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A former MIT blackjack team member has launched an online database of startup ideas to encourage entrepreneurs to show all their cards at once.
High-tech entrepreneur, blackjack hustler and Ben Mezrich book character Semyon Dukach has created StartupHive.org, a wiki-warehouse of potential businesses that anyone can edit. After about a week of existence and zero marketing, the site has 14 entries. With the site, Dukach said he hopes to disabuse entrepreneurs of the fallacy that keeping their ideas secret is beneficial.
“The ideas aren’t that good by themselves,” he said. “They need to be talked about.”
One entry suggests a GPS-powered service that would alert a paid meter-filler when a person’s time at a parking space was about to expire. Subsequent edits explain the unlikelihood of the idea’s success based on most local municipalities’ parking lot laws. Another suggests a text-message-based service to find people with common short-term needs — for example, finding a fellow traveler to split a cab ride to Cambridge from Logan Airport upon arrival. A follow-up edit questions the speed and efficiency such a system would need to be successful.
David Dykeman, a shareholder and patent attorney with Greenberg Traurig LLC, said it was important for an inventor to file first before making an idea public, after which the inventor would lose international patent rights, but would have a year to file in the United States. Such a wiki could confuse the issue of who owns the startup — the originator or the person who added an incremental improvement, Dykeman said.
“The site has a place in the innovation economy, but the trend toward virtual collaboration conflicts with the need for patent protection and the need for clear ownership of IP,” Dykeman said.
Some of the more service-oriented ideas on the site may not be patentable, Dykeman said, which would eliminate any such conflict.
Dukach plans to form a nonprofit to maintain the site, host it, and control spam. Down the road, the nonprofit could expand to providing collaboration tools and facilitating the incubation of new startups, Dukach said.
Having made his money starting companies — such as Newton-based e-mail facilitator SMTP.com — and teaching blackjack seminars, Dukach said he was looking for a way to help people when he thought up StartupHive. He’s still looking, but said he hopes the site becomes fulfilling nonprofit work.
“(SMTP.com) helps people send e-mail, but people will send e-mail without it,” he said. “I want to do more.”
Dukach learned the benefits of information sharing from one of his MIT professors, Richard Shyduroff, of the MIT Entrepreneurial Club, or E-Club, who called the sharing of ideas a natural function of being a part of the MIT community.
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