[thebenedict]

I appreciate the update on Phileas and Fogg! I remember seeing the launch on here a couple of years ago.

I'm curious about "idea factories are a dime a dozen, and nobody would want to work for one". I've turned down similar arrangements in the past because they felt vaguely sketchy, but didn't realize "idea factories" are common. What are the problems with them?

[gkoberger]

I can only speculate, but here's a few of the issues I have with them:

  * No incentive to see anything through, since there's always a "next idea"
  * Lack of vision. Most of the good startups have someone with a general vision, which is impossible this way.
  * Harder to recruit people since there's no core idea to get behind
  * Since the only way these are funded is by a rich person (after all, no VC would ever invest in one), it's susceptible to the whims of said rich person.
  * What happens if something becomes successful? How does equity/spinning out/etc work? And, if it spins out... all the revenue for the "factor" dries up.

There's a lot more, I'm sure.

[thebenedict]

Looked at charitably these could be mitigated with good contracts and governance. E.g:

  * Well defined procedures for choosing what to work on and for how long
  * Agreement on what metrics to to base go/no-go decisions for continuing with an idea past the initial stages
  * Contracts to specify how spinoff equity is assigned. One interesting proposal I've heard involves a calculation based on developer hours worked over the initial development period.

Might be interesting outside of major tech markets where where VC funding is unlikely anyway, which could be an added benefit to the traveling idea factory/accelerator.

I appreciate that this is hard (if possible) to do in practice, and that lack of vision might be a fundamental problem. It also feels like it could be an excuse to treat developers poorly -- which was one of my concerns when I had the opportunity and seems to have happened in this case.

[calpaterson]

I work for an "ideas factory" and can confirm we have all of those problems.