Crowdfunding is a solution to high quality software development, open source development, science funding, and sopa/pipa. It's really quite amazing and people h

Crowdfunding is a solution to high quality software development, open source development, science funding, and sopa/pipa. It's really quite amazing and people haven't caught on yet. It's also a solution to the startup problem of building what people want. Eric Ries talks about "pre-testing" - put up a landing page and seeing if you get signups. However, this sounds scammy. A better way is to simply launch a kickstarter/indiegogo campaign. You release the software as open source, which is better for the world as well. But you also get paid as well. You want to launch as startup that does project management as a saas. Instead put a kickstarter campaign up for 1 million dollars, or however much you were expecting to earn from the lifetime of your startup. If enough people want it, it will get funded. The next step you build and release as open source. Afterwards you can host it, or a bunch of other people who are expert at sysadmin host it and get customers paying for saas. You move on to the next project you want to build. The point is, you can have many crowdfunding campaigns going. Think of 20 apps, list them for 60 days. The ones that get funded, you build. It also solves sopa/pipa. Someone has ideas for movies, launches campaigns in parallel. The ones that get funded, he creates releases for free on youtube. Same for science. Scientists would no longer need to be attached to a university or do the politics that is involved in getting funding in science. They go directly to the public. In the above scenarios everyone wins. Customers and creators. The only people who lose are people who were good at politicking their way up the coroorate ladder. Although, they don't really lose. They can switch to being marketers who launch campaigns, however they'll now need to have competence in marketing and brainstorming ideas. Firms only exist to solve the communication problem. Now that we have the internet, there really is no need for organizations to exist. As more database-based information systems are created for crowdsourcing (kickstarter, fiverr, mechanical turk) , the more efficient this process becomes - which is good news for startups because this is what they are creating.