
Hitforge: A different Incubator - rokhayakebe
http://gigaom.com/2007/04/25/hitforge/
======
spazmatic
seed (angel) funding in 1996: I wrote UNIX. I got rich enough to fly my jet to
visit you. Here's $200K, I want 10% of the company.

seed (angel) funding in 2006: We wrote a web store. We got rich enough to fly
you in a jet to visit us. Here's $10K, we want 20% of the company.

seed (angel) funding in 2007 and beyond: We hired some guys in india to make a
web site. We got rich enough to buy a jetta. We can't tell you how much money
we will give you, we want all of the company. (but only if it all works out in
a couple of months.)

------
jamongkad
But thats how I feel about engineers with great passion who cant raise
money, usually because they were born in the wrong country or under the wrong
circumstances. I want to create an abstraction layer that allows them to be
entrepreneurs.

I like this part IMHO :-)

------
Ev
Yet another example of how bad people want to make money really-really bad
without actually doing anything. "Go from idea to a product in a few weeks
with some help of an offshoring developmet team".

Since when _software_ became so easy to make that it takes only _weeks_ to
"convert an idea..."?

How about building something hm... more complex than a dozen of HTMLized SQL
SELECT outputs?

------
ced
Interesting concept, but Yikes, is their site low on details.

"working remotely and independently"

"Let us know your funding / salary requirements"

"with help of an offshore engineering team"

I think that having a "guild" of some sort, to share the risks and the
success, is a good idea. But their particular implementation seems so
impersonal.

------
danielha
Toward the bottom, Om makes an analogy to the music industry where hit
factories were created to churn out manufactured pop stars -- some good, some
not so much.

The analogy is quite appropriate, especially how many new startups seem to
have as much substance as pop songs.

------
madanella
I think there's a lot of validity to this model, even outside of tech. I don't
get the restriction on non-techies though, is the management afraid of
competition?

------
nivi
By the way, Naval, the guy behind Hitforge, is the real brains behind Venture
Hacks.

