Andressen Horowitz doesn't need to see a direct return from meteor. If they think that the existence of meteor is a good thing for their other investments, then the indirect return they see from those projects is a good thing.
Eventually the [VC] generation that Fred Wilson leads will fall behind, as did the one led by John Doerr at Kleiner-Perkins. What they will be replaced with is one that is not only aware of the usability of products, but also has a sense for the flow of open technologies to fuel the ecosystem. These VCs will make side investments in technologies that are not intended to produce an IPO or acquisition, rather are intended to produce a new layer of technology that a whole generation of startups can feed off. At the same time, some percentage of each fund will be plowed into programs designed to generate the next layer after that.
Interesting point, but if that is their thinking, they didn't share it with me :)
As far as I know, they're looking the billions of dollars a year that IBM makes on WebSphere and thinking, "all of this spending on middleware and applications servers, where is it going to go in the future, if the future is client-side JavaScript, native mobile apps, and other things that fetch data over the wire and render it locally?"
They're hoping that in the fullness of time, many corporations will build important apps on Meteor, and that when those apps go to production we'll get a slice of their operations budget. It's the same model as the relational database.
* Meteor needs to exist. There needs to be a great way to build modern, dynamic client-server web apps. Meteor is a real breakthrough and deserves to be fully built out and supported.
* As Geoff notes, the market is actually very large. Much like we think Github can eat a lot of the market for source code control systems and developer tools (a multi-billion-dollar market today -- IBM/Rational etc.), Meteor at scale should be able to be a great business on top of a great technical and open source phenomenon.
* There's a lot of historical resonance for me personally -- I was the guy who kick-started the Javascript project at Netscape 17 years ago (originally called Livescript) -- the goal then was a single scripting language and framework on web client and server. Client worked great, server not so much. (Java was the opposite -- server worked great, client not so much.) Given that Javascript has become the most widely used programming language in history, I think the original idea deserves to be fully implemented, and Meteor is what we should have built back then had we known everything that we know today.
It's unlikely that Andressen Horowitz would make an investment because they anticipate the company's services will increase the value of their portfolio. I think it's far more likely that they're looking for a positive return on Meteor.
What about Cloudera?
Hadoop ecosystem subsidized by VCs, so lots of their smaller startups will be able to save money on Oracle, Vertica/Greenplum licenses...
Maybe, but probably not. I suspect AH believes 1) it can make a big financial return and 2) if it does, it's a model for funding this type of "company".
Andressen Horowitz doesn't need to see a direct return from meteor. If they think that the existence of meteor is a good thing for their other investments, then the indirect return they see from those projects is a good thing.