ehutch79 14y ago
  this. i can't even touch it until i know i can make sure a client can't even see the existence of rows it's not allowed to read.
  - debergalis 14y ago
    That's precisely how Meteor auth works. Each client can request a set of documents from the server -- think of it as a predefined query. For each of those requests, your server code decides what (if anything) to send back to the client.
gellis 14y ago
If they can make Meteor as accessible as PHP, they have a great chance of success. It's definitely heading in the right direction.
flexie 14y ago
"we've arranged $11.2 million in funding for Meteor's continued development." That's a nice arrangement. Do anyone know about other open-source web frameworks that have managed to get so much funding?
- dmix 14y ago
  Firebase raised $1.1 million. Although I don't know how open source it is.
  - flexie 14y ago
    Thanks
- drumdance 14y ago
  Not an apples to apples comparison, but Zend has raised a ton of money.
  - flexie 14y ago
    OK
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  While I was fundraising, VCs told me that DHH could easily have raised a lot of money for Rails had he chosen to. I don't know for sure that that's true, but it certainly seems plausible given Meteor's experience. Even though we chose a different path, I really admire what DHH did with Rails. We studied the original Rails screencast very carefully when were making the Meteor screencast.
  - flexie 14y ago
    Maybe. Good luck with Meteor. It's interesting to follow!
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
deleted 14y ago
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sharjeel 14y ago
Congrats. Could someone please explain the business model of such open source based startups in general?
- zumda 14y ago
  Mostly training and consulting. There is no better indicator that you know a framework best if you made and maintain it. Another way, that the Meteor guys are trying (probably on top of training and consulting) is to sell an enterprise solutions. This solution will probably be an all in one appliance that enterprises can buy so they have an easy way to deploy and manage Meteor applications internally.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Could someone please explain the business model of such open source based startups in general? There are a few different models: for example, "open core" where part of the overall product is open source, and then layers of proprietary stuff are put on top and the aggregated "thing" is sold (but can't be redistributed). Then you have "dual licensing" where the product is purely under a F/OSS license (often times the GPL or another "copyleft" license) and the company sells commercial licenses that offer different terms (such as the right to redistribute a derivative product without needing to make your own product F/OSS). And then there are the "pure play" OSS firms... everything is F/OSS, but they test/certify certain builds, and ship binaries for money even though you can download something which is probably 99.999% bit identical (images and copyright notices being the main differences). In this model what the customer is paying for is - arguably - not software at all, but "peace of mind," indemnification, certification, the "somebody to sue" factor, support, etc. Red Hat are a good example of this latter model. JBoss binaries are freely available, and CentOS is nearly identical to RHEL, but yet people still pay Red Hat for JBoss and RHEL. In all three cases, there are also supplemental things the firm can sell for revenue, such as training classes, certifications, professional services work, T-shirts, etc. There are probably still some other variations that I'm forgetting at the moment, but I think those are the big three.
- nicholasreed 14y ago
  WebFWD has a useful overview video of Open Source startups, licenses to ponder, business model's, and goals. http://blog.webfwd.org/post/27490054493/getting-your-software-license-right http://blog.webfwd.org/post/27490054493/getting-your-softwar...
tibbetts 14y ago
I expect to see some of this money used to purchase actual meteors: http://www.ebay.com/itm/CANYON-DIABLO-IRON-METEORITE-140-gr-METEOR-CRATER-AZ-FORMER-UNM-MUSEUM-PIECE-/221080520933 http://www.ebay.com/itm/CANYON-DIABLO-IRON-METEORITE-140-gr-...
brador 14y ago
Anyone know the planned business model on this one?
- wavephorm 14y ago
  You mean other than continue taking more money until an acqui-hire happens?
jasonkester 14y ago
No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years, without taking on consulting work or trying to create some other application on top of Meteor to sell Does that raise any red flags for anybody? Do development frameworks built for their own sake ever really work in the wild? I think of successful ways to build web apps, and the names that spring to mind are rails, django, php, etc. that evolved by developers who were using them to build stuff. In some cases (rails, django especially), they were the side product of a single application. I think of overarchitected nightmares such as Fusebox and some of the magic frameworks that would be Meteor's competition, and they tend to share the quality of having been built as the Ultimate Solution to Everybody's problem (with the conspicuous exception of the developers themselves, who aren't actually dogfooding it for anything). To be clear, I'm impressed by Meteor and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. But it makes me a bit uncomfortable to see a declaration like "we're definitely not going to try building anything with it!" tacked onto their funding announcement.
- trekkin 14y ago
  I'm here with you - $11m for pure long-term development without any hands-on application seems like a clear path to an over-engineered solution.
