I don't know how this will end up, but thank you for taking risks supporting open-source federated comms. I hope this will give a mature, free alternative for those of us who are not enthusiastic about the ubiquitous centralization and vendor-locked technologies.
We're super supportive of matrix and their protocol, Riot will be getting a huge overhaul from how I understand
https://matrix.org/blog/2018/01/29/status-partners-up-with-n...
their latest blog post on this investment goes over the details of what all they are hiring for.