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Comment by wkoszek | Hacker News Reader

Hm. I’m a little puzzled. If you can’t meet other people to talk, you’ll have problems forming a firm. So my counter-offer to people reading this: meet with each other for lunch every Sunday. It’ll be $15/lunch. After 12 weeks of lunches you will know if you like the people and whether they have thr skills and can form your team anyway and not give anybody anything, especially the 1%. To find people who care, form a meetup, post on HN and Reddit. If nobody replies after 12 attemps, your idea is wrong and change your idea. This method lets you iterate through 5 ideas a year. If you dont have the idea and like coding - there are hundreds of post on how to find the idea. Ping me if you still have no idea. I can give you hundreds of ideas that I have no time building.

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People used to summarize YC in a similar way. The devil is usually in the details though. I think this program could be valuable to a certain type of aspiring founder.

Attempting to market to random people seems like it is a different approach, perhaps complementary to this one. To me it seems like Sidepact is essentially acting as the curator of the top of the funnel you describe. They do the work of collecting people interested in doing something, then iterate together until matches are made and ideas are moved further along.

I think this is a better approach for people who say "I don't have an idea". Usually what they mean is that they don't have an idea they think isn't already covered by deeply entrenched incumbents (internet search) or hopelessly swarmed by competition willing to race you past the bottom of (quality x price) you're willing to stop at (games). What these people want is confidence and support to follow-through on them, even if they don't seem good, or to develop that spark that sets your idea apart from the rest, not a list of ideas to work on.

We really hope that people feel inspired to do that too! We've found that for some founders, having structure and shared commitment go a long way and we'd like to support that part of the process. The equity is also there to ensure that the organization has aligned incentives and skin in the game.

Make it be $300/month. This would align people too. Or maybe publish the list of VCs and angels who will come to pitch week. If its Andressen Horowitz or Sequoia or Mayfield, that makes sense

We've thought about charging more to ensure commitment through the program, but we'd like to make the program as accessible as possible (especially for our first cohort).

As for the VCs and angels coming to pitch week, we're actively working on this and hope to have more to share over the coming weeks.

How will that work?

Does an actual organization actually get created during this program?

Who owns the intellectual property?

I contact a friend of mine the decides to be a customer of something, the team decides not to pursue it?

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