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I disagree. Fred Wilson puts it much more succinctly than I could: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/04/can-the-crowd-be-more-patient.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/

• dlf 14y ago
  And yet he seems to argue that the sort of world changing things we need aren't in the wheelhouse of startups, in the internet/mobile sense, which are the sort of startups that Phil Libin argued should only be done if you mean to change the world. Fred Wilson's post seems to advocate crowdsourcing the funding of big, world changing ideas like curing cancer. Tackling these sort of problems is hardly prevalent among startups, but as far as it goes it's fine. But then changing the world is still an extrinsic motivation. You're not intrinsically driven to the idea of a startup or an obsession with the problem your trying to solve. I tend to think this is more problematic with the really big, world changing sort of problems with a long time horizon. It's also unclear to me how crowdfunding these sort of things would work. Would you need to renew funding annually? Would people continue funding you if they didn't see marked progress? ...maybe that's the point of his post, but in any case it's tangential at best to the present discussion.