My initial thoughts were that Meteor would be more widely deployed in production than Firebase would. But it also seemed like Firebase had a more obvious path to profitability than Meteor.<p>Given the current VC market and the rapidly evolving landscape of (so called) real-time services, I'm surprised they raised such a small sum. I would have thought if you were going to go the VC route, you might as well go all in and raise a massive chunk.<p>With a (somewhat conservative) estimate of $10K a month per engineer and $1.1M to spend, a team of 8 engineers would give you a runway of just under 14 months. I think you would want more runway than that.
I think there's a good lesson for startups building platforms: don't underestimate the importance of hustle.<p>I met James and his team at a hackathon this past March. Twilio (the company I work for) was a sponsor, along with Firebase and several other API companies. I had never heard of Firebase, and I don't think any of the ~100 developers there had either.<p>James and his team (~6 of so colleagues & friends) spent that weekend talking to every team there, understanding what they were trying to do and diving into their code. They were everywhere, buying beer, lending a helping hand, you name it.<p>3 months later, they raise a million dollars. Not a coincidence.
We're using this to power Roll20[1]. The whole team has been very responsive and supportive of any and all questions. Congrats!<p>[1] <a href="http://roll20.net" rel="nofollow">http://roll20.net</a>
Are you working on a way to develop and delpoy apps on your platform without shipping the entire source code to the app to the browser? I'm guessing there are a lot of people who don't mind their source code being sent to each user, but I think there are many of us who would love to use your platform that would prefer not to do that.<p>Congrats on the funding!