  - MattRogish 14y ago
    Agreed. I worked on an open-source app development framework and found it really difficult to "do the right thing" unless we were actively building "real world" apps with it. Although they have enough money to not do consulting - I strongly suggest they take on strategic apps (even for free!) that push the boundaries of the framework. It'll be a better product for it.
    - njx 14y ago
      100% agreement. When your app behaves like a framework there needs to be examples of applications on top. I had the same dilemma when I was about to release my dashboard framework (https://my.infocaptor.com https://my.infocaptor.com) . I had all the documentation but to truly demonstrate the framework and various different ways, we had to build various little dashboards. some of the dashboards were plain stupid like the "bug olympics" but they were built to demonstrate certain features which we did not have enough sample data to build upon. The question is do you build "real valuable applications" or "not so useful but demo like apps". We built the 2nd category apps in first go and now with our customers we are helping them build the first category of applications.
JTxt 14y ago
I've been leaning towards DerbyJS because pages are also rendered in html (SEO, no-js)and it uses npm instead of making it's own repository... http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-meteor/ http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-mete... But Meteor has the advantage now, looking forward to what they do with it. Congrats to them!
- lefnire 14y ago
  These two frameworks are so similar, and so close in developmental progress. Derby follows more closely the spirit of Node. Meteor's upper hand is its press/following/critical mass, Derby's its architecture and authors. There's some good discussion going on here https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/derbyjs/AMJ-FaYnMjI https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/derbyjs/A...
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  Meteor has brand-new experimental support for serving HTML to crawlers. Check out the Google cache for meteor.com :) The links work and everything. This just went live this morning.
warech 14y ago
First Github, then Meteor. As Peter Levine pointed out in his blog (http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/25/meteor-magic/ http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/25/meteor-magic/) Andreessen Horowitz is making strides towards "help[ing] developers build the next generation of applications." Are there any other VC firms that have had such a stong foothold on the foundation of application development?
radarsat1 14y ago
I love the idea of Meteor and want to use it on some projects, the only thing I don't like is how language-centric it is on the back-end. node.js is okay, I'm not completely adverse to coding server stuff in JavaScript, but I'd prefer having a choice of languages, for instance most of my server-side code is in Python. I wonder how friendly its architecture would be to supporting multiple language back-ends eventually.
- marknutter 14y ago
  I think for that you'd be better of using something like ember.js
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  The architecture is designed specifically to support your choice of backends. The Meteor client and the Meteor server speak a simple JSON-based protocol called DDP. A Meteor client can talk to any server that can speak DDP. A Meteor server can talk to any client that can speak DDP. In fact, clients can connect to multiple servers by calling Meteor.connect() to open additional connections. We already have a demonstration DDP client that is written in Python :) My prediction is that in the future, you'll often see a breakdown where the user interface team works in JavaScript, and some of their code runs on the client, and some on the server. Other teams will build backend services in whatever language is best for the job, and they'll talk to the JavaScript written by the UI team (sometimes interfacing directly on the client, and sometimes, for example when multiple services are integrated, going through some JS code on the server.) That's just a guess though.
  - radarsat1 14y ago
    Sounds great! Thanks for that info, now I know what to look for in the docs :)
bbayer 14y ago
I really wonder the idea of putting $11M to a javascript framework.
jhspaybar 14y ago
So, as I write Node.js and Socket.io based applications, lots of my code(on the server at least) focuses almost completely on protecting myself from bad data/malicious users. I know it works this way for almost any application, but how does Meteor handle this? I saw in the screencast someone opening their chrome console and touching the database directly. This seems like an absolute nightmare to protect! Currently, I only need to protect the individual web address that gets, puts, posts, etc. It's a single query with clear attack vectors that can be guarded against. How in the world do you protect a server and data using this framework?
- quattrofan 14y ago
  My first reaction when I saw him opening the chrome console was the same, its going to be a nightmare to build and maintain secure apps with this thing.
  - mcantelon 14y ago
    I guess the theoretical plus side, security-wise, of pushing everything through one abstraction is the potential for simplifying security. Non-layered approaches like Meteor make me a bit queasy, though. Will be interesting when its auth mechanism undergoes community security review.
100k 14y ago
