[taylorbuley]

Heroku (YC08) has been around longer than #22 (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html), but pg's item on fundable ideas might hint at some of his vision regarding abstracted platforms:

Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists.