Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that thinks Bobby the poster is acting oddly, with odd expectations?

Maybe it's because I'm not familiar with norms around "Startup Weekend" type events.

I have no doubt Billy the pitch man is an asshole (almost all restaurant owners are, for one thing). I also think he's being completely reasonable being confused about why this guy he just met thinks he should own a piece of Billy's company.

But I confess I've never understood why anyone would want to go to a 'startup weekend' kind of thing and code for free on someone elses business idea, someone you've just met, in the first place.

I must be missing something about the general cultural expectations of such events.

But it does seem odd to have an event focused on starting businesses (and creating teams likely to work together in the future on the business?) among people who have just met, with no written contracts involved (even prohibited!) based just on cultural expectations which may or may not be shared, and no time to discuss them or get to know each other in advance. Do successful teams actually get created from this process sometimes?

The idea of the event is to get people to work together for the weekend, see if they like working with each other, expand their network etc. Its not to do work on someone elses startup. I've seen many teams that randomly formed at Startup Weekend go on to build a real startup afterwards.

As noted in the FAQ, it was actually against the rules for an already existing company to show up.

That's part of the reason why contracts are not allowed - everyone owns the IP then so there cannot be an owner-employee relationship in any sense.

No, you're not the only one. The guy wants 40 basis points for 10-20 hours of work. In real companies, you would have to work 4 years to get that kind of equity. He thinks he's a founder of the internet when he's actually a guy in backwater Texas giving himself way too much credit for modeling a basic CRM schema.

To paraphrase a former governer of Texas, he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.

Generally if you're quoting Texas politicians you're already on shaky ground.

Not when it's Ann Richards

Also not when it's a great quote in its own right.

"In real companies, you would have to work 4 years to get that kind of equity."

When Billy builds a "real company" he can make those kinds of deals with developers. Right now, Billy has nothing like a real company. He has an idea, no ability to execute by himself, and a 50% partner who also can't execute said idea.

Startups are not real companies, and equity for working on a startup is very different than equity for working on a real company.

A real company also expects to pay market rates for developers. So, by that metric Billy should have been paying these developers $50-$150/hour (depending on market, experience, etc.) for these 20-30 hours worth of work, if they were contractors rather than employees. It sounds like at least some of the team has enough experience to be on the high end of the rate scale, and if they actually delivered some sort of working prototype in that time, they certainly delivered value.

They agreed on 40 basis points in advance. That's a contract. If 40 basis points was "way too much credit" then Billy-the-idea-guy shouldn't have accepted those terms.

Also, saying that X% of something is "a lot" independent of stage or size is absolutely inane.

So what implies that Billy has any more stake in the company than Bobby if they each owned 0% of nothing at the start of the weekend?

Just to clarify, this didn't happen in Texas.

First understand this. "I code on your business idea and it becomes our idea." Idea's worth nothing.

Ideas are not IP.

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