Current thinking on VCs around App Engine Powered startups is unfortunately negative. VCs are aware that Google often kills beta products or drastically changes the economics of products they offer at a price. When GAE comes out of beta this may change, but currently the risk as a VC is that an App Engine Powered Startup gets to 10M users and 1M lines of code, and Google decides it isn't in the App engine business, any more. All of sudden you are homeless and without a compatible alternative.
Being Self-Funded I'm Taking the bet that my product will save enough money running on GAE that it negates the risks. But most VCs right now favor AWS because you could bounce to Liquid Web or host on your private hardware cluster, or move to a number of other compatible services, maybe not at the same economics but you wouldn't be out of business. Plus, I'm hoping Google will just buy me before I get to that point, and then if they close the project I'll already be paid out :-) From: google-appengine@googlegroups.com [mailto:google-appengine@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Calvin Sent: Monday, April 04, 2011 9:58 AM To: google-appengine@googlegroups.com Subject: [google-appengine] Startup Weekend and Google App Engine I just had a really great time participating in a Startup Weekend event (http://startupweekend.org/). I was the sole engineer on our team and, thanks to App Engine, I was able to create a functional site, a user sign-in mechanism, a "wizard" for creating data, and a rough mobile site for consuming that data. All within 48 hours (and I even had time to sleep). Unfortunately, we were the only team to use App Engine. Google, or the App Engine team, should sponsor events like this to raise awareness of the product's capabilities. I'd also like to thank Google for all the ass-kicking public APIs they provide. With no previous experience with the Google Maps API (and a tight time crunch) I was able to add address lookup, and a map with a thumbtack on the returned location, in just a couple of lines of JavaScript. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to google-appengine@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.
