As a former programmer and engineer, I sat in awe as Geoff and Matt presented Meteor at our first meeting. The meeting started normally enough: a brief discussion with the team on their backgrounds, a PowerPoint presentation on what Meteor was up to, a lot of nodding around the room, questions along the way. That all changed when Geoff decided to show us Meteor live. In all of 30 seconds, he hacked up a rich-client and back-end server application. The client was running locally yet synchronizing all of its data to a backend server. Fast, secure and in real-time. What I saw in front of my eyes was magic!
JavaScript has become the number one programming language on GitHub, above Java, C, PHP—everything. The reason for this is that Web clients, such as mobile devices and tablets, are becoming richer and more capable as compute devices as opposed to display devices, and running the application logic locally on the client results in performance, usability and scale for users.
The problem with JavaScript, however, is that it was designed to be a client-side language, leaving all the back-end server implementation to other languages. The result is that cloud-based Web applications take way too long to develop due to the sheer complexity and brittleness of the environment. Without Meteor, everything from security, to multi-tenancy, to latency, to database access requires special APIs and custom development, and developers need to know at least two languages.
The Meteor framework solves all of these problems. Meteor makes real-time application development dramatically faster and more approachable. It gives developers a comprehensive platform for writing Web apps in JavaScript where both client and server code use the same language and API, enabling the same code to be run on both the client and server. The result is real-time, cloud-based Web apps that are scalable, secure and distributed by design.
We see this technology as fundamentally important to the future of the Web. Through this investment in Meteor, as well as our recent investment in GitHub, we at a16z are excited to help developers build the next generation of applications.
The Meteor magic would not be possible without the founding team: Geoff, Matt and Nick. While they’ve graciously described the board and investors as a dream team, the real dream team is the Meteor founders. Passionate, committed and appropriately eccentric make them the best team in the universe to be working on this project. We are honored to be partnering with Meteor in their mission to build a new platform for cloud computing applications.
The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/.
Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.