Steve Poland, author of the Techquila Shots blog about web startup ideas, is launching a "crowdsourced" startup. Ringside Startup aims to raise $20,000 from readers and sponsors, use that money to build a startup and blog the whole thing. Did someone say Million Dollar Startup? ;) Those who donate money will be able to vote on the startup's business decisions.
Not to take anything away from Poland's venture so soon after launch, but here are a few ominous precursors: the first crowdsourced startup, TheBusinessExperiment, was a catastrophic failure due to the indecisiveness of large groups - they chose obvious ideas, and no one had much incentive to contribute. What's more, it's not even that hard to get $20,000 dollars in the tech community: VCs lose that much money down the back of the couch.
So why put up with scores of of back seat drivers for a mere $20K? Firstly, because it has that whiff of democracy that web Utopians strive for but never achieve (hence the controversy over the Top 100 Digg users controlling most of the stories), and secondly because it could achieve more attention through a "million dollar homepage" model, and that attention could be converted to users.