We spent 3 months going door to door, making demos to people I knew were working on similar projects or looking for one. We had a good reputation in the ops and systems engineering community because of our work on dotCloud over the last 6 years. Then we bootstrapped the open-source community with that initial group of 30-50 people willing to federate efforts. By the time the project was leaked on hacker news, the github repo and mailing list were already very active.
Early members of that "seed" community included engineers from Twilio, Heroku, Soundcloud, Koding, Google, Meteor, RethinkDB, Mailgun, as well as the current members of the Flynn project.
I am flattered, but we are already well funded and are not currently looking for new investors. However if you're feeling generous I can point you to a few people who have been making awesome contributions to Docker on their free time. I'm sure they would appreciate donations, or perhaps contract work :)
There are also several startups currently raising money for a business based on docker. This is bigger than any one company!
When you are an ops and spend time finding the perfect way to make "redeploying easier than fixing", docker became the answer.
I got to meet the docker team (a lot of french dudes in the team!). Very passionate, technically super sharp, and really fun ! They were interested in my point of view and opinion. Plus, there lead dev knows how to party from what i have seen during a meetup !
As a former Sun guy, I can say it's because extracting value wasn't something we were very good at or really gave much weight. From Grid to Java to Solaris 10 Zones and ZFS, Jini, RFID we mostly just made cool stuff and then... went and made other cool stuff.
To be honest - I think it's a timing thing - virtualization wasn't popular initially but VMWare did a great marketing job. Then any hyper-visor became acceptable. Now - VPS-style containers are becoming acceptable. IE: Docker.
Being too early can kill you. If you think your idea is awesome but too early, my advice is to keep trying for as long as it takes. Docker was not my first attempt at solving this particular problem :) [1] [2] [3]
Early members of that "seed" community included engineers from Twilio, Heroku, Soundcloud, Koding, Google, Meteor, RethinkDB, Mailgun, as well as the current members of the Flynn project.