Mark Cuban launches Open Source Funding Environment
February 16, 2009
Regular readers will know that one of my favorite topics in the startup realm is the supposed value of business ideas. Here are some of the posts where I have written about it:
As a matter of fact, in one of those posts I interviewed fellow startup blogger Jackson Miller (who writes the Tennessee Startup Blog) about his tongue-in-cheek experiment of offering to buy ideas for 2 cents a piece.
There is also an interesting post by Derek Sivers about calculating the value of business ideas. His point is that the idea is only one part of the business equation with execution being the other part. Ideas are cheap and easy to come by and execution is hard, expensive and takes time and talent.
Dane Carlson on his Business Opportunities Weblog just pointed out something interesting that Mark Cuban is doing. Cuban calls it an open source funding environment and it works like this: you post your business plan on his blog and he will comment on it. If he likes your business plan and it fits within the rules that he lists, he will invest in your business.
The downside? You have to put your idea out there for all to see. And yes, some people will rip your idea off and may do a better idea executing than you might. But competition is not a bad thin and the market is big. I believe that business is not a competition of ideas, but a competition of execution. You don’t buy your lunch at a particular place because they invented the hamburger, but because that place does the best job preparing and serving it.
This idea sounds pretty radical and unconventional and will generate a lot of discussion. When I read the post there were already over 1200 comments and submissions. I scanned some of them and its a mixed back for sure. There are some interesting ideas, some very whacked ones and some humorous, but unrealistic ones. It seems that Cuban hasn’t blogged since that post went up on Feb. 9th. He may be overwhelmed with opportunities to invest, or he might just be busy reading the 1200+ comments.
I think the most interesting part is that we are seeing a change in the startup culture. It is slowly becoming acceptable to share business ideas openly. What Cuban did is an example, but so are things like co-working and the startup weekends. In a network based culture it doesn’t work to operate with lots of secrecy. Access to information is shifting the competitive paradigm of business from the idea to the execution. And that’s a good thing.
