The effects of a "hacker collective" on chances of receiving outside investment?
I recently had the thought that instead of trying to look for a technical cofounder, I could instead just make something of a "collective" of people who are skilled in one area of another, and can pitch in on the project at different times.
[Edit 3:14PM 12/6/13:] This would ideally enable a startup to several people working on it, without needing to give them arbitrary amounts of equity in advance. Also, the startup would not need to hold out for that one "can do everything" tech cofounder, and can instead have many people slowly chipping away at the problem (even if they don't have tech skills, but say, are learning and care about the problem the startup solves.)
They could get a similar amount of the company, but this would be measured dynamically, with GitHub (it's a tech startup) and basic Excel for ideas (spreadsheet approved weekly or so among FT. PT people not involved in idea aspects, or recompensed up-front.)
As for everyone's shares, they would all (PT or FT, even the example girl who helped with graphic design) would understand up-front that there work is going into a single entity. That is, if and when outside investors acquire equity of the company (say 7%), the "collective's" 100% falls to 93%.
My main concern is what effect you guys think this would have on ability to attract outside investment. Or even enter something like an accelerator. Assuming, any problems you see with the model can be overcome (I'd like to hear those too, in the context of the main question.)
As I understand this model is similar to a "grunt fund", but I was only referred to said term yesterday, so am looking into it.
(PS - not sure, but are ?'s automatically inserted into the "ask" section of HackerNews? Wasn't sure how to do that.) What problem are you trying to solve here? Is this really simpler than finding a tech cofounder? More than just skills, reliability and dedication is what you want in any cofounder/early employees. Would this give that to you? Thanks for pointing out a lack of "thesis." I edited the post to try and highlight this. To answer directly though - I currently lead to meetup.com groups, one for programmers and one for entrepreneurs. I had the idea that I can pull help from the programming one. They are all acquaintances, and as a newcomer to programming, I don't know any one else well enough (ie friends) that can be a cofounder with me. Making this "collective" would ideally let me have people work on issues little by little, on a "need-to-know" basis. Then if we get along, I'd bring them on FT (they are given equity even for the previous PT work.) I don't have any $ to be paying people either. I see this as circumventing the reliability problem (they get equity for real work only, not hours - ie GitHub commits etc). As for dedication, we get to work with each other for mutual benefit, and see if we "get along."