At Throne of JS last weekend, Meteor stole the show in my opinion. The other frameworks (Backbone, Ember, Angular, etc) were about how to build rich JavaScript web apps on top of current backend technology, whereas Meteor is envisioning something new. I'm not sure I want to write JavaScript everywhere but what they are able to demonstrate was super cool.
- arnorhs 14y ago
  If anybody else is curious about said talk, here are the slides: https://speakerdeck.com/u/ericf/p/advocatus-diaboli-throne-of-js https://speakerdeck.com/u/ericf/p/advocatus-diaboli-throne-o... if there will be a video, i'd be interested in that
tlogan 14y ago
Interesting idea. I have questions about the following: > Database Everywhere. Use the same transparent API to > access your database from the client or the server. Is this a good thing? I have been always under impression that separating data management and application logic is a good idea - basically a must. Meaning lets think about more complex way to look at the database (temporal, stream, event processing, etc.). How this can be then possible?
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  It's always a good idea to separate business logic from presentation logic. The idea in Meteor is that your business logic can run on either the client or the server as is appropriate in a given situation. For example, if you want to get the most recent 10 posts in the news feed, the exact same line of code works on both the client and server. Why have two APIs for this when you could have one? Of course the server still has to make sure that clients can't read or write to records they shouldn't (cf point 6, "Sensitive code runs in a privileged environment.")
dreamdu5t 14y ago
Let's come back to this when Meteor is actually deployed in a real production environment handling 200 requests a second. Until then it seems like a lot of hot air.
huhtenberg 14y ago
Perhaps a naive question, but how does AH envision getting its $11M+ back and in what time frame?
- smoody 14y ago
  Salesforce bought Heroku for a boatload of dollars. It's not difficult to imagine that someone might acquire a next-generation application development platform. Just one possible exit.
- pmarca 14y ago
  We have a 10+ year lockup on our money -- we can go to 13 years without too much effort, and longer if necessary -- so there's no near term pressure for financial return. The goal is to build Meteor to its full potential both as a technology (including open source) and a company. If that happens, the long-run return will be fine.
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  What they're dreaming of is: lots of big companies write their vital business apps on top of Meteor. They spend billions of dollars on middleware and application servers that helps them deploy, monitor, and control these apps across their 100 divisions and 5 data centers, similar to the billions of dollars they've spent in the past on Oracle, WebSphere, Tuxedo, Tibco, etc. Meteor does an IPO. Failing that, they're hoping that we can replicate the success of JBoss ($420M to Red Hat), XenSource ($500M to Citrix), or SpringSource ($420M to VMware), all of which took open source software and sold it to the enterprise, and each of which did it under the direction of one of Meteor's new advisors (David Skok, Peter Levine, and Rod Johnson respectively.) As for time frame, they are patient and expect it to take a long time. They know that it takes years for a platform to be adopted.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    Thank you. Couldn't hope for a better reply. (edit) I am honestly surprised to see a VC invest into (what amounts to) a fundamental technology. Though, given the valuation bubble we are in, it makes sense. VCs now have a choice between continuing to speculate by funding upload widget startups ($2-3M a pop, two years of runway) and putting money into the core tech. Fingers crossed, this becomes a trend.
blhack 14y ago
Some naivety being thrown around in this thread: Andressen Horowitz doesn't need to see a direct return from meteor. If they think that the existence of meteor is a good thing for their other investments, then the indirect return they see from those projects is a good thing.
- pbreit 14y ago
  Maybe, but probably not. I suspect AH believes 1) it can make a big financial return and 2) if it does, it's a model for funding this type of "company".
- drumdance 14y ago
  Interesting. I've never heard of a VC making this sort of "ecosystem" investment.
  - nivertech 14y ago
    What about Cloudera? Hadoop ecosystem subsidized by VCs, so lots of their smaller startups will be able to save money on Oracle, Vertica/Greenplum licenses...
- dpritchett 14y ago
  Eventually the [VC] generation that Fred Wilson leads will fall behind, as did the one led by John Doerr at Kleiner-Perkins. What they will be replaced with is one that is not only aware of the usability of products, but also has a sense for the flow of open technologies to fuel the ecosystem. These VCs will make side investments in technologies that are not intended to produce an IPO or acquisition, rather are intended to produce a new layer of technology that a whole generation of startups can feed off. At the same time, some percentage of each fund will be plowed into programs designed to generate the next layer after that. - Dave Winer
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  Interesting point, but if that is their thinking, they didn't share it with me :) As far as I know, they're looking the billions of dollars a year that IBM makes on WebSphere and thinking, "all of this spending on middleware and applications servers, where is it going to go in the future, if the future is client-side JavaScript, native mobile apps, and other things that fetch data over the wire and render it locally?" They're hoping that in the fullness of time, many corporations will build important apps on Meteor, and that when those apps go to production we'll get a slice of their operations budget. It's the same model as the relational database.
