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As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnati
by bgentry 8mo ago
As somebody whose first day working at Heroku was the day this acquisition closed, I think it’s mostly a misconception to blame Salesforce for Heroku’s stagnation and eventual irrelevance. Salesforce gave Heroku a ton of funding to build out a vision that was way ahead of its time. Docker didn’t even come out until 2013, AWS didn’t even have multiple regions when it was built. They mostly served as an investor and left us alone to do our thing, or so it seemed those first couple years.
The launch of the multi language Cedar runtime in 2011 led to incredible growth and by 2012 we were drowning in tech debt and scaling challenges. Despite more than tripling our headcount in that first year (~20 to 74) we could not keep up.
Mid 2012 was especially bad as we were severely impacted by two us-east-1 outages just 2 weeks apart. To the extent it wasn’t already, reliability and paying down tech debt became the main focus and I think we went about 18 months between major user-facing platform launches (Europe region and eventually larger sized dynos being the biggest things we eventually shipped after that drought). The organization lost its ability to ship significant changes or maybe never really had that ability at scale.
That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results. I left in 2014 and at that time it already seemed clear to me that the product was basically stalled.
I’m not sure how much of this could have been done better even in hindsight. In theory Salesforce could have taken a more hands on approach early on but I don’t think that could have ended better. They were so far from profitability in late 2010 that they could not stay independent without raising more funding. The venture market in ~2010 was much smaller than a few years later—tiny rounds and low valuations. Had the company spent its pre-acquisition engineering cycles building for scalability & reliability at the expense of product velocity they probably would have never gotten successful.
Even still, it was the most amazing professional experience of my career, full of brilliant and passionate people, and it’s sad to see it end this way.
- Aurornis 8mo agoThanks for sharing your story. Those early days of using Heroku were really enjoyable for me. It felt so promising and simple. I remember explaining the concept to a lot of different people who didn't believe that the deployment model could be that simple and accessible until I showed them. Then life went on, I bounced around in my career, and forgot about Heroku. Years later I actually suggested it for someone to use for a simple project once and I could practically feel the other developers in the room losing respect for me for even mentioning it. I hadn't looked at it for so long that I didn't realize it had fallen out of favor. > That time coincided with the founders taking a step back, leaving a loss of leadership and vision that was filled by people more concerned with process than results This feels all too familiar. All of my enjoyable startup experiences have ended this way: The fast growing, successful startup starts attracting people who look like they should be valuable assets to the company, but they're more interested in things like policies, processes, meetings, and making the status reports look nice than actually shipping and building.
- ptdorf 8mo agoThe cancer of corporations: bureaucracy.
- ghaff 8mo agoAs corporations grow, they also increasingly need some level of process which can increasingly look a lot like bureaucracy.
- catlifeonmars 8mo agoBureaucracy is a natural consequence of workforce growth. Respectfully, I think you are blaming the symptoms here, not the root cause.
- drewda 8mo agoThanks for a capsule tour through Heroku! FWIW, the team that eventually created "Docker" was working at the same time on dotCloud as a direct Heroku competitor. I remember meeting them at a meet-up in the old Twitter building but couldn't tell you exactly which year that was. Maybe 2010 or 2011?
- bgentry 8mo agoYep, that team did great work. I remember having lunch at the Heroku office with the dotCloud team in 2011 or 2012 and also Solomon Hykes demoing Docker to us in our office’s basement before it launched. So much cool stuff was happening back then!
- asenchi 8mo agoI remember Solomon's demoing at All Hands... it was such a crazy time for tech and innovation.
- asenchi 8mo agoIt remains the greatest engineering team I've ever seen or had the pleasure to be a part of. I was only there from early 2011 to mid 2012 but what I took with me changed me as an engineer. The shear brilliance of the ideas and approaches...I was blessed to witness it. I don't think I can overstate it, though many will think this is all hyperbole. I didn't always agree with the decisions made and I was definitely there when the product stagnation started, but we worked hard to reduce tech debt, build better infrastructure, and improve... but man, the battles we fought. Many fond memories, including the single greatest engineering mistake I've ever seen made, one that I still think about until this day (but will never post in a public forum :)). It was a pleasure working with you bgentry!
