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Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

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Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#51

Post by kore »

cuchoperl wrote: post #19

heroku 94% pg 6% (early 2008) --- $3M Series A (mid 2008) Assuming a $2M pre-money: heroku 37.6% pg 2.4% series A 60% --- $10M Series B (2010) Assuming a $5M pre-money: heroku 12.5% pg 0.8% series A 20% series B 66.6% --- $212M Exit: heroku $26.5M pg $1.7M series A $42.4 series B $141.3 --- result: series A $3M -> $42.4M // 14X in 2.5 years series B $10M -> $141M // 14X in 1 year pg $17K -> $1.7M // 100X in 3 years A…

> $3M Series A (mid 2008) Assuming a $2M pre-money

> $10M Series B (2010) Assuming a $5M pre-money

I know this was just a thought exercise, but shouldn't their valuation have increased between 2008 and 2010?

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#52

Post by Nrsolis »

I interviewed with Salesforce and I have to tell you that I found their culture a bit ....weird. It's something I couldn't put my finger on but I just had the feeling that they were all in some sort of cult or something.

I didn't get the job. Probably a good thing.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#53

Post by puredemo »

Nrsolis wrote: post #52

I interviewed with Salesforce and I have to tell you that I found their culture a bit ....weird. It's something I couldn't put my finger on but I just had the feeling that they were all in some sort of cult or something. I didn't get the job. Probably a good thing.

The cult of enterprise solutions.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#54

Post by thibaut_barrere »

duck wrote: post #16
dawson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why, it makes you more confident? (genuinely interested)

I know for my clients they would just like the name recognition that it brings. Selling someone on something they are familiar with is a lot easier.

I second that. Some people I know at companies really consider Ruby to be a toy. Having the SalesForces name behind it somehow will really be a change here in my case.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#55

Post by csomar »

wouterinho wrote: post #17
PanMan wrote: post #15

AFAIK Ycombinator invests about 15K for 6%. That 6% would now be 12 million. That's a 800x ROI. Nice :)

I imagine YC's share will have been diluted quite a bit, but no doubt it's a great ROI.

It would be intelligent if YC take a non-diluted portion. That is if the startup raise VC money, the YC % don't get diluted and the founders % get diluted a little more.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#56

Post by thibaut_barrere »

geoffc wrote: post #39
bigiain wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how much its just Mark poking Larry with a stick. "So you bought Java, eh? Who cares? I don't need to rely on Java, I've got all the cool kids and their RoR apps!" (212M is an expensive stick though...)

RoR for dynamic HTML apps used to be the coolest thing but now the really new/cool stuff is written as a JSON server talking to AJAX and mobile clients. In this world node.js, clojure and erlang (maybe) are cooler than RoR.

I think Heroku is not so much about Rails than about Ruby. You can use any rack-based app here, as well as host long-running job workers.

In the non-startup enterprises (I work with those), the work is usually to glue things together. Call a legacy web-service here, run a worker there, put things back into a legacy CRM etc. Ruby is perfect for that.

JRuby is even better, actually, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Heroku support it later on.

Re: Salesforce Buys Heroku (YC W08) For $212 Million In Cash

#58

Post by smoody »

hristov wrote: post #29

It comes out to about $2000 per ap hosted on Heroku. Pretty good considering most of those aps are probably free. Of course they are hoping for growth, and Heroku has been adding almost a hundred apps per day.

If my "app" on Heroku is counted in that hosted app number, then people must assign a lot of value to a one page web app that simply states "welcomes to rails." I suspect there are other apps on the service that compete direectly with mine.
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