Hitforge: A different Incubator

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.)

“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 :-)

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?

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.

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.

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?

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