Meteor (YC S11) gets $9M in funding

Really awesome. What would be really cool to see is a demo and example code of an app that has authentication, and user-level permissions on the data. These "everyone in the world can update a global list" demos are getting pretty tiring.

I can't believe this. Really. Meteor is a bunch of open source projects glued together with some of their own libraries. Their package system which is out of npm is completely arbitrary.<p>Why not funding other good projects? There's plenty of better framework/libraries that are massively used by the community.<p>I'm, myself, leading a little node.js framework open source project with similar concepts and I'd never accept to be funded. This isn't a project, there's no revenue opportunities there, it's a tool!<p>Tools help to develop projects which then make a revenue...<p>Some investors have very poor judgement.

As brilliant a business model as Heroku has, trying to do the same with one specific and not-yet popular development language/library/framework seems really unlikely to work out in a way that will justify the 9 million investment. If VCs have this much capital to throw at projects like this, perhaps this is a sign that there would be a market for a startup that makes it easy for VCs to find startups with good potential and for startups to find funding more easily. Incubators are the only attempt I know of to solve this problem, but I'm sure there are larger scale solutions waiting to be thought of.

Was it ever "officially" announced that Meteor was part of YC? I've followed the original launch post but can't remember that mentioned. (I looked back and didn't find anything either)<p>I find it interesting to see this project as well as Diaspora (S12) and LightTable (S12) be part of Y Combinator, since they're all companies built around open-source projects (IIRC). (with two of them who "started out" on Kickstarter)

I am pretty curious on how they are going to compete against other open source 'realtime web' solutions such as derby.js?<p>Especially since derby.js is distributed with npm and can be used in conjunction with the thousands of existing node.js libraries. Any node developer can integrate derby.js into his existing web app with a little effort and make it 'realtime'. With meteor, not so easily.

I've always been interested in building developer tools, I did it at the beginning of my career, 4 years ago, but I've always thought it was a "bad market", a "small one", "there's no money in it".<p>I've been, secretly, working on a tool while working at a startup and bootstrapping my own startup (my hours are 8am to 4-5am), for the past couple of months, but it has always been kind of a disappointment when I try to think on how to create a business out of it. With these investments - Meteor, 10gen, and the Github rumor - I, definitely feel more encouraged :-)<p>The plan is always bootstrap - of course - since I don't have a track record, I'm not a ex-facebook employee, nor went to a top CS school.<p>Since, I'm not from the valley, or any tech hub by that chance, I haven't been able to understand the "industry". I think I get it now, it doesn't matter what you make (money) and the fools that ask "What's the monetization strategy?", you just need to create something very cool that you and other people find useful. I might be wrong but that's my observation.

Parse, Meteor, and Firebase are all YC companies and all of them are working on this.

Why do they need 9 million, really? That's about 10 programmers for 5 years, with a competitive salary and benefits, plus office costs.

#1 issue is security #2 issue is this:<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&#38;rls=en&#38;q=%22Meteor+is+an+ultra-simple+environment+for+building+modern+websites%22&#38;ie=UTF-8&#38;oe=UTF-8" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&#38;rls=en&#38;q=...</a><p>Doesn't have this page on it:<p><a href="http://docs.meteor.com/" rel="nofollow">http://docs.meteor.com/</a>

Out of all these "real-time" JS frameworks, to me, Meteor seems the most promising. Looking forward to how it evolves. Congrats and good luck to the team.

Speaking about meteor, can someone tell me if there is any way to protect the database from the user fiddling with a javascript console? In all screencasts they show how powerful it is by changing the DB with some mongodb-like commands on Chrome Developer JS Console, well, I don't want my users doing that. Anyone knows better?

Between Meteor and 10gen (which makes MongoDB, which Meteor uses heavily), $50M was just invested. If both companies use their money wisely this could pack a powerful punch!

Didn't even know that Meteor was a YC company. Does anyone know what their original product was?

Hmmm, security model is vaporware and VCs are deciding that we (developers) will really love this library before anyone is even using it.

I understand, that YC have no choice, but to invest in competing startups, simply because the large number of startups being accepted in Y-Combinator. They backing many Realtime Messaging companies, such as Firebase, Meteor, Flotype/Now.js, Simperium, Parse, etc.<p>EDIT: apparently Flotype pivoted from Now.js to something very different from what Meteor and the rest of the gang do.

whats the monetization strategy?

Congrats Meteor. That's awesome!

Nice, that pure tech ventures get high fundings of well known VCs but thinking a little bit more about Meteor I come to following conclusion:<p>First, we do not really know the first payment/milestone, maybe it's just $1M.<p>Meteor itself is an amazing technology, very well marketed by obviously smart guys—their Marketing pitch few weeks ago was just awesome and far beyond any other new JS framework. And I understand that Meteor gets very positive feedback here on HN due to their great communication skills and YC affiliation<p>But it has severe drawbacks:<p>=&#62; While employing Node as core they surprisingly ignore the well established npm package manager which is one of the best package managers around. This is bad and there's no excuse because it leads to fragmentation of the still young JS server-side landscape dominated by a lean and modular-driven Node which is just the smartest way to establish a real ecosystem—the one-size-fits-all approach is aged and that's Meteor. I assume they did their own package manager due to their upcoming business model (which will be introduced very far in the future if their ecosystem is once established), maybe they'll take license fees or demand support fees or whatever of everyone who wants to actively participate as contributor in the ecosystem. They couldn't do this with the npm. And by choosing this path the can lock out competing frameworks: if Meteor would just be a package in the npm ecosystem the opportunity costs of changing to other realtime frameworks in the npm world wouldn't be that high because changing the framework wouldn't mean changing the entire ecosystem.<p>=&#62; As long client-side JS is delivered unprotected to the browser you will never have the one-code-base-or-name-space-covering-front-and-backend approach. This approach doesn't provide any security—client code could do any shit to the server side—and others who tried made great products too but couldn't get any traction (nowjs i.e.). You will need always to separate both. They promised to come up with solutions like authentification or signed data, but then we have again more communication overhead than we would have if just separated those layers. This drawback isn't as huge as the first one, it's a technical challenge and thus, I appreciate any efforts to solve this problem.<p>Meteor was at the beginning a great tech demo, now they want to get serious and I doubt (and hope) that they won't succeed. Mentioned drawbacks are the main reasons I won't use, support and even advise against Meteor (as much as I like these guys and YC but sorry). They do not seem to contribute in any way to a great and existing ecosystem called Node but using it as their core to build a new competing one with monetization reasons in mind and a severely flawed architecture. Now, they obviously need and will use the money for PR and paying/incentivizing devs building the ecosystem and this competition between ecosystems (pure Node/npm vs Meteor) which is basically about winning the best devs will lead to further fragmentation and at the end no large ecosystem could be established and server-side JS failed. No, thanks.

$9M, wow. Enough money to become the next Rails.

Congratulations, guys.

Congrats! Meteor this is awesome, glad this will help them move along faster. Right alongside the mongo funding this week.

Wow, pretty awesome that YC is getting great companies like this.

Congratulations indeed!