phmagic 14y ago
I'm surprised that people quickly adopt Meteor yet chastise PHP for enabling bad app developers, wouldn't Meteor do the same thing?
tferris 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052120 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052120
rdl 14y ago
$11m (implying a valuation of of over $20mm) is a lot of money. (Although in a world of $7 rent, $150k developers, etc, it isn't as much as you'd think). However, Meteor looks like it has some chance of being a huge platform, maybe the next big one. Even if it just dominates a niche, that is more than enough to justify the investment. A bigger series a reduces risk for the company, and a lot of the other interesting hard tech companies out there raise that amount of funding early (eg Bromium). Red Hat does a pretty good job of demonstrating how open source companies can make a lot of money.
drumdance 14y ago
From my cursory review Meteor a few months ago, I got the sense that it could be a game-changer like Rails. However, by raising this money they're going a very different route than DHH and company. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.
smoody 14y ago
What is their mobile native app story (if one has been announced)? -- I'm not sure how I'd integrate the meteor backend with a native client (can't use a phonegap-like sdk in my case).
equark 14y ago
So far it seems like Meteor is focused on data syncing and live UI elements. That's neat when done well, but the main pain points for client-side heavy apps is the mismatch between the server and client and between the traditional URLs structure of web pages and the MVC structure of apps. I'm looking for: * Complete parity between server and client-side rendering for content. This is required both for first-page performance, caching, and SEO. * URLs as the foundational organizing principle of the app. The mismatch between clicks, back buttons and external links makes code hard to organize and apps behave strangely without serious work. * Database agnostic. Relational datastores remain incredibly productive and proven for the vast majority of apps.
- geoffschmidt 14y ago
  IMO, this is dead on. We group your first two requests together as a project called Routes, and it will be one of the big initiatives we take on once the authorization and account work is shipped to production. As for your third request, we're been careful with this. Internally, Meteor is already database agnostic. For example, DDP, the Meteor wire protocol, is based on tables, and all of the code that performs latency compensation, etc, doesn't make any database assumptions. Mongo support is provided by a Smart Package that includes the client-side Mongo emulator and the server-side Mongo connector. Supporting SQL, Redis, Couch, etc, is a "simple matter of programming." We'll likely do Routes first since there's more technical risk there.
zanst 14y ago
Well deserved! Congrats to the team.
stuffihavemade 14y ago
Why the NIH package system instead of npm? That's the main showstopper for me w.r.t investing time into meteor.
tlear 14y ago
Congratulations! Talk at Throneofjs for Meteor was excellent, especially liked the meteor remove insecure that was a great touch
enos_feedler 14y ago
I will take Meteor seriously when it is acknowledged and supported by the existing node.js community and the leadership. There is a large group of module authors who are cranking out beautiful, useful modules for both the browser and server at 1000x the rate of a normal human being. I am not going to list names here but check github or npm repository, etc. It is this team that makes node.js special, not simply 'javascript on the server'. If Meteor can gain support from this _established_ community I will start taking it more seriously. Why not use the 11M in funding to hire one of these node.js leaders full-time? Outside of Meteor, what contributions has the Meteor team made to node.js and the ecosystem of modules? The founding team has no presence in the development community and yet their technology stack is built on top of it. I need to see that people I trust in the node.js community are driving and influencing the direction Meteor is headed. In fact, its almost a warning sign if Meteor can't staff any of the node.js leadership full-time as they certainly have the cash to do so. I will be watching who they are hire next very closely. The lack of node.js leadership in their organization is already evident in the product decisions they are making which wouldn't stand a chance if they had a true representative of the node.js community on their team. A glaring example is the decision to build their own package management solution instead of adopting npm or working with npm to drive it forward if its missing useful features. Meteor is leveraging the output of the node.js ecosystem yet not recognizing its existence in their own product. They seem to be segregating themselves.
- 2mur 14y ago
  Bingo. It has been uniformly dismissed/ignored by the larger node.js community. Take from that what you will.
tzury 14y ago
After their recent shocking Github investment and now Meteor, a16z are, IMHO, the most impressive VC firm in the US. They have a very long-term vision, they put their money where their vision is, and that's the best thing founders can wish themselves when raising funds, may my investor will look as far as I and ever further. Congrats!
wikkiwa 14y ago
BUT CAN IT SHARE PICTURES???
wissler 14y ago
"$11.2 million is a lot of money. What it gives us is certainty. No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years" Assuming you're not targeted with any software patent suits.

