Hiding wrote on Feb 28
th, 2014 at 2:11am:
Where I worked as a waiter, we were all students. All the customers knew this and, if you were interesting enough or they were bored enough, they'd ask you about your studies. I don't know why, but I got a couple serious job offers and a bunch of fake offers from hacks. The serious ones turned out ok - but they laid their cards on the table immediately. "This is what I want from you. What do you think? Do you want to do it?"
The quacks were all like "I want to talk to you about a business venture. Let's talk about it over coffee." They never give details up front, always promise money right away - and it always involves the person being solicited doing something for nothing "but only at the beginning". After a while I learned to spot them the second they started into their line.
I'm not saying you're a quack. I quite hope you're legitimate and that you're going to start a successful business. If that business involves taking over DDO and making it better, all the best to you.
Do people extract value from students for nothing, sure, all the time. Especially in college town, but life isn't always a college town. I don't but you'd just have to trust me on that.
Let me use an example of something else I'm doing completely unrelated. I just licensed a pretty well known erotic photographer's entire body of work for multiple years so I can put it on a fashion label. I just signed a contract with a very good boutique owner with a strong design background who's designing the label/branding/marketing/production. What am I doing, I'm paying the fucking bills? Up to $5k to roll just the first release of highly limited stuff for the upper end clothing market. What's the split on the margin in the contract, 60 boutique owner/ 20 artist / 20 me. It does well, everybody makes money, and the right people in the deal are incentivised to make money for their efforts. For me, 20pts is more than enough return considering the shit I get back on passive invested money not working for me. Plus, it gives me access to the upper end fashion market, parties with models, etc, etc. Does it need to make money, absolutely, all my ventures do, I can't stand doing ones that don't. And in this case, the fact is, the boutique owner was going to make his own fashion anyhow out of his own pocket, so I just saved him money by underwriting the whole thing. If the first release works out, and judging from private feedback it will likely sell out, we'll roll a real LLC and he and I will be partners.
Do people sometimes work on spec for me, sure, but with always with a solid contract. They know what they get, and generally it's pretty generous if the idea bears fruit. I'd say I avoid students simply because they're flaky. I know what I was like in college, I'm not that far removed. But, kids who come out of college and are tinkerers anyhow? Why not offer that kid a chance to build something of real value rather than his own wordpress site? What he gets out of it, a spot on the cap table, and if things work out, "fuck you" money. This happens all the time in software startups, so while you may have had some sort of searing experience that forever turned you off of business dealings with others, your experience is exactly that, just yours. Not everybody wants to fuck everyone else over. Learning how to tell the difference is the key.
And most people who would tell you their startup business idea w/o an NDA (which doesn't apply to what's in my original post), don't know shit about business.
ETA: Just in regards to DDO specifically. What I'm talking about is pretty fungible as regards any one MMO in particular. That said, was I to have the money some of the people I'm involved with do, I would buy DDO as a vanity project. I'm not a car/boat/women collectors, but the idea of owning something that has a community around it. That's has a certain kind of appeal that a lot of "goods" don't have. I can't say it would ever happen, but I wouldn't deny thinking about it. You'll know that if/when it happens, because the first thing that will happen is it will get open sourced, and the base turned over to the mod community to propose changes. That and I'd turn everything involving content possible into a randomisation engine in a theoretical attempt to kill the metagamer (or at least drive them insane).