[timr]

Low-effort, maybe. But it was always high risk, and the reward was unclear except for a few players who did it successfully ("successfully"...it's not like any of these startups became titans) and marketed it well. Probably the marketing was the secret there, not the "open startup" part.

In the startup world, a lot of trendy ideas get repeated with little/no thought put into their actual risks and benefits for a particular situation. Remember when everyone was certain that feeding their team lunch in the office was the secret to winning? Today the hype is that you don't even want to have an office.

YMMV.