Welcoming npm

There are open source projects. And then there are open source projects—like lightning in a bottle, where the groundswell of support is simply staggering.

Node.js is one of those projects. Since being created by Ryan Dahl in 2009, Node.js has exploded in popularity. It is the third-most popular project on Github (based on number of “stars”), and since the release of v 0.10 in March 2013, there has been an average of 35,000 downloads per day. Anyone building mobile apps is using this fundamental infrastructure. The market is enormous, and we’ve always felt there was a huge opportunity for a company to commercialize this large installed user base and provide value on top.

Enter npm, Inc., which is building services and support for the Node.js and JavaScript package ecosystems. npm installs, publishes and manages Node.js packages and is critical to making Node.js work. It is the default package manager and the key gateway for anybody building Node.js apps. Its modules are being downloaded over 150 million times a month, up from 13 million a year ago, which is simply amazing.

npm Co-Founders Isaac Schlueter, Laurie Voss and Rod Boothby comprise a veritable dream team of Node.js superstars. Isaac, a Yahoo! alum, is the author of npm. Isaac recently left Joyent, which sponsors the development and maintenance of Node.js. Rod also hails from Joyent and was a critical business lead there. Laurie, who worked with Isaac at Yahoo!, has spent the last sixteen years building sites at every level from front-end through the application stack and down to the level of DBA and systems administration. Most recently, he was Co-Founder and technical lead at awe.sm. Together, the npm Founders are building a company that is attracting the highest level of experts in the area.

Over the past nine years, open source has become an incredibly important part of the True portfolio, since one of our very first investments in Matt Mullenweg and Automattic, the company behind WordPress. Since then, we have been privileged to back the Founders and creators of projects like Puppet, DIY Drones, OpenStack, Makerbot, Vagrant, Cascading, Cassandra and Cloud Foundry. Open source aligns closely with our own values at True around community, being a part of something bigger than yourself, and investing in Founders of movements.

Relationships are everything, so we’re thrilled to have met npm through the team at WordPress and through Jason Hoffman, Founder of Joyent, who will also be joining the board of npm. We are joined in this investment round by Matt Mullenweg, Founder of Automattic; Jevon MacDonald and Gavin Uhma, who co-founded GoInstant.com; and Charles Beeler and the team at Asynch Media, who host Node Summit. We couldn’t be happier to partner with our illustrious co-investors and with the dynamic npm team.

Isaac, Rod, Laurie and the rest of the npm team: Welcome to True!