I've been involved recently in a local incubator YCombinator/Tech-Stars type program (BoomStartup in Salt Lake City). For a while they would have some sort of get together every Friday (mostly to discuss the program and let people meet those involved). I thought it was interesting that the vast majority of people that showed up were "business people". While I'm sure some of them are legitimately worthy of being called a business person, for most of them, that really just meant "want to start a company and can't code". We also had alot of issues with people being too paranoid of having their ideas stolen to feel comfortable talking about their ideas.<p>I'd love to see someone come up with a good way for the right people with the right mindset to come together and socialize in order to help form teams.
I had my own idea for dealing with this phenomenon. After reading your post I decided to try and make it a reality instead of an idea.<p>MiniLeap: A pickup game for startups<p>www.MiniLeap.com
Been working on this project for a while with a friend. Just a prototype I'm making to match people based on their resources. It's really barebones right now (full documentation should be up soon) but thought this was an organic moment to drop a shameless plug. Should be able to match programmers (or anyone) based on the required skills the startup needs.<p>link: <a href="http://kxs.miceswitch.com/" rel="nofollow">http://kxs.miceswitch.com/</a><p>Hope the little guy can be of some use to HN.
You leave us with a great question at the end of that essay. I'm interested in learning about how you plan to hack the startup process, especially here in Boston.