ON DISINTERMEDIATING VCs AND KILLING DRAGONS

"ALL TOGETHER NOW..."

(UPDATE:  Mark Evans , Tom Evslin, and Rick Segal have relevant pieces on this post's topic)

Dave Winer has a 5-step idea to "disintermediate" VCs and directly connect entrepreneurs with "users" to create a "User Internet Capital Corp.".  Specifically, the motivation is to:

'Take out the middleman. We don’t need the partners, limited or general, they gum up the works. We need money to start new ventures. Luckily we know the people with the money, they’re the users. And we need people to validate the ideas. Same people, the users."

How would you get there?

"File all the right paper with the SEC, and do an IPO. You have to, because we’re going to be selling shares to the public right at the start. This thing will be public from day one. The purpose of the company will be to invest in promising young Internet companies, chosen by the users, nurture them through startup, get them liquid through acquisition or IPO and distribute dividends to the shareholders accordingly."

Sound reasonable?  All the users have to do is to coordinate and cooperate, presumably in the tens if not hundreds of thousands.

I was getting all excited about the idea.

Then I read this excellent, and UNRELATED piece in today's New York Times titled "Kill the Big, Bad Dragon, (TEAMWORK REQUIRED)" by the talented Seth Schiesel.  As the article explains:

"As a lead game designer at Blizzard Entertainment for World of Warcraft, the ridiculously successful online PC game that now has more than 5.5 million subscribers, Mr. (Jeff) Kaplan, 33, is a combination of long-term planner, whipping boy, police chief and deity for a rabid global player-base that is about as large as the populations of the cities of Chicago, Houston and Detroit combined.
Earlier massively multiplayer online games like EverQuest, which topped out at around a half-million users, appealed almost entirely to hard-core young male players.

World of Warcraft, however, has shattered the expectations of just about everyone in the game industry because it also appeals to a broader, more casual audience. And one of the biggest reasons for that appeal is that much of the time, World of Warcraft is a relatively easy game."

What's the biggest problem Mr. Kaplan faces evolving the game to the next level?

"That ease of play has made the game fantastically successful, but it has also created what has become almost a blood feud in the game and on Web message boards between the game's casual users and more serious players.

The issue is that once players reach Level 60, if they want to keep fighting bigger and badder monsters and if they want to get rarer and more powerful loot, they must start to work in teams, perhaps of 10 or 20 players.

The most epic challenges, like conquering Blackwing Lair and its master, the black dragon Nefarian, require 40 players to work together with the coordination of synchronized swimmers.

But because the game from Level 1 to Level 59 is so easy, there are a ton of Level 60 users who don't know how to be team players and don't have the time or inclination to learn. And that is the root of the current conflict."

Let's see here...getting from 1 to 59 is a piece of cake, but the biggest problem for the game is that getting groups of Level 60 players to be team players is like herding cats. 

So what are the developers at Blizzard doing about this conflict?

"...caught in the middle are Mr. Kaplan, known online as Tigole, and the rest of the Blizzard team.

For the game's newest high-end area, called Ahn'Qiraj, they set up a system earlier this month that essentially requires most of each server's population, casual and hard-core, to work together to amass huge amounts of war materiel like bandages and metals before the gates to the dungeon will open."

For me, that sparked the following idea. 

What if instead of the "ultimate" challenge of Ahn'Qiraj,  the "super-task" was something else?

What if the "super-task" was letting all the Level 60 players to directly invest in a start-up in a public fund and help it guide it to ultimate success? 

Then they can help counsel the start-up through the dark, dangerous canyons of 'EXECUTION HELL" to eventually open up the "Gates of Google-Gusher II". 

And they'd do it by being "team-players" coordinating and cooperating, right? 

And of course do a MUCH better job than a bunch of  hapless, clueless VCs, who of course can spend all their extra time playing World of Warcraft. 

What good can the VCs do there?  Why, they can create and help guide "virtual start-ups" comprising of large groups of Level 60 players to open up the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj of course. 

P.S.  Interesting follow-on thoughts on Dave's post by Scoble and Mike Arrington on one side, and Paul Kedrosky and Mathew Ingram on the other.

Comments

[Mathew Ingram]

Michael:

Just a quick note -- your link has my last name as Wingram, but it's actually Ingram. Thanks.

Mathew