Why share?

Reasons not to share
There are lots of reasons not to share your idea.
 * You might be nurturing it, and toying with the idea of quitting your day job, or dropping out of school to follow your passion.


 * But you might have doubts, reservations, or commitments that prevent you from fully following through.
 * You can't let your startup consume your life.
 * You think you have the next Google or something, and you have dreams of being rich, owning a private jet or racing yacht or something.
 * You might be a failed startup, but that doesnt mean you didn't achieve anything.

Reasons to share
There are also some compelling reasons to share:
 * You have probably solved interesting puzzles developing your features, and sharing them could help other startups overcome similar obstacles.
 * You can exchange your expertise for equity in this company, and profit from your otherwise worthless sweat and blood.
 * This would also have the positive externality of improving the startup community as a whole
 * if users can contribute their solutions to problems that other startups are working on, then all of the startups can learn from these advancements,
 * and focus their attention on new, more interesting problems

Leveraging existing communities
Building a community from scratch is a difficult task. However, if we reach out to very focused communities and encourage the most curious/bored to read, learn, and contribute, hopefully users will eventually be able to create a self sustaining startup seeding company. Integrating with communities that already focus on relevent topics could help us more rapidly develop our own community of users who interact and capitalize on each other to form startups

Building a community
I'm not sure where to start. But I think the Hacker News users are pretty smart, and seem like the type of users i'm interested in. I believe that many posts to the news section prompt ideas for how the services that the posts mention could be improved, or of other ideas for startups that are prompted by the site submitted to hacker news. Brad Fitzpatrick's lazyweb worked, because his thoughts were interesting enough to engage a highly intelligent group of followers who probably knew the answers to the questions he asked. I believe that the userbase is a self selecting group of users, much like the followers of bradfitz's journal. Hacker News users are more than likely to have at least considered participating in a startup, and have valuable assets (experience, insight, connection) to contribute to the community. People who are in active startups could weigh in, as could venture capital hot shots, angel investors, other incubators (who already freely distribute videos of their lectures and demo days). Demo days could feature insight into how technology works, like bradfitz's walkthrough of livejournal's backend. (Memcache).

Problems that users have without this community
The whole point of this wiki is to allow you to connect and collaborate with people who share the same dreams as you do. You may have lots of ideas for how to improve the world around you, but lack the skillset to implement these ideas. However, there is some combination of people who could potentially work together and satisfy all the skillsets required to implement this idea. And there also is some person or group of people out there who has the talent, or sheer determination to organize and lead these people. And probably someone else to help them raise money (from crowdfunding to venture capital, to incubator programs, for example).

But that shouldn't stop you from contributing. Some people can build the moving parts, others can assemble them. Others can do market research, price them,
 * Some ideas are easily understood, some are more complicated
 * Some have immediate payoffs, others operate on a much longer time horizon
 * Some ideas have huge potential, others are less rewarding
 * Some ideas are extremely fuzzy, others are well articulated


 * Some people are disciplined, some have trouble focusing
 * Some people have extensive experience, others are relatively inexperienced
 * Some people are very good at monotonous, repetitive coding, others write programs to write their programs


 * So many ideas worth pursuing are tragically abandoned, or quickly discarded, mostly because a user can't figure out how to solve all the problems that arise while implementing their idea.
 * which is a shame, because they could really build something if only they persisted and recruited people with talents that complemented their own and fulfilled the requirements for the project.


 * By sharing these ideas, and using them as starting points for conversations, people from many different backgrounds can identify other individuals to collaborate with and try to realize that dream.

Users can evaluate themselves, and post this information in their profiles, which are just wiki pages for now. If people work together, they can eventually evaluate each other, and the user who was evaluated could chose to keep this information private, or share either parts of it or the whole thing with other users who might be interested in working with them.

How a dream can become a reality
Users who suddenly stumble upon inspiration can write up and share their ideas, as best they can express them. A community can collaborate, and rate these ideas according to all of the above criteria, as well as categorize and tag the idea. Other users who find these ideas interesting can chip in, either with experience based advice, related information, introductions to people who might be interested or helpful, etc. Someone can submit a top down outline of what they would build to implement these ideas, then users can brainstorm together, and those who learn quickly and jump from thought to thought can pair with those who have a knack for explaining things. Then the idea could iterate as a result of the cross pollination between smart people.

Someone else could turn that into a business plan, someone else could put together a design for the software that would have to be written to implement the idea (for now, we'll focus on tech startups, but really this idea can be generalized to any type of startup). The software would consist of components, basically custom libraries solve a specific problem (it would be really cool to open source these along the way). If this were to be written in an object oriented language, for example, the design would consist of classes and interfaces, with defined, well documented behavior. Programmers would collaborate to develop solutions from scratch, others could improve these solutions,

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