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Comment by ai_ia | Hacker News Reader

I would be more happy if there was a stay with "Builders" alternative. I would love to live around with technically smart people who are building something on their own rather than "founders"

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There is just something with "staying with founders" that feels so pretentious...

A meta startup; a startup making money from other startup founders... Sounds parasitic...

The whole Digital Nomad fad works similarly

I've been wanting to create something called "Dev Nest" (or similar) for a while now (in my ever growing backlog). The basic premise would be that tech professionals with spare rooms provide medium term accomodation in exchange for part time technical expertise (design or development). So guests could see somewhere else in the world, experience the culture, and get hands on experience with a variety of startups and projects (open source etc.).

The main difficulties would be in ensuring expectations of hosts are clear so everyone is happy, and also IP. However, I think it's doable.

EDIT: There's also potential legal hurdles as to whether the accommodation is deemed payment for work. The whole platform would need to be extremely transparent to mitigate exploitation.

Having looked into compensation law in the US, my understanding (I’m not a lawyer but play one on HN) is that housing accommodations are generally considered taxable income. However, the way you’re describing it means it could work. They would need to live in your house, and also work in your house with you. They would accept that arrangement in your hiring docs. You would need to be able to demonstrate benefit by having them live on the property.

I think this gets tricky if you live and work in two different areas, so it’s probably best suited for remote work or new projects.

Totally agree. We have a lot of builders on the platform already. We started with founders because that's the community we know best, but it's pretty easy to expand it to to all sorts of makers, builders, future founders--generally ambitious people.

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