It would probably be valuable to use some amount of that $11m to fund development of interesting applications/startups that showcase Meteor in the real world. For instance, you notice something interesting a community member is building on their own time, but you don't want to focus on it. In my experience close partnerships can work as well as dogfooding, as long as you trust the source and can make the right decisions based on the feedback.
I feel that this is implicit in the post, that there will be this outreach/advocacy/support?
"Create opportunities for Meteor developers — for example, encourage companies to adopt Meteor, creating jobs. We want to make you famous and get you paid.
Support the Meteor community. This includes everything from publishing books and organizing conferences, to being responsive to bug reports and pull requests, to finally making some cool tshirts."
I think that's a great idea. The ability to do creative things like this is the "silver lining" of having so much money in the bank (which, as I mentioned above, is something I generally consider a risk, or at best a hedge.)
I'd love to hear your ideas about how this could work, and when we should start doing it (it's probably way too early?) either here or on meteor-talk.
This will definitely require more than the two minutes of thought I put into this post, but. . . Large companies like Adobe, Microsoft, etc, often sponsor projects that will serve as good marketing for whatever initiative they're trying to push. Something similar could work once you see projects out there. In the spirit of openness you could setup and initially fund a non profit similar to Apache Software Foundation with a board that decides where the money goes. Doing something like Google's Summer of Code might spur some interesting projects. Or maybe even set aside the cash and do some sort of community voting contest thing. Like: "Build something awesome and win up to X in no-strings-attached cash, voted on by the internet." Put in caveats like it has to become a full time project, etc.
