Fisher for founders! VCs try to catch entrepreneurs with their best start-up ideas as bait. (Photo: rfduck / Flickr)

If you have a hot idea for an Internet start-up, conventional wisdom goes, do not tell anyone. Draw up a non-disclosure agreement, file a provisional patent, and have your friends sign frieNDAs. Skip the therapist. Do not go out. Stop tweeting. Thieves, copycats and precocious 17-year olds are everywhere, handing you cocktails, eavesdropping on your Sunday brunch, eager to make a Winklevoss of you. You are in super-stealth mode, in start-up parlance, and you should most certainly not blog about how you are "working on something exciting." That's just begging to get Zucked.

The current generation of venture capitalists, by contrast, don't mind getting Zucked; increasingly, they're asking for it.

"An Android Wifi App I Need," Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures wrote on his popular blog in April, describing a location-aware app that would automatically switch his data connection from 3G to wifi when appropriate. "If one exists, I'd love to know the name of it so I can get it. If not, I'd love for someone to build this."

Most tech VCs would say they swear by Silicon Valley sage Ron Conway's adage, "We invest in the entrepreneur first, not the idea," but we couldn't help noticing that VCs seem increasingly comfortable placing a custom order. The practice was sanctioned in 2008 when revered Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator published its start-up wishlist. "When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we're hoping to see," director Paul Graham wrote, in introducing the list. "In the past we've never said publicly what they are... We don't like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we're trying something new. "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" offered 30 suggestions, including "a cure for the disease of which the RIAA is a symptom" (no. 1), "Craigslist competitor" (no. 25) and "Startups for startups" (no. 30).

Mr. Wilson didn't say he'd invest in his imaginary app. But Jordan Cooper, a venture partner at Lerer Ventures, recently offered funding and office space to anyone interested in working on an app he mostly wants for himself: a private social network where people can dish on their love lives. "I want to be able to send a photo of a girl that I really like or one that I just went out with for the first time. I want to tell a story beneath the photo, or just a short note that says 'so pretty, but soooo boring' or whatever captures my impressions of this temporal but potentially permanent new entrant into my life," he wrote last month in a blog post, titled "Whitespace for the taking." He signed off, "Holler."

At a Wesleyan alumni event, founder Kai Bond mentioned to RRE Ventures' Stuart Ellman that he was thinking of leaving his gaming start-up to create something new.

Just come by my office, Mr. Ellman told him. We'll workshop ideas until we find something I want to back.

"Ah, demand-side venture," the tech consultant and protoblogger Anil Dash said when Betabeat asked him if he'd noticed the trend.

Software developers and early adopters have always loved playing I wish this existed with each other, he said, recalling crowd-sourced web sites like LazyWeb and HalfBakery, where people posted requests addressed, like messages in a bottle, to no one in particular, and with a similar success rate.

But there's a difference when the person thinking out loud is in a position to write a check.

"It's also sort of the modern commissioned work," Mr. Dash said. "'I'm the Pope, I want some art on my walls. Go get me Michelangelo.'"

What are you looking to fund right now? we asked Craig Shapiro, former president of GOOD magazine, current CEO of socially-conscious venture capital concern Collaborative Fund, and he started giggling at us.

“It’s a secret,” he said, rocking forward and backward in his chair. “But I’ll tell you."

On the record? we asked, confused. "It’s on the record. But it’s totally secret."

He's "dying to find" a universal reputation score, he said. Like a credit score, but for general trustworthiness and "how good a person you are," factoring in your track record on sites like Kiva and eBay along with whether you shop local, offset your carbon footprint or recycle.

Such a score would have a positive impact on society and the business potential is "tremendous," he said. Distrust of strangers is the biggest barrier for the kind of companies he wants to invest in, resource-sharing start-ups like Airbnb, a marketplace where people list their homes as bed and breakfasts. But so far, his search has come up dry.

Curiously, Chris Paik of Thrive Capital, which frequently co-invests with Mr. Shapiro, had pitched us the same idea the week before. You know what someone should do? he asked rhetorically of Betabeat, before describing a universal reputation score.

In the course of reporting this story, Betabeat asked angel investor and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian if there were any ideas he wished someone would just pitch him already. By that time, Mr. Shapiro had already pitched Mr. Ohanian on the universal reputation score. "It's funny, I had coffee with Craig and I'm helping him with that very idea," said Mr. Ohanian, who signed on as an adviser. "That was the one I was going to give you." They're scouting for developers now, he said.

Totally not a secret.

If you want to Zuck someone else's idea, there are plenty of places to look; 100startupideas.com, for example. Free start-up ideas are all over Twitter, too. Steve Poland, a former tech blogger and self-described "idea guy," got servicey with "100+ Web Start-up Business Ideas." Similarly, there are umpteen marketplaces that match founders with ideas to investors with money—AngelList, Kickstarter, and New York's bajillion tech-themed meetups.

