[1] http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/lessons-from-leaders/jboss-e...

In short, it's debatable whether an investment into npm, Inc. will directly pay off for the investors. What the investment is more likely about is creating the infrastructure for new, billion dollar companies to pop up, giving those investors an inside track to the new companies.

In the case of ElasticSearch, investing in this infrastructure project absolutely makes sense. "Big Data" is becoming huge, but it's still relatively dumb. Up until now, we've primarily been focused on tools and technologies to source, aggregate, and analyze the data. But lots of companies are now popping up who are built on the idea of making intelligent use of all this data, far beyond what humans are naturally capable of. ElasticSearch of course isn't the whole solution, but it's part of it.

(I work for one of those companies, and we use ElasticSearch)

The world is finally figuring out that it's impossible to employ top talent, but that it can be quite lucrative to sponsor it.