Quite simply, would you fund a novelist without seeing some writing samples? Sure, if a Vonnegut or King walks in, you're familiar with the brand name, otherwis

Quite simply, would you fund a novelist without seeing some writing samples? Sure, if a Vonnegut or King walks in, you're familiar with the brand name, otherwise you want to see some street cred. Github is the street cred for hackers these days. On a related note, since you mentioned Indinero there, if you notice at the bottom of that page, you'd have found this link https://indinero.com/gettingtoknowyou https://indinero.com/gettingtoknowyou which is very accurate of why a cultural fit and coding skill can make or break a startup in its first steps. As about other startups that have challenges, it's pretty easy to find. Quite a bit of YC startups are starting to do it - of course, a blog, github and twitter are helpful these days. Dropbox, Justin.tv, and more recently Greplin also have challenges as well. As a rule of thumb, here is the url nomenclature to find such challenges: "http://www.startup-name.{com|whatever}/jobs http://www.startup-name.{com|whatever}/jobs