[michaelochurch]

There's good and bad here.

The good: right now, the funding racket for startups (unless they can get clients, and under-35's tend not to have those kinds of relationships yet) is unfair and, due to the illegal comparing-of-notes whereby a VC can turn off interest in supposed competitors, probably extortionate. It sucks. A lot of good businesses are shut out. Here's some writing I did on how to fix that: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/03/26/gervais-macle... .

The bad: this means that startups are funded based on their ability to attract attention and raise money (tip-jar model) when they really should be funded according to provision of value. These will probably converge over time, so you get eventual consistency.

On the whole, I think the good outweighs the bad. It's just that you couldn't use a tip-jar model to fund, say, a new GPU-aware C compiler. There's a lot of infrastructural technology that can't easily be funded by "dumb money" of the populace nor by the "I-think-I'm-smart money" of meddlesome VCs and executives.

There are a lot of hard financial problems to solve, but ideas like this are bringing us in the right direction.

[mindcrime]

I'm really intrigued by the possibilities that crowdfunding may offer, once the SEC fully implements the JOBS ACT stuff. I'm not sure I see the rosy picture that this guy paints:

http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/03/how-crowdfunding-and-the-jo...

But I think he makes some interesting points. I don't think this just relevant to Open Source companies either, although they may be uniquely positioned to really tap into this mode of funding (or not... I need to spend a lot more time thinking about this, especially since I run an Open Source startup).

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on crowdfunding, michaelochurch.

[michaelochurch]

I think crowdfunding is an excellent idea but it's too early to see how it plays out. It could fail; it could be The New Thing. Too early to tell.

One idea I've had, which I think has major steam, is passive payment. Given that my consulting rate is high (full rate I don't disclose but it's well over $200/h; however, I give lower rates, sometimes zero, for businesses I believe in and non-profits) it really isn't a major cost to pay $2/hour for websurfing. That's a rounding error. I have no problem paying $0.25 for the time it took to write this post because the value of the time itself is an order of magnitude greater.

People would need to have the ability to calibrate their passive payment, obviously. For me, $2/hour is nothing; for the developed world, it's far too much.

Right now, advertising is the only passive payment system we have and it's extraordinarily inefficient.

Passive payment would make living by blogging much easier. For example, I get about 1700 hits per day (2.5 minutes each) on my blog. If we assume the average web user sets his passive payment level to $1.00 per hour (median would be lower; mean might be around that) then I'd be making $70 per day. Not enough to live on (in New York) but it would almost cover my too-damn-high rent.

Passive payment would also be great for time-tracking. I probably wouldn't waste as much time if I realized "holy shit, I wasted $0.73 reading that garbage!"

Finally, it would obsolete those damn paywalls. I don't mind paying 95 cents to read a good NYT article (again, the time is much a greater expense) but bringing out my credit card is a hassle.