249 points by debergalis 14y ago

lukeholder 14y ago

Wow, congrats. Great work. Anyone know if they are close to having proper auth in the client for DB work yet?

zumda 14y ago
That's exactly what I was going to ask. That's the one thing keeping me from building something serious with Meteor. The rest I tried, and it does look really nice for real-time webapps, as soon as the Javascript development environment grows up a bit more.
glasser 14y ago
While it hasn't landed in the master branch yet, you can follow the progress of auth support in the auth branch: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/auth https://github.com/meteor/meteor/tree/auth See also discussion in the meteor-core list: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-core/g4Bsm3yFTe4 https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-co... https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-core/PdwPNpMmlRU https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-co... and https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-core/-KHgLzb6xHo https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/meteor-co...
- tegansnyder 14y ago
  Thanks for sharing this!
debergalis 14y ago
Thanks. Yes, we now have an authentication system that lets you define limits on which documents each client can read and modify. It's available on the "auth" branch in the Meteor repository. https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Getting-Started-with-Auth https://github.com/meteor/meteor/wiki/Getting-Started-with-A...
- zumda 14y ago
  Do you have an ETA when you will officially release Meteor with auth?
ehutch79 14y ago
this. i can't even touch it until i know i can make sure a client can't even see the existence of rows it's not allowed to read.
- debergalis 14y ago
  That's precisely how Meteor auth works. Each client can request a set of documents from the server -- think of it as a predefined query. For each of those requests, your server code decides what (if anything) to send back to the client.

gellis 14y ago

If they can make Meteor as accessible as PHP, they have a great chance of success. It's definitely heading in the right direction.

flexie 14y ago

"we've arranged $11.2 million in funding for Meteor's continued development." That's a nice arrangement. Do anyone know about other open-source web frameworks that have managed to get so much funding?

dmix 14y ago
Firebase raised $1.1 million. Although I don't know how open source it is.
- flexie 14y ago
  Thanks
drumdance 14y ago
Not an apples to apples comparison, but Zend has raised a ton of money.
- flexie 14y ago
  OK
geoffschmidt 14y ago
While I was fundraising, VCs told me that DHH could easily have raised a lot of money for Rails had he chosen to. I don't know for sure that that's true, but it certainly seems plausible given Meteor's experience. Even though we chose a different path, I really admire what DHH did with Rails. We studied the original Rails screencast very carefully when were making the Meteor screencast.
- flexie 14y ago
  Maybe. Good luck with Meteor. It's interesting to follow!
- deleted 14y ago
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deleted 14y ago

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sharjeel 14y ago

Congrats. Could someone please explain the business model of such open source based startups in general?

zumda 14y ago
Mostly training and consulting. There is no better indicator that you know a framework best if you made and maintain it. Another way, that the Meteor guys are trying (probably on top of training and consulting) is to sell an enterprise solutions. This solution will probably be an all in one appliance that enterprises can buy so they have an easy way to deploy and manage Meteor applications internally.
mindcrime 14y ago
Could someone please explain the business model of such open source based startups in general? There are a few different models: for example, "open core" where part of the overall product is open source, and then layers of proprietary stuff are put on top and the aggregated "thing" is sold (but can't be redistributed). Then you have "dual licensing" where the product is purely under a F/OSS license (often times the GPL or another "copyleft" license) and the company sells commercial licenses that offer different terms (such as the right to redistribute a derivative product without needing to make your own product F/OSS). And then there are the "pure play" OSS firms... everything is F/OSS, but they test/certify certain builds, and ship binaries for money even though you can download something which is probably 99.999% bit identical (images and copyright notices being the main differences). In this model what the customer is paying for is - arguably - not software at all, but "peace of mind," indemnification, certification, the "somebody to sue" factor, support, etc. Red Hat are a good example of this latter model. JBoss binaries are freely available, and CentOS is nearly identical to RHEL, but yet people still pay Red Hat for JBoss and RHEL. In all three cases, there are also supplemental things the firm can sell for revenue, such as training classes, certifications, professional services work, T-shirts, etc. There are probably still some other variations that I'm forgetting at the moment, but I think those are the big three.
nicholasreed 14y ago
WebFWD has a useful overview video of Open Source startups, licenses to ponder, business model's, and goals. http://blog.webfwd.org/post/27490054493/getting-your-software-license-right http://blog.webfwd.org/post/27490054493/getting-your-softwar...

tibbetts 14y ago

I expect to see some of this money used to purchase actual meteors: http://www.ebay.com/itm/CANYON-DIABLO-IRON-METEORITE-140-gr-METEOR-CRATER-AZ-FORMER-UNM-MUSEUM-PIECE-/221080520933 http://www.ebay.com/itm/CANYON-DIABLO-IRON-METEORITE-140-gr-...

brador 14y ago

Anyone know the planned business model on this one?

wavephorm 14y ago
You mean other than continue taking more money until an acqui-hire happens?

jasonkester 14y ago

No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years, without taking on consulting work or trying to create some other application on top of Meteor to sell Does that raise any red flags for anybody? Do development frameworks built for their own sake ever really work in the wild? I think of successful ways to build web apps, and the names that spring to mind are rails, django, php, etc. that evolved by developers who were using them to build stuff. In some cases (rails, django especially), they were the side product of a single application. I think of overarchitected nightmares such as Fusebox and some of the magic frameworks that would be Meteor's competition, and they tend to share the quality of having been built as the Ultimate Solution to Everybody's problem (with the conspicuous exception of the developers themselves, who aren't actually dogfooding it for anything). To be clear, I'm impressed by Meteor and I'm looking forward to seeing where it goes. But it makes me a bit uncomfortable to see a declaration like "we're definitely not going to try building anything with it!" tacked onto their funding announcement.

