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Comment by hopeless | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like stellar news for Heroku employees and investors.

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 :(

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Gotta agree with this assessment.

I've found deployment to Heroku whilst tinkering with side projects fantastic, whilst Salesforce is the bane of my life in the day job. And whilst they have the in-house infrastructure to actually reduce Heroku prices, the Salesforce focus on the enterprise market hints that they're more likely to raise them.

Congratulations to the Heroku team though. Is it DropBox's turn next?

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if Dropbox became the first YC company to hit IPO.

I actually would be surprised if Dropbox exited via IPO. I think their offering fits in with a lot of large companies profiles. Dropbox could easily fit into a portfolio of Google, Microsoft, even Cisco.

explaining Cisco - Cisco seems to be trying to break into the "Digital Home" market with things like FlipVideo and some other video services. Dropbox would make a great cloud storage play for media services.

They are obviously swinging for the fences, especially with Sequoia involved. It's fair to expect that they would aim for a 9 figure exit. IPO or not.

Interesting case about Cisco. I would've also thrown in Apple because of their huge war chest and select big acquisitions. Dropbox could easily outdo MobileMe. Then again, I'm sure Google wouldn't mind getting a GDrive finally.

But then, there's facebook!(Sure, they got Drop.io, but facebook loves grabbing startups away before Google get to them)

Dropbox uses Amazon S3 for their storage. Google and Microsoft have their own cloud storage backends - if they did acquire Dropbox, they would probably throw away most of the technology, making an acquisition somewhat less likely.

>Congratulations to the Heroku team though. Is it DropBox's turn next?

Shut up before you jinx us all.

Jinx us? What could be better? You get to build a product with a clear roadmap, a vast market of disgruntled users of the product that went to shit and basically guaranteed success.

I wonder if I should start building Heroku 2 now...

>I wonder if I should start building Heroku 2 now...

Yes, but make it good

Time to start keeping an eye on other hosting solutions. I'm love Heroku and I host a decent number of paying applications on it, but I'm afraid that when the original people will start leaving we'll be left with just another big corporation.

if you're a fan of python, keep your eye on djangy. those guys are sharp.

Another Heroku-like service for Python is DjangoZoom. Sign up for the beta at http://www.djangozoom.com

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of DjangoZoom.

Are these guys on HN, and if so, who are they?

endlessvoid94

From what I understand SalesForce totally shafted Sitemasher's customers by shutting the service down a month of so after the acquisition. At least with Heroku you can move to another hosting provider. Sitemasher was a closed-system "build a web application without programming!" type of service. So I'd actually start worrying about the short-term right now.

Nothing last forever.

Eventually all the "startups that you love" will either close their door or be acquired and I think people should expect that since day 1.

Why are these the only 2 outcomes? Why not grow a business?

Partly because of the changing pace of technology. A watch company could be pretty sure 100 years ago that watches would still be around in 20 years, sure the technology might need to be updated but not dramatically. You think anyone will even use Heroku in 5 years? There is a new language and technology every month now that gets hype, it's unlikely something like this will continue to grow for the long term.

I'm sorry but that's a bullshit notion. Why is anyone still using PHP today? or Java? Just cause something new comes out, it doesn't automatically displace the old. I think paperback's are more likely to go away before the last rails app is written.

Agreed. Also, why does a company have to be tied to one bit of technology?

We hear a lot that being a good programmer/designer/etc. isn't language-specific but that it is a skill-set that transcends technical knowledge. Why isn't this the same for companies and products?

Even if they grow, eventually they'll be too big to remain the "friendly cool kid next door."

With 20,000 employees, it's just not the same.

Either way, you can't expect a founder to stick around for 30 years with the same company and product. It takes a Steve Jobs to keep things interesting over decades.

I think you just nailed why so many modern companies suck.

100 years ago you put your name on the company and treated it's performance as your personal reputation (for better or for worse). Today the most common "strategy" is to build something just good enough that you can attract enough customers to generate a revenue stream that is interesting to someone else, and then wash your hands of it.

This punishes everyone who was willing to suffer with you while you worked out the kinks.

I'm sorry but the whole thing just seems too "deadbeat dad" to me.

I guess it depends what kind of investors they've taken on, and how eager they are for a big money exit.

I think we all accept that another outcome can happen.

But the likelihood of independent growth for a platform of any type is incredibly low. For each Google how many Herokus and Friendfeeds are there?

The driving force behind very few independent companies is a lack of an IPO market. Without a payoff for VCs you have to grow organically through customer funding or sell to a big acquirer, or in rare cases pay off investors with debt.

They offer founders too much money to pass up.

Google? I do not recall them being "acquired".

Google is 1 in a [insert the number of startups from 1998 to 2010]

1:xyz

Bullshit.

Salesforce.com (you know? That company that just bought Heroku?) was founded in 1999, went public in 2004 and is currently worth ~$20B.

VMWare were founded in 1998, and is worth ~$37B now.

http://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPOHome/Press/IPOIndustry.... shows there have been 37 tech IPOs in 2010, worth ~$5B

http://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPOHome/Press/IPOPricings.... shows IPOs/year. Obviously not all are tech, but a large number are.

Additionally, we all know that there are many companies which are very successful but are deliberately not going public.

Cool stats bro. Chill out, here's a glass of wine.

I think you've got the date range wrong there. For many recent startups, it's too soon to tell if they'll avoid death and acquisition and survive as independent companies. You need to look at the companies that have been around long enough to hit it big on their own (most of the current giants) or stay small and friendly but in a sustainable way (harder to find, but by no means unheard of).

I'm actually really excited about it as a customer. Heroku's solution is outstanding, but it was clear that they were having trouble scaling up customer support; this acquisition makes it more likely that they'll have the support staff needed to serve their customer base.

Big congrats to them!

The support staff of a big company? Not really looking forward to that.

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