Ask HN: Finding a financial benefactor?

Everyone always asks "where can I find a technical cofounder?" and it surprises me because I'm surrounded by technical people and I've known many teenagers with more technical know-how than some of the bosses I've worked for. For me, the real question is "where are all of the benefactors/angel investors/people who made it during the dot com and housing bubbles who fund entrepreneurs?"

Then I read this link last night:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2714304

And it got me thinking that I've been looking at it all wrong. I haven't earned a benefactor yet.

tl;dr:

I frankly don't know anyone in angle investing circles. The richest people I know are probably my dad's business landlord and my old workout buddy who worked for the IRS of all places. I live in Boise, ID, about as far away as possible from any tech scene.

But where there's a problem, there's often an opportunity, once the issue is understood. Here is how I see it, as a programmer with 20 years of experience whose only claim to fame was helping make a Macintosh game of some obscurity, working a year as a contractor at hp and working for a Macintosh sales and service outfit for 3 years:

1. Hackers know that location is irrelevant, since most of what we do is virtual, but people with money seem to want face time.

2. Hackers instinctively recognize other hackers (sort of like how men spot women's potentially dangerous boyfriends when the women don't see it) but financial types don't seem to really get it, although they can recognize each other instinctively as well.

3. There is little to no overlap between the social circles of hackers and benefactors.

4. Money is valued over talent. It's extremely difficult to get a meeting with someone like Mark Cuban, but Richard Stallman or Linus Torvalds would probably hear you out. I have forgotten more math and programming techniques than most people will probably ever learn, but it's not something I can really prove, and nobody really cares. It's often just a hobby to them, or they see me as someone who could help them fix their computer.

The simple answer to most of this is that our society values money over talent, so wealthy people have the luxury of stepping back and waiting for opportunities to come to them.

So a possible solution to this might be, maybe hackers need to raise their prices and become less expendable. Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way to do this. Right now most hackers work for pennies on the dollar, trying to scrape together money to become ramen profitable. The remainder who make it quickly become unaffordable; they won't work for anyone for any price (I'm thinking the Zuckerbergs of the world).

Without a solution to this problem, I think hackers will forever be relegated to the same boat as starving artists. We only hear about the Picassos and Warhols of the world, who frankly don't represent the entire spectrum of the art domain, or even the majority of it.

I'm concerned about this because I graduated from college in 1999 and only had maybe a year before the dot bomb hit, and graduates today are stepping into a darwinistic society with a wider separation than ever between the haves and have-nots. The amount of wasted talent is just staggering. I look at most of the problems in the world like alternative energy or affordable housing and to me they are non-issues, so easy that a child could solve them. They pale in comparison to concurrency or microprocessor design, for example. Yet the people who could solve many of these problems are probably working at their uncle's appliance shop because they value their freedom more than the soul-sucking existence that a major corporation provides.

Unfortunately I ran up $50,000 in debt hanging onto my floundering internet business so I would need at least that just to start over. A $10,000 kudos from Y Combinator wouldn't cut it. In fact I'm not sure if $100,000 would buy me enough time bring a product to fruition, especially if the extra $50,000 was split with a cofounder. Bankruptcy and working for the man is probably the smart thing to do, but I've been doing a rough approximation of that for 12 years. Folding and mind renting would be an endgame scenario. Believe it or not, I actually quit my job and started a small eBay business fixing broken computers 6 months ago, because I realized too late that bootstrapping/consulting is really the only way that any notable business ever started, bills be damned. It's actually going well and for the first time in my life, I have hope for the future.

So the irony is that after all of this, maybe I am too stubborn to take someone's help. I was a better hacker when I was idealistic, fresh out of college, than I am today. The trials changed me. I spent 10 years learning about entrepreneurship and meeting bills instead of making things. Watching this scenario play out for another generation of hackers is somber.

But Y Combinator is still my favorite site on the web, because it's the closest thing to matching benefactors to hackers that I have seen, but perhaps it could go further. My theory is that once entrepreneurs have reached a level of affluence where they could help someone else, their reluctance to do so has more to do with how life has changed them than any fundamental rule of business. I'm hopeful that maybe benefactors are starting to arrive on the scene who came through unscathed enough to pay it forward.