- Folcon 8mo agoI'm just going to chime in here and say thank you, there still really isn't in my mind a comparable offering to heroku's git push and go straight to a reasonable production I honestly find it a bit nuts, there's offerings that come close, but using them I still get the impression that they've just not put in the time really refining that user interface, so I just wanted to say thank you for the work you and the GP did, it was incredibly helpful and I'm happy to say helped me launch and test a few product offerings as well as some fun ideas
- gonational 8mo agoThis! It absolutely boggles my mind that nothing else exists to fill this spot. Fly and others offer varying degrees of easier-than-AWS hosting, but nobody offers true PaaS like Heroku, IMHO.
- ardeaver 8mo agoAs far as the Salesforce acquisition goes, I'd be curious to see who made the decision to put Heroku into maintenance only mode. I worked for a different part of Salesforce. I don't really feel like Salesforce did a ton of meddling in any of its bigger acquisitions other than maybe Tableau. I think the biggest missed opportunity was potentially creating a more unified experience between all of its subsidiaries. Though, it's hard to call that a failure since they're making tons of money. It could be a case of post-founder leadership seeing that there's not a lot of room for growth and giving up. That happens a lot in the tech industry.
- duxup 8mo ago> people more concerned with process than results Sounds like something Steve Jobs observed at apple https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE?si=QOCBUqcUPWu8AsAX https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE?si=QOCBUqcUPWu8AsAX
- direwolf20 8mo agoLink with spyware removed: https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE https://youtu.be/l4dCJJFuMsE
- duxup 8mo agoSpyware?
- Centigonal 8mo agoGP means the si url parameter, which is a token that helps google track how their videos are being shared.
- netule 8mo agoNot OP, but the "si" parameter in the URL is an individual tracking identifier, generated specifically for YouTube to see who you share the link with.
- duxup 8mo agoTY
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoI feel as if youtube itself might still contain some tracking. People recommend invidious and piped but they are starting to have issues. This video is archived on wayback machine (archive.org) and I feel as if that might be the best way to watch this video right now. https://web.archive.org/web/20260207024055/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://web.archive.org/web/20260207024055/https://www.youtu... Edit: I have also uploaded it on preservetube when I got interested in what are some wayback machine alternatives (given that wayback machine suggests to not upload videos given storage constraints unless absolutely necessary) So I found preservetube which is sort of intended for this and uploaded this video on it https://preservetube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE https://preservetube.com/watch?v=l4dCJJFuMsE
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- dpe82 8mo agoHaving been on a bigco team that underwent the same sort of headcount growth in a very short time I have to imagine that "more than tripling our headcount in that first year" was likely more a driver of the inability to keep up than a solution. That's not a knock on the talents of anyone hired; it's just exceedingly difficult to simultaneously grow a team that fast and maintain any kind of velocity regardless of the complexity of the problems you're trying to tackle. The culture and knowledge that enabled the previous team's velocity just gets completely diluted.
- deepsun 8mo agoI worked with some of the folks from there, and honestly you make it sounds like tech debt is inevitable consequence haunting projects from year one. I disagree, I think the folks just did a sloppy job of "let's bungee strap it all together" for speed, instead of more serious planning and architecturing. They self-inflicted the tech debt on them and got drowned in the debt interest super fast.
- TranquilMarmot 8mo agoSure, but that bungee strapped slop got them pretty damn far
- deepsun 8mo agoMy point is that they would have gotten much farther. I'm not talking about architecture astronautics, just a little more thinking-ahead.
- sowbug 8mo agoThere's someone out there who built the scalable version of Heroku at another garage startup. But we never heard of them because Heroku beat them to market.