But there's no mechanism to match a venture capitalist with an idea and a checkbook to a CEO who's willing to build a company around it.

One reason is that commissioning start-ups is not really what most investors want VCs doing with their money. Sure, VCs have a huge influence over the evolution of the idea after they take a stake in it. But most institutional investors and other sources of funding expect VCs to buy into organic ventures that have their own momentum. "As venture capitalists, we believe deeply in the value of decentralized, emergent, start-up innovation," Union Square Ventures partner Brad Burnham wrote recently on the fund's blog.

The main reason, though, is that entrepreneurs aren't interested. If they wanted to build someone else's idea, they wouldn't be entrepreneurs--they'd be working for a software development agency. A few people offered to build Mr. Cooper's dating app, he said, but they weren't committed to sticking with it long-term.

"I'd love a venue where I could pitch ideas I want to see built and then fund them," he said. "But the truth is if that model works, I think the entrepreneurs will likely be folks who have previous relationshop with the investors who are pitching ideas."

The mercenary 48 Hour Apps, a four-person pop-up development shop that builds apps in a weekend for $10,000, is a compromise—the team works on a commissioned app with the zeal of a start-up, but doesn't carry it to term. 48hourapps co-founder John Britton thinks he would get bored working on an idea floated by a VC, even if it came with the promise of funding.

Hence the time limit, we surmised.

"Yeah, I don't want to work on your idea after that," he said.

When Ben Lin of Great Oaks Venture Capital gets an idea for an app he wants, he calls his engineering team on the West Coast. The result is not as fabulous as a start-up fronted by fresh-faced yuppies, multiple investors and a write-up in the Wall Street Journal. But when iboutiques.com (I wish there were a site where boutique owners could upload and sell inventory from their discount racks...) launched recently, Great Oaks owned all of it.

"Ideas are not the shortage," Mr. Lin said.

And yet in these anything-goes times, it seems unfair to deny VCs a platform to pitch. Sequoia Capital is funding grilled cheese sandwiches and location-based Dadaist art projects, but VCs aren't supposed to have ideas? After a long over-caffeinated day of unconvincing pitches from first-time founders, VCs should be entitled to ideate with some dignity. A dedicated forum would give some credibility and exposure to VCs elevator-pitching founders. PitchMeThis.vc, maybe. Someone should Zuck that.

"They bought a $20 million bullshit CMS then laid off staff and went bankrupt as a direct result. Bloomberg bought them and laid off more staffers. Staffers were blameless in $20 M CMS debacle yet they took the hit for it," Mr. Zeldman wrote on Twitter.

Followed by: "Oh shit I thought those were DMs... Probably wasn't public knowledge until 2 min ago."

The comment was provoked by Mr. Dash praising the BusinessWeek redesign, which Mr. Zeldman interpreted as praise for the company's business savvy.  "I was saying I liked the product BW is putting out," Mr. Dash said, when contacted by The Observer. "Zeldman took it as an endorsement of their business (as did others) despite the fact the magazine is a loss-leader for the rest of the Bloomberg business. But I wasn't talking about that part of it... anyway, then we all reached consensus that we like the current product but aren't sure it solves the business model."

But $20 million--that's a lot for a CMS, no?

"Oh yeah, way too much if the number's right. I'm skeptical it's correct, though. Sounds like the sort of number that gets bigger as people get understandably upset after being laid off," Mr. Dash said.

If correct, or on the right order of magnitude, $20 million seems grossly expensive for BusinessWeek's needs. At the same time, it's hard to believe the financial trouble was a "direct result" given BusinessWeek was reportedly generating more than $100 million in revenue at the time.

UPDATE: "BusinessWeek did not go bankrupt or buy a $20M CMS," former BusinessWeek creative director David Sleight tweeted. He said he believes Mr. Zeldman may have been referring to technology that was bought for McGraw Hill's Business Exchange.

UPDATE NO. 2: A reference to the Muppets, originally included in this post, was taken out of context and has been removed. Apologies to Fozzie Bear & Co.

Mr. Zeldman could not be reached for comment by phone...or Twitter. 

Protoblogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash, with 118 votes, and New York University computer science professor Evan Korth, with 97 votes, nabbed the two open seats on the board of the 15,000-strong organization.

Seventeen candidates campaigned for the positions (see them in our feature: Meet the Candidates Vying for NY Tech Meetup's Board).

Creator of the New Work City coworking office Tony Bacigalupo came in third with 75 votes.

Only 590 members of the NYTM voted, adding up to a turnout of less than 6 percent.

The election generated some controversy because members were only allowed one vote each despite the two open spots, and some members vocally criticized the current members of the board for complacency.

Candidate Noel Hidalgo is one of the members who feