Shanti’s Dispatches

I was on Digg this morning and saw a thing about Cambria House. Looks interesting.

I googled them and found this post on mashable about their launch.

Here’s my take:

I wish Cambrian House the best of luck.

I started something similar to this (it’s now defunct) that never gained much traction, called “Menlo Park 2.0.”

Our business model was going to be much more like typical angel investors, where we would take 1-2% of equity in the startups we got going and 1% of revenue (or 2.5% of profits), once the startups were rolling.

In exchange, people who started companies with us would also get stock in Menlo Park 2. It would’ve been kind of like a diversification play for startup entrepreneurs.

The problem was, as some commenters have pointed out re: The Business Experiment (which I also watched) was actually getting development time contributed by the community.

I actually don’t think the phrase “ideas are worth a dime a dozen” does the concept justice.

It should read: “ideas aren’t worth the lint in my pocket.” A little harsh, yes, but true, imho.

Everyone with even a moderate sprinking of creativity and intelligence could come up with 100 ideas in 15 minutes, if they sat down and thought about problems they faced and possible solutions. For startups — it’s 1% inspiration (the idea), 99% perspiration (execution).

Again though, best of luck to Cambrian House. All it would really take is 1 moderate success for something like this to take off and give the concept legitimacy.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos