Comment by hopeless

15 years ago

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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hopeless

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notahacker  15 years ago

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?

  • samratjp  15 years ago

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

    • mikeryan  15 years ago

      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.

      2 replies →

  • alnayyir  15 years ago

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

    Shut up before you jinx us all.

    • StavrosK  15 years ago

      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...

      1 reply →

davidedicillo  15 years ago

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.

sedachv  15 years ago

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.

yesno  15 years ago

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.

  • tamersalama  15 years ago

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

    • ry0ohki  15 years ago

      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.

      2 replies →

    • alain94040  15 years ago

      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.

      1 reply →

    • rikthevik  15 years ago

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

    • messel  15 years ago

      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.

_pius  15 years ago

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!