trekkin 14y ago
I'm here with you - $11m for pure long-term development without any hands-on application seems like a clear path to an over-engineered solution.
- MattRogish 14y ago
  Agreed. I worked on an open-source app development framework and found it really difficult to "do the right thing" unless we were actively building "real world" apps with it. Although they have enough money to not do consulting - I strongly suggest they take on strategic apps (even for free!) that push the boundaries of the framework. It'll be a better product for it.
  - njx 14y ago
    100% agreement. When your app behaves like a framework there needs to be examples of applications on top. I had the same dilemma when I was about to release my dashboard framework (https://my.infocaptor.com https://my.infocaptor.com) . I had all the documentation but to truly demonstrate the framework and various different ways, we had to build various little dashboards. some of the dashboards were plain stupid like the "bug olympics" but they were built to demonstrate certain features which we did not have enough sample data to build upon. The question is do you build "real valuable applications" or "not so useful but demo like apps". We built the 2nd category apps in first go and now with our customers we are helping them build the first category of applications.

JTxt 14y ago

I've been leaning towards DerbyJS because pages are also rendered in html (SEO, no-js)and it uses npm instead of making it's own repository... http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-meteor/ http://blog.derbyjs.com/2012/04/14/our-take-on-derby-vs-mete... But Meteor has the advantage now, looking forward to what they do with it. Congrats to them!

lefnire 14y ago
These two frameworks are so similar, and so close in developmental progress. Derby follows more closely the spirit of Node. Meteor's upper hand is its press/following/critical mass, Derby's its architecture and authors. There's some good discussion going on here https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/derbyjs/AMJ-FaYnMjI https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/derbyjs/A...
geoffschmidt 14y ago
Meteor has brand-new experimental support for serving HTML to crawlers. Check out the Google cache for meteor.com :) The links work and everything. This just went live this morning.

warech 14y ago

First Github, then Meteor. As Peter Levine pointed out in his blog (http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/25/meteor-magic/ http://peter.a16z.com/2012/07/25/meteor-magic/) Andreessen Horowitz is making strides towards "help[ing] developers build the next generation of applications." Are there any other VC firms that have had such a stong foothold on the foundation of application development?

radarsat1 14y ago

I love the idea of Meteor and want to use it on some projects, the only thing I don't like is how language-centric it is on the back-end. node.js is okay, I'm not completely adverse to coding server stuff in JavaScript, but I'd prefer having a choice of languages, for instance most of my server-side code is in Python. I wonder how friendly its architecture would be to supporting multiple language back-ends eventually.

marknutter 14y ago
I think for that you'd be better of using something like ember.js
geoffschmidt 14y ago
The architecture is designed specifically to support your choice of backends. The Meteor client and the Meteor server speak a simple JSON-based protocol called DDP. A Meteor client can talk to any server that can speak DDP. A Meteor server can talk to any client that can speak DDP. In fact, clients can connect to multiple servers by calling Meteor.connect() to open additional connections. We already have a demonstration DDP client that is written in Python :) My prediction is that in the future, you'll often see a breakdown where the user interface team works in JavaScript, and some of their code runs on the client, and some on the server. Other teams will build backend services in whatever language is best for the job, and they'll talk to the JavaScript written by the UI team (sometimes interfacing directly on the client, and sometimes, for example when multiple services are integrated, going through some JS code on the server.) That's just a guess though.
- radarsat1 14y ago
  Sounds great! Thanks for that info, now I know what to look for in the docs :)

bbayer 14y ago

I really wonder the idea of putting $11M to a javascript framework.

jhspaybar 14y ago

So, as I write Node.js and Socket.io based applications, lots of my code(on the server at least) focuses almost completely on protecting myself from bad data/malicious users. I know it works this way for almost any application, but how does Meteor handle this? I saw in the screencast someone opening their chrome console and touching the database directly. This seems like an absolute nightmare to protect! Currently, I only need to protect the individual web address that gets, puts, posts, etc. It's a single query with clear attack vectors that can be guarded against. How in the world do you protect a server and data using this framework?

quattrofan 14y ago
My first reaction when I saw him opening the chrome console was the same, its going to be a nightmare to build and maintain secure apps with this thing.
- mcantelon 14y ago
  I guess the theoretical plus side, security-wise, of pushing everything through one abstraction is the potential for simplifying security. Non-layered approaches like Meteor make me a bit queasy, though. Will be interesting when its auth mechanism undergoes community security review.

