Meteor was a viable business, but not a viable venture-backed business

Meteor, a Commercial open-source software company with exciting new ideas around building interfaces, launched with a boom. It held the #1 spot on Hacker News for multiple days. But its host company pivoted to another project, and mostly left Meteor to languish.

{Tiny}, a small private equity company, purchased Meteor in 2019. Andrew Wilkinson, one of the Tiny co-founders, reports that Meteor ran afoul of VC funding scale expectations. It already had millions of dollars in annual profit and Fortune 500 customers, but it raised $53M in VC funding.

Meteor was a viable business, but not {a viable billion-dollar business}, so {the VC-backed firm was forced to pivot away from it}.

The glib conclusion is “Meteor would have been better off without VC money,” but I don’t quite know how to think about the counterfactual and path dependence here. Could Meteor-the-viable-business have been created without VC money? Could it have been bootstrapped? It’s not clear to me.

References

Andrew Wilkinson on Twitter: “Late last year, we bought Meteor (@meteorjs) from @Apollographql.It was a wonderful, highly profitable business with customers like IKEA and Honeywell.But they had a problem: They raised $53M from @A16Z and other venture investors…”