Re: Possible huge business

Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Tue, 01 Jun 1999 22:42:43 -0400

Sasha Chislenko wrote:
>
> At 06:13 AM 6/1/99 , Brian Atkins wrote:
> >I have seen this attitude a lot over the past several months
> >(in myself too)... ideas pop up, seem wonderful, but the person
> >envisioning it does not have the wherewithal to just do it.
> >Seems that if there was some kind of company that would pay
> >people for ideas, and then use its resources to develop them
> >that it could really make some dough. Like Hollywood paying
> >writers for scripts- the writers don't make much cash, but
> >writing is what they love; the studios make all the $$$. Hmmm
>
> One of the ways this can be handled, is to find a company that
> believes in your ideas and have a general contracting arrangement
> with them, with stock sharing. I started doing this now, and it
> allows me to both launch the ideas and eat better sandwiches.
>
> Another approach is to have an umbrella company that would
> launch startups and work with investors, managerial teams,
> techie pools and the idea guys. This activity is interesting
> enough to attract some people. Such groups exist, we could
> create a new one.
>

Yeah I think it's interesting because if you did pay people for rights to their ideas (just like movie studios pay writers for their scripts), then very quickly you might end up with a bunch of people (just think about how many screenplay writers are out there) just coming up with all kinds of ideas (of course most of them are crap) in order to make money. So it might stimulate ideas in general.

Can you point me to these "umbrella companies" you say are already doing this? I can think of stuff like IdeaLab that incubate startups, but it really doesn't go to quite the extreme I am describing. 

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