100k 14y ago

At Throne of JS last weekend, Meteor stole the show in my opinion. The other frameworks (Backbone, Ember, Angular, etc) were about how to build rich JavaScript web apps on top of current backend technology, whereas Meteor is envisioning something new. I'm not sure I want to write JavaScript everywhere but what they are able to demonstrate was super cool.

arnorhs 14y ago
If anybody else is curious about said talk, here are the slides: https://speakerdeck.com/u/ericf/p/advocatus-diaboli-throne-of-js https://speakerdeck.com/u/ericf/p/advocatus-diaboli-throne-o... if there will be a video, i'd be interested in that

tlogan 14y ago

Interesting idea. I have questions about the following: > Database Everywhere. Use the same transparent API to > access your database from the client or the server. Is this a good thing? I have been always under impression that separating data management and application logic is a good idea - basically a must. Meaning lets think about more complex way to look at the database (temporal, stream, event processing, etc.). How this can be then possible?

geoffschmidt 14y ago
It's always a good idea to separate business logic from presentation logic. The idea in Meteor is that your business logic can run on either the client or the server as is appropriate in a given situation. For example, if you want to get the most recent 10 posts in the news feed, the exact same line of code works on both the client and server. Why have two APIs for this when you could have one? Of course the server still has to make sure that clients can't read or write to records they shouldn't (cf point 6, "Sensitive code runs in a privileged environment.")

dreamdu5t 14y ago

Let's come back to this when Meteor is actually deployed in a real production environment handling 200 requests a second. Until then it seems like a lot of hot air.

huhtenberg 14y ago

Perhaps a naive question, but how does AH envision getting its $11M+ back and in what time frame?

smoody 14y ago
Salesforce bought Heroku for a boatload of dollars. It's not difficult to imagine that someone might acquire a next-generation application development platform. Just one possible exit.
pmarca 14y ago
We have a 10+ year lockup on our money -- we can go to 13 years without too much effort, and longer if necessary -- so there's no near term pressure for financial return. The goal is to build Meteor to its full potential both as a technology (including open source) and a company. If that happens, the long-run return will be fine.
geoffschmidt 14y ago
What they're dreaming of is: lots of big companies write their vital business apps on top of Meteor. They spend billions of dollars on middleware and application servers that helps them deploy, monitor, and control these apps across their 100 divisions and 5 data centers, similar to the billions of dollars they've spent in the past on Oracle, WebSphere, Tuxedo, Tibco, etc. Meteor does an IPO. Failing that, they're hoping that we can replicate the success of JBoss ($420M to Red Hat), XenSource ($500M to Citrix), or SpringSource ($420M to VMware), all of which took open source software and sold it to the enterprise, and each of which did it under the direction of one of Meteor's new advisors (David Skok, Peter Levine, and Rod Johnson respectively.) As for time frame, they are patient and expect it to take a long time. They know that it takes years for a platform to be adopted.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  Thank you. Couldn't hope for a better reply. (edit) I am honestly surprised to see a VC invest into (what amounts to) a fundamental technology. Though, given the valuation bubble we are in, it makes sense. VCs now have a choice between continuing to speculate by funding upload widget startups ($2-3M a pop, two years of runway) and putting money into the core tech. Fingers crossed, this becomes a trend.

blhack 14y ago

Some naivety being thrown around in this thread: Andressen Horowitz doesn't need to see a direct return from meteor. If they think that the existence of meteor is a good thing for their other investments, then the indirect return they see from those projects is a good thing.

pbreit 14y ago
Maybe, but probably not. I suspect AH believes 1) it can make a big financial return and 2) if it does, it's a model for funding this type of "company".
drumdance 14y ago
Interesting. I've never heard of a VC making this sort of "ecosystem" investment.
- nivertech 14y ago
  What about Cloudera? Hadoop ecosystem subsidized by VCs, so lots of their smaller startups will be able to save money on Oracle, Vertica/Greenplum licenses...
dpritchett 14y ago
Eventually the [VC] generation that Fred Wilson leads will fall behind, as did the one led by John Doerr at Kleiner-Perkins. What they will be replaced with is one that is not only aware of the usability of products, but also has a sense for the flow of open technologies to fuel the ecosystem. These VCs will make side investments in technologies that are not intended to produce an IPO or acquisition, rather are intended to produce a new layer of technology that a whole generation of startups can feed off. At the same time, some percentage of each fund will be plowed into programs designed to generate the next layer after that. - Dave Winer
geoffschmidt 14y ago
Interesting point, but if that is their thinking, they didn't share it with me :) As far as I know, they're looking the billions of dollars a year that IBM makes on WebSphere and thinking, "all of this spending on middleware and applications servers, where is it going to go in the future, if the future is client-side JavaScript, native mobile apps, and other things that fetch data over the wire and render it locally?" They're hoping that in the fullness of time, many corporations will build important apps on Meteor, and that when those apps go to production we'll get a slice of their operations budget. It's the same model as the relational database.

