startups

The difficulty in recruiting hackers or seasoned technologists is often lamented in the tech startup community (e.g. Philly Startup Leaders), despite having both large and diverse developer communities.  I am constantly asked by entrepreneurs who/what/where/how to find hackers or tech co-founders.  They are a scarce resource, so here is a description of an idea for a developer community that functions as a company:

Hacker Community == Hacker Company

1. A hacker community forms a company, HackCo.  HackCo has a fairly open membership policy in the [local and remote] hacker communities.  All members are *part-time* at HackCo, like many developer communities (e.g. Philly On Rails) and open source projects (e.g. Ruby On Rails).  The governance structure is similarly organic.  This lends itself to leveraging people that have normal jobs in a coordinated fashion (there is no shortage of startup-curious developers … they just cannot risk everything).
2. An event is held where other companies compete to be selected by HackCo as the current project (or perhaps only project).
3. The NeedHack company wins the competition.  NeedHack issues stock options to HackCo.
4. HackCo members begin hacking on NeedHack’s business.
5. All HackCo members work on the same project, and each member’s contributions are given a score based on some metric of performance.  A member’s score is their equity in HackCo.  The metric used may change based on governance within HackCo (much like sales commission structures are modified).

There is a lot to be fleshed out, and since I don’t have this problem I’m hoping somebody else might run with it.  If it doesn’t exist already, I’d be willing to bet there is a Champion out there who could make it work. -Chris

I have stacks of business cards, and only “important” people make it into the Rolodex (joke).  It was a good idea once, but I rarely pull a card from the Rolodex.  I have been thinking for the past year about buying the Neat Business Cards scanner to digitize them, and throw away the originals. NeatReceipts is a Philly startup located near Vuzit at the University City Science Center.  Now I have another reason to procrastinate on this buying decision: Dropcard.

Dropcard, a fellow DreamIt Ventures company, is a free service with a vision of replacing business cards by using a combination of SMS text messages, email, and an online service.  It is easy to connect to someone by texting ‘drop joe@gmail.com‘ to 41411, then a vCard is emailed to each person for use with your favorite address book. The time of the exchange is permanently recorded so it replaces the need to write the date/time on the business card (something I try to do).

My address book is scattered in so many products, services, devices, and matter so I’m hoping this will help fix the problem over time. Another thought I have is that browsing a stack of business cards is nostalgic and triggers memories like the time/place it was exchanged … and it’s always fun to look at your own business cards from previous employers. I hope future applications will preserve this characteristic somehow.

Dropcard created a promotional video that I had to share because it’s hilarious: