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by thiagodotfm 4985 days ago
I get daily requests to join some random startup guys in their adventure, for equity.

They are all horrible and I doubt this model is going to work unless all the startups there are already profiting.

Having 100% of a business that makes $0, "but have the potential" isn't worth shit.

1 comments

This is Nathan from Late Labs. Our goal as a company is to create a community of high level developers who can work on projects together. We are also playing around with the idea of using successful existing companies to let developers work on project together for them. What type of horror stories have you worked on? I know we all have these, our goal in the long run is to help make sure developers don't wast their time on projects that aren't stable :)
>What type of horror stories have you worked on?

If you're a developer, then you know what sort of ridiculous proposals are common.

"Build my facebook clone for absolutely zero pay, but I'm feeling gracious so you get 15%!"

I do, however, like the idea of working on granular bits of startups and distributing my risk in a way that makes me more likely to have something take-off than committing to a single startup but not necessarily having any more control than the 'freelancer' mode.

That's our long-term goal for developers. Think of the projects we'll let developers work on as creating a diversified portfolio of equity. A developer can either work on one project and take more of a lead position, or work on multiple projects over time (from Late Labs and from other startups we partner with), for a specific equity base. We know how much time and effort building a site/app takes, so we understand. And I've seen so many "facebook clones" proposals over time so I know the feeling, where the team tells you that they potentially have a 1Billion user market. We're going to keep away from that and focus on smart business and marketing strategy :)