I was (am?) also a TextDrive VCII customer. I signed up in March of 2005 and had a little home on a server called nelson. If my memory is correct it was around $450 or so and I hemmed and hawed over the decision. I was just getting out of the debt I had built up after the post-college/dotcom recession and it was a lot of money for me. However, I knew that I was going to continue programming for my career and so I saw it as an investment in them as well as myself. In 2008 I was asked to move to a Joyent shared accelerator (drake) and everything continued along.
I saw it as a genius business move for them: they got upfront capital in exchange for a promise to offer a commodity that their customers would naturally outgrow. Those customers would likely be highly influential and/or become power-users. Furthermore they would be able to grow bigger than they would otherwise without having to take VC money (which at the time was harder to come by and the VC had a lot more power/control). Now we have things like Kickstarter so the idea doesn't seem so strange anymore.
I saw it as a genius business move for them: they got upfront capital in exchange for a promise to offer a commodity that their customers would naturally outgrow. Those customers would likely be highly influential and/or become power-users. Furthermore they would be able to grow bigger than they would otherwise without having to take VC money (which at the time was harder to come by and the VC had a lot more power/control). Now we have things like Kickstarter so the idea doesn't seem so strange anymore.