>> Having ideas and being a user in your target market doesn't cut the mustard IMO. And an early stage team doesn't need a project manager, or detailed spec sheets, or other "manager-y" stuff.

I predict you'll fail with whatever you try to startup AS LONG AS you have this attitude. A founder who used to be a former user and can point to the flaws in everything on the market and came up with a better solution is an IDEAL person to have start something. Their intuition is based on their experience of what people like them (ie, former customers) will PAY MONEY for. That's a business. Hackers hacking all night is not a business. Sorry to burst your bubble.

You can't be more wrong. You only get PRACTICAL, USEFULL business ideas AS a customer/user. That's why 99.99% of programmers who start businesses flop - they're so wrapped up in some tiny aspect of their warped reality and how their awesome code makes a tiny part of it a bit better in ways nobody understands, that they never stop and think that 99.99% of the general population of who they think will be their customers couldn't care less.

That's if they even bother to think about who their customers will be. Most programmers can't think beyond "users" and I'm sorry, but now that we're entering recession times, you'll learn really quick that users does NOT equal same as paying customer.

The sad truth for you is that most successful companies were started by people without the technical skills but who were users of many things, had a "big picture perspective" and thought to themselves, "You know what sucks about the current state of things, this, this and that - someone should make something different like this and this."

Otherwise, from your model, you just have programmers making something most likely nobody will care about. That's not a company, that's code. If you get some users, that may a service, by which I mean of the charity kind. If they pay you, that's a product, though not necessarily a successful company.

HERE - FORGET MY THESIS - imagine instead this scenario - let's say all the "big idea" people went on some Atlas shrugged type of strike. That leaves you programmers in boston, and those in virginia, in New York, S.V, and about a hundred million others in Russia, Eastern Europe, India, China, Netherlands, Ireland, France ...

If the idea people are that irrelevant to starting great companies, and programmers are that all-important, why don't you guys all get together, form some sort of super development virtual company and spit out 50 million uber-companies all based on your awesome code?

I'll bet 50 idea people in various industries will start successful companies that MAKE MONEY for every 1 programmer with a brilliant algorithm to load YouTube videos 2% faster or whatever passes for a great business idea among hackers these days that manages to fool some desperate, inexperienced VC to put money into their project.

FINAL ANALYSIS: Masons build, but building without a good plan leads to well-executed crap. No inspired architect/designer, no beauty, no inspirational "thing" that PAYING customers can wrap their minds around. I've said it before and I'll say it again: just because you get "users" and maybe bought out by Mega-Corp. doesn't mean you've created a successful company. Get people to pay you money for your thing, that's a business. Otherwise, just a delusion that will never survive the next 4 years of economic slowdown. Can't figure out how to make people hand over their money for your "thing"? That's where you need "business idea" people who've honed their intuition from using everything in the market.