
Meet the World’s Cheapest Venture Capitalist - wyclif
http://www.wired.com/business/2012/12/worlds-cheapest-venture-capitalist/
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hristov
Great now all the technical press just hangs out at hn looking for stories.
The circle is complete.

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thoughtcriminal
HN has more than its share of misinformation. Just because people use big
words around here doesn't mean much.

As for WIRED, the journalistic quality has been going downhill for years. I
stopped my subscription back in 2004.

~~~
thoughtcriminal
My comment was mean and I'm sorry. It's the quality of my personality that
goes downhill - every time I get on HN.

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readme
I almost applied for the $37. Then, by the time I typed out my email I
realized how giving away your concept and plans for profitability with only a
speculative offer for publicity and $37 dollars is a total rip.

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gregpilling
Quoting the article: "By the end of the evening, he had upward of 40
applications, as well as offers to supplement each of his investments, to the
tune of $50 apiece, from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen (of the
aforementioned Andreessen Horowitz) and tech entrepreneur Thomas Ptacek."

I think this is great. Many ideas suffer from lack of publicity and not lack
of usefulness. His own Pinboard took a long time to get noticed and to become
the sensation it is. I offered to contribute $20 per startup, but I am sure
that he is already overwhelmed with support.

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JoelMarsh
I feel like this is a joke that I almost get, but don't.

~~~
daniel-cussen
It's one of those jokes that got everybody laughing, but everyone suddenly
stopped laughing, got all serious and realized it was brilliant.

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lubujackson
The only problem with this is that he wants anything in return at all. If you
take convertible debt (as he says) you must be 1) incorporated, 2) lawyered-
up, if at all serious. Maybe the marketing he can provide is worth it, but I
look at this as almost a statement/art project. From that context, it is just
not going to make financial sense to bother with for a one-man show.

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chmike
It looks like Maciej Cegłowski is trying to undercut Y Combinator! PG himself
made the apology of this strategy in one of his essays. But Maciej should be
careful because there is still room to undercut him.

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bravura
Actually this isn't a bad model: If you use software to easily create
syndicates, you could raise a few months, assuming you keep your burn at two
guys in a garage.

Kickstarter meets angel.co

If you put money in the company, it's completely through standardized docs
that say it is uncapped convertible debt.

So you can create rolling syndicates of people that each contribute $50 or
$250 or $1250 dollars.

This is done publicly, and is a way for angels to signal mild interest in a
company in a public way.

Conversion should not be triggered by an investment under $50K, to prevent the
argument that the early investors bought equity at the same price as YC.

It makes the market for equity in startups a little more efficient.

~~~
solutionhn
Why do we have to think in such complicated ways?

Aren't we supposed to make a great and compelling product that makes each one
of our customers pay us this $37. Why do we even need to do do all this
rolling syndicated thingy?

Investment from anybody is a pain that is worth taking if you are getting a
large amount in return. For the smaller amounts, working with customers is
better on the pain-return axis.

KISS

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chandru89new
Okay so people don't want to appreciate this guy. That's fine because it's
nothing as big as it is tooted to be but let's also understand that he's not
doing the tooting - and nor is he doing this to gain attention to himself...
it's to a philosophy/policy that he wants to gain attention to.

1\. He knows what he's doing. Only a fool would actually make this crazy idea
so public.

2\. $37 is nothing and he accepts it publicly so let's keep those "it's cheap,
it's a spam, it's a joke, it's crap" comments to ourselves :)

3\. It's not a speculative offer: at least, not after it's got so much public
coverage and someone will be snooping around to see if he keeps his word. So
$37 for focused publicity is pretty good.

4\. In fact, he's doing a good thing. Most startups need nothing but exposure
and connection with the right people. A few good men talking about the startup
on their blogs gets a lot of good for the startup.

5\. The part about convertible debt is going to be very debatable... and
downright condemned but his investments in the form of time and contacts-
expertise is going to be more than what a million-dollar VC would invest.

6\. or in short, "it's not about the money."

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sgdesign
I thought the original concept was a satire of VCs and incubators meant to
point out that you don't need a lot of cash to build a startup, you just need
drive and hard work.

But now, it seems everybody's taking it seriously? For example, the comments
on that Wired article are dead serious.

So I don't know if I'm the one who's missing the point, or if everybody else
is…

~~~
gojomo
A concept can work at both the joking and serious levels simultaneously.
Sometimes this has been called "ha ha, only serious":

[http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/ha+ha+only+seriou...](http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/ha+ha+only+serious)

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nyfarang
Is he taking a % of the companies or just doing this for exposure for
pinboard/public service or...?

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arbuge
Not as bad as it sounds. That works out to approx 180 packets of Ramen
noodles. In theory you could survive for 90 days like with any other
incubator, though you might come down with high blood pressure from all the
excess sodium.

~~~
wyclif
That's why you throw the flavour packets away and put veggies or something
healthy in.

~~~
amorphid
It works, until you need you need to scale your free Heroku instance to 1
$30-something worker for more than a month :)

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obilgic
I agree with his argument that 37+publicity will be enough.

But the selection process is the most important thing in this bet, and should
not be simplified, he should spend as much time as HN people spend to select
their batches.

