[dabent]

This is just another case of investing in people, just like YC, or any startup investor does.

"The guy was one of the best enterprise sales people in North America and highly valued by the organization."

I get your point and Benioff was not the ordinary "business" person. If someone with that level of success wanted to talk with me about their project, actually had some kind of written plan for it (even just a dozen pages) and could actually rent out space on top of that, they'd at least get me interested.

I think most developers end being approached by a mid-level manager (often freshly laid off) who has an idea outside of their area of expertise, not so much as one page for a spec, no money and only has unwritten promises of equity for pay. I know I've been approached by a few over the last decade. If I bet on them, I'd have to try and understand what they want built, build it on my own time and hope that they honor their promises of pay in the future. Maybe there have been successes in that case, but it seems like such a long shot, especially when almost anything else offers a better reward-to-risk ratio, that it's never worth pursuing.

I think that the repeated offers that developers often get from non-technical founders start to sound like the offers writers get to develop a novel based on an idea non-writer has. Very often, the developer has more than enough drive and imagination to develop their own idea, just an an author can develop stories on their own.