phmagic 14y ago

I'm surprised that people quickly adopt Meteor yet chastise PHP for enabling bad app developers, wouldn't Meteor do the same thing?

tferris 14y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052120 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4052120

rdl 14y ago

$11m (implying a valuation of of over $20mm) is a lot of money. (Although in a world of $7 rent, $150k developers, etc, it isn't as much as you'd think). However, Meteor looks like it has some chance of being a huge platform, maybe the next big one. Even if it just dominates a niche, that is more than enough to justify the investment. A bigger series a reduces risk for the company, and a lot of the other interesting hard tech companies out there raise that amount of funding early (eg Bromium). Red Hat does a pretty good job of demonstrating how open source companies can make a lot of money.

drumdance 14y ago

From my cursory review Meteor a few months ago, I got the sense that it could be a game-changer like Rails. However, by raising this money they're going a very different route than DHH and company. It will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.

smoody 14y ago

What is their mobile native app story (if one has been announced)? -- I'm not sure how I'd integrate the meteor backend with a native client (can't use a phonegap-like sdk in my case).

equark 14y ago

So far it seems like Meteor is focused on data syncing and live UI elements. That's neat when done well, but the main pain points for client-side heavy apps is the mismatch between the server and client and between the traditional URLs structure of web pages and the MVC structure of apps. I'm looking for: * Complete parity between server and client-side rendering for content. This is required both for first-page performance, caching, and SEO. * URLs as the foundational organizing principle of the app. The mismatch between clicks, back buttons and external links makes code hard to organize and apps behave strangely without serious work. * Database agnostic. Relational datastores remain incredibly productive and proven for the vast majority of apps.

geoffschmidt 14y ago
IMO, this is dead on. We group your first two requests together as a project called Routes, and it will be one of the big initiatives we take on once the authorization and account work is shipped to production. As for your third request, we're been careful with this. Internally, Meteor is already database agnostic. For example, DDP, the Meteor wire protocol, is based on tables, and all of the code that performs latency compensation, etc, doesn't make any database assumptions. Mongo support is provided by a Smart Package that includes the client-side Mongo emulator and the server-side Mongo connector. Supporting SQL, Redis, Couch, etc, is a "simple matter of programming." We'll likely do Routes first since there's more technical risk there.

zanst 14y ago

Well deserved! Congrats to the team.

stuffihavemade 14y ago

Why the NIH package system instead of npm? That's the main showstopper for me w.r.t investing time into meteor.

tlear 14y ago

Congratulations! Talk at Throneofjs for Meteor was excellent, especially liked the meteor remove insecure that was a great touch

enos_feedler 14y ago

I will take Meteor seriously when it is acknowledged and supported by the existing node.js community and the leadership. There is a large group of module authors who are cranking out beautiful, useful modules for both the browser and server at 1000x the rate of a normal human being. I am not going to list names here but check github or npm repository, etc. It is this team that makes node.js special, not simply 'javascript on the server'. If Meteor can gain support from this _established_ community I will start taking it more seriously. Why not use the 11M in funding to hire one of these node.js leaders full-time? Outside of Meteor, what contributions has the Meteor team made to node.js and the ecosystem of modules? The founding team has no presence in the development community and yet their technology stack is built on top of it. I need to see that people I trust in the node.js community are driving and influencing the direction Meteor is headed. In fact, its almost a warning sign if Meteor can't staff any of the node.js leadership full-time as they certainly have the cash to do so. I will be watching who they are hire next very closely. The lack of node.js leadership in their organization is already evident in the product decisions they are making which wouldn't stand a chance if they had a true representative of the node.js community on their team. A glaring example is the decision to build their own package management solution instead of adopting npm or working with npm to drive it forward if its missing useful features. Meteor is leveraging the output of the node.js ecosystem yet not recognizing its existence in their own product. They seem to be segregating themselves.

2mur 14y ago
Bingo. It has been uniformly dismissed/ignored by the larger node.js community. Take from that what you will.

tzury 14y ago

After their recent shocking Github investment and now Meteor, a16z are, IMHO, the most impressive VC firm in the US. They have a very long-term vision, they put their money where their vision is, and that's the best thing founders can wish themselves when raising funds, may my investor will look as far as I and ever further. Congrats!

wikkiwa 14y ago

BUT CAN IT SHARE PICTURES???

wissler 14y ago

"$11.2 million is a lot of money. What it gives us is certainty. No matter what else happens in the world, the core team will be able to focus entirely on Meteor for several years" Assuming you're not targeted with any software patent suits.