Laugh while you can about Kickstarter's brand. Donors are going to be happier sending money via an entity they've actually heard of, that has a track record of

Laugh while you can about Kickstarter's brand. Donors are going to be happier sending money via an entity they've actually heard of, that has a track record of delivering millions of dollars as promised. Vendors are going to ask themselves how their use of a cut-rate bootstrapping vendor reflects on the quality of their own brands. These problems will all get worse once the first Kickstarter clone goes under and a bunch of people with Twitter feeds get burned. That will happen. Meanwhile, consider this excerpt from Founders At Work, chapter one: MAX LEVCHIN: It was pretty funny because [at the time of PayPal's launch] we met with all these people in the banking and credit card processing industry, and they said "Fraud is going to eat you for lunch." We said, "What fraud?" They said "You'll see, you'll see." I actually had an advisor or two from the financial industry, and they said, "Get ready for chargebacks. You need to have some processing in place." We said "Uh huh." They said "You don't know what a chargeback is, do you?" If Levchin had done nothing else for the world than dictate these words, it would have been sufficient. Every time I hear someone, often myself, utter a phrase like "that business is so simple; it's just a glorified Perl script and some JPEGs" I try to envision Levchin, reading these words to me.