[MichaelCrawford]

The Portland Startup Weekend presented itself as a way to get a new company started, but they were blasting everyone's trade secrets all over facebook and twitter. There was no discussion of taxation, nor how equity would be divided.

If you have the idea, I write the code, and angersock markets the product, how do we divide the equity?

There are some good answers to that question but the Startup Weekend company - a private, for-profit corporation - simply didn't address it, rather they got angry with me when I brought it up.

[empressplay]

Yeah, I've had similar experiences with my regional Startup Weekend franchise as well. The way they see it it's actually about coming up with a convincing pitch. This isn't of course "starting a company" or even in most cases developing a product. Instead, it's about coming up with an intriguing idea, that since you're just at the starting line yourself, can be jumped on and stolen by whoever else is there and has more startup capital than you do.