photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³
Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, is offering what he calls Open Source Funding. He’s asking entrepreneurs to explain their ideas openly and completely in the comment section of his blog. If he likes the commenter and the idea, he’ll buy in.
I love it. This is a perfect example of my dictum that ideas are worthless.
Many of the early commenters worried that if they offered too many details about their business ideas that others would steal their ideas. Cuban clearly expects that the good ideas will be stolen and replicated elsewhere. He explains:
If its a good idea and worth funding, we want it replicated elsewhere. The idea is not just to help you, but to figure out how to help the economy through hard work and ingenuity. If you come up with the idea and get funding, you have a head start. If you execute better than others, you could possibly make money at it. As you will see from the rules below, these are going to be businesses that are mostly driven by sweat equity.
There are some good ideas in the comments that can be easily implemented on a smaller scale in only a couple days. My favorite is: We Scan Everything.
See any other gems?