The book talks about equity being a logical next step and about the value of being able to diversify and distribute risk. I think there is definitely one possible future where this is very common. It probably starts with athletes and celebrities - as you can see, this guy has gotten a terrible valuation (for several reasons).
For years, I have been talking myself out of starting a company that serves as an exchange for people selling equity in themselves. It is inevitable that someone tries this because the crowd-funding industry is so sexy. It will be an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure the effects on society will be net desirable. At its best, it would give people the ability to sell a fraction of themselves for some up-front cash and give them the ability to take bigger risks in the projects they do. Anyway, if you want to talk more about this, hit me up.
Your project, Cucumbertown, is a cooking/recipe site/platform/network. Hacker News is not your audience/customer. Any "launch" on Hacker News is a fail, regardless of downtime.
Couldn't disagree more. HN community is the most (brutally) honest and it's feedback can prove very valuable - regardless whether HNers are the target market or not.
I've never thought of HN as a marketing platform. It's a place for Hackers (perhaps the "news" fails to encompass the full site) to discuss PG's concept of hacking entrepreneurs. Far too many Show HNs target developers.
"your app can be slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore -- http://adtmag.com/blogs/watersworks/2010/10/mobile-app-creat... -- or perhaps you may need to build/host something on the scale of both the royal wedding blog and event livestream with traffic numbers that are mindblowing -- http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2011/05/royal-wedding-be... ... these are the reasons for using App Engine. it was not meant as free/cheap generic app-hosting but to provide a premium service that's difficult to get elsewhere in the market. if you're just after the former, there are plenty of options for you."
My take-away is that GAE is hard to justify unless your usage pattern is unpredictable and spike-y. I'm taking the long weekend to give dotcloud a serious test-drive.
I still don't quite understand their market, and honestly I don't think they do either.
If you're expecting insane traffic to begin with, it makes more sense to create your own systems using a more standard stack and not tie yourself to GAE. If you're just some small to medium sized site that gets "slashdotted or tweeted by demi moore", I guess it is nice that your site will automatically scale to serve the millions of unexpected incoming users, but when you're filing for personal bankruptcy due to the unexpected and infinitely scaling GAE bill that comes along with that, how much consolation is the fact that your server stayed up during the rush going to be?
I also participated in the spring San Diego Founders Institute session. I put together insights on the experience which can be read here: http://her-era.com/
Join us at the San Diego Tech Founders meeting July 16th. I'm organizing a group of San Diego Tech Founders with the purpose of meeting monthly to discuss customer and product development and business strategy. I would also like the group to develop into a great place to meet potential co-founders.
If you are a founder of a technology company, or have the desire to start/co-found a technology company, please join us for presentations and networking at our first meeting on Thursday, July 16th at the Hive Haus co-working space in downtown San Diego.
http://www.amazon.com/Future-Wealth-Stan-Davis/dp/1565113942
David Bowie sold bonds backed by his IP in 1997:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebrity_bond
The book talks about equity being a logical next step and about the value of being able to diversify and distribute risk. I think there is definitely one possible future where this is very common. It probably starts with athletes and celebrities - as you can see, this guy has gotten a terrible valuation (for several reasons).
For years, I have been talking myself out of starting a company that serves as an exchange for people selling equity in themselves. It is inevitable that someone tries this because the crowd-funding industry is so sexy. It will be an interesting experiment, but I'm not sure the effects on society will be net desirable. At its best, it would give people the ability to sell a fraction of themselves for some up-front cash and give them the ability to take bigger risks in the projects they do. Anyway, if you want to talk more about this, hit me up.