Looking for founders for three startup ideas | Hacker News Reader

Looking for founders for three startup ideas

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32 pointsrchaudhary15 comments

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the intent of this post, but I'm reminded of a hilarious Facebook group I used to be in called "I'll handle the business side".

Example of the types of posts screenshotted and shared in said group: "hi i have an excellent idea for a startup, easily compete with Facebook/Google, i need a lead programmer you need to have 10+ years experience in javascript and C. i cannot pay you but if you build a model platform I will look at it and if i like it i will use it for my idea and you will get equity in my company. cannot offer salary. please respond immediately"

No you don't get it. THESE guys are different!

Carta needs these services to thrive as a private equity marketplace/"book entry" recordkeeper, while anyone building a startup for these services would be better served getting funding and an acqui-hire from Wall Street and other traditional financial services orgs with incredibly deep pockets.

> Carta is a fun company because the more problems we solve, the more problems we get to solve.

So, you're like every other company? I used to work as a Soft. Eng. for a particular Fortune 500 company in the outdoor/pool luxury industry. They've been around ~40 years. Technologically though, woefully immature. Every e-commerce problem we solved was answered with another "fun" problem to solve. What makes you different?

Let's look at the "ideas"

- Total compensation, "problem": Ah, so data mining and monetization.

- Portfolio analytics, "problem": ...you want data analysis?

- Sell-side Research Firm: "There will be a market for sell-side research." ...umm, why? Why would those private venture-backed companies WANT to be associated with you? Then you're differentiating factor is...marketing?

Finally, why are you posting this here? On HN? At best, it's misguided. At worst, it's tone-deaf or shady. If your ideas and motivations are legit then keep building. Put your own hours and sleepless nights behind it. Prove yourself. Show there is actually market demand for what you claim. Then come back. Offer value before asking for it.

So you want people to apply with what a v1 of the product should look like and a vision ? Why should people do that for free and what guarantees do they have you won’t Profit off the suggestions ?

IMO this is very shady.

I've heard the story that the idea doesn't matter. It's the team that matters, with a good idea. I'm not saying this is true or not. Probably depends.

In this case, they are presenting their "ideas" as a "shell" of an idea and soliciting anyone who is willing to match their expectations in "good team". They talk about a product by a Sell-Side Research Firm which enables a "robust research industry to help investors make better trading decisions". That's not a product. It's a meme. They even say it:

Think Morningstar for private markets.

A better idea is an AI crawler just for me, which only crawls what is relevant and deletes the rest from the search index.

tbf, if you can convince someone you and your cofounders have a better approach to portfolio analysis and sell-side research than all the finance professionals etc doing it [big if] they'll make more investing in you than trying to replicate what you've suggested you might do, and you've got a much more defensible business model than the average founder pitch. Of course, you've also got well-established competition you're not going to beat by scaling really fast and having better marketing

It looks super shady.

If you believe these are fields of potential massive growth, then why you don't develop them in situ?

And if someone else is working on that already... why you don't acqui-hire them?

> If you believe these are fields of potential massive growth, then why you don't develop them in situ?

Because they have a list of three problems, not of three solutions?

On one side, I think it's nice that a company decides to explore/fund new ideas and products by giving someone an entrepreneurial-like offer.

At the same time, a great founder shouldn't need to do this via Carta, and I'd be worried a lot about Carta's real intention.

Not sure how Carta could defuse these concerns, though. Perhaps they're well intentioned but it's hard for them to prove it.

>At the same time, a great founder shouldn't need to do this via Carta, and I'd be worried a lot about Carta's real intention.

Would you say the same holds true for ycombinator's seed accelerator program?

It might sound arrogant, but yes, it should apply to everything, to a degree.

I'd say that YC is probably the highest value among the "seed" things that exist out there, and therefore it would apply to it less than this Carta initiative.

Would you agree?

@Carta: What's the benefit to this model vs hiring and directing the products development internally? Besides a possible seed round, the other benefits (public API/infra, office space, access to Carta folks) appear to be of limited value for these endeavors.

Probably sharing risk (and upside) and attracting a different profile

The funny thing about this is one of their product idea is quantitative analysis for VCs... And then they say send us a pitch, we don't care about numbers at all!

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