This sounds like stellar news for Heroku employees and investors.<p>I'm not sure how it's going to be good for Heroku customers (like me) in the long-term. There will be the inevitable brain drain over the course of 1-2years when key staff move away as their contract clauses run out and then we'll be left with Heroku being run by SalesForce :(
This is great news for Heroku and YC (congratulations folks!). That said, does anyone have any insights on why exactly SalesForce would buy Heroku? What is the business rationale?<p>"This is Salesforce’s fifth acquisition this year. Earlier purchases include Activa Live, Sitemasher and Jigsaw. Salesforce.com also spent $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan."<p>Anyone see a pattern? I don't, but then I am not that business savvy.
I'm happy for Heroku that they got such a great deal, but I have to say I'm disappointed by this. Heroku seemed like they were in a great position to do amazing things. I thought they had a solid revenue model. I had hoped Heroku would be the one doing the acquiring.
I can see EngineYard opening a bottle to celebrate as well, $212M in 'mostly stock' would be landing a big one, to be landing it in <i>cash</i> is very good indeed.<p>Congratulations to everybody, especially to the people that brokered the deal on Herokus side, very impressive.<p>In other news, registrars the world over report a large uptick in domain registrations around the twin themes of rails hosting and sushi...
I interviewed with Salesforce and I have to tell you that I found their culture a bit ....weird. It's something I couldn't put my finger on but I just had the feeling that they were all in some sort of cult or something.<p>I didn't get the job. Probably a good thing.
heroku 94%<p>pg 6% (early 2008)<p>---<p>$3M Series A (mid 2008) <i>Assuming</i> a $2M pre-money:<p>heroku 37.6%<p>pg 2.4%<p>series A 60%<p>---<p>$10M Series B (2010) <i>Assuming</i> a $5M pre-money:<p>heroku 12.5%<p>pg 0.8%<p>series A 20%<p>series B 66.6%<p>---<p>$212M Exit:<p>heroku $26.5M<p>pg $1.7M<p>series A $42.4<p>series B $141.3<p>---<p>result:<p>series A $3M -> $42.4M // 14X in 2.5 years<p>series B $10M -> $141M // 14X in 1 year<p>pg $17K -> $1.7M // 100X in 3 years<p>All the pre-money valuations are guesstimates/fiction.
I really hate it when people to give arbitrary numbers to things like 'Cloud 2'.<p>It's still just cloud computing. 'Cloud 2' doesn't actually -mean- anything. It's not a standard. It's not like you can say something is or isn't Cloud 2 by any objective means.<p>It's marketing speak, and who exactly is he marketing it to? All developers see right through it and know it doesn't mean anything. All clients only care that their products work. What tech they're built on doesn't mean a thing.
Anyone know what this means for Heroku? I love their service and I'd really hate to see it depart from what it is.<p>I'm really happy for the Heroku guys, but I'm also kind of nervous because I can think of so many ways Salesforce can screw this up.
I've honestly never understood why startups want to be acquired (besides the monetary gain for individual employees). Doesn't acquisition often destroy or dilute the very successes they've worked so hard to build? (I worked for an acquisitive company that worsened nearly every product/company it acquired.) Why not just focus on making your business better?<p>Heroku will now be subject to all kinds of pressures and asinine ideas that may not relate to their core offering. As a Heroku user I am concerned and saddened.<p>Can anyone offer any perspective? I'm puzzled by the acquisition mindset.
Very very good news for Heroku employees and investors. I also hope that Amazon will start bidding war.<p>However, knowing Salesforce (and fact that they have many very very big enemies in this business) I'm concern about future of Heroku offering in the current form. As far as I know, Salesforce is not a hacker company - they remind me a little of Yahoo! (product managers are running the show). And, don't get me wrong, in this case, not being a "hacker company" is a good thing. But, I assume that Heroku will be transformed to be much profitable and target bigger margin businesses.
It comes out to about $2000 per ap hosted on Heroku. Pretty good considering most of those aps are probably free. Of course they are hoping for growth, and Heroku has been adding almost a hundred apps per day.
I'm not entirely surprised. Heroku's manual-scale model has shown a strong focus to sell to the enterprises. The App Engine's auto-scale model (no expenses if no traffic, but always ready to face peaks) is largely friendlier to individuals on a budget.<p>I hope these news will help boost projects like appengine-jruby.
I hope this will have them a kick to spread into Europe.<p>For now, as they use only US EC2 regions, it's only possible for many EU-located users to have a prototype or a toy project on Heroku. Believe me, those few routers more and pings > 100ms do make a difference.
Not that there is any correlation (Heroku's awesome and those guys are simply great talent) but, RoR start-ups seem to be doing amazing nowadays with Hulu in high eval, Groupon rumored to reject a $5B deal, Twitter with its momentum, and now Heroku.
Also, don't forget about potential future value re: their upcoming node.js support. I suspect that'll be even more popular than their rails service at some point in the not-to-distant future.
Everyone is happy for Heroku (I'm pretty sure this beats Mint for the canonical "ideal exit" case), and everyone is scared as a customer (I have no idea where I would build and alternatively easy-to-use Rails app that was as cheap).<p>ffffuuuuuuuu
I'm glad that the Heroku team will continue running the company with some degree of independence. They've done great things for the community, and have amazing vision for the product's trajectory. Congrats, guys!
will this affect the pricing model for small ruby builds (Free)? I hope not. As a designer/developer this service has been beneficial to sell Ruby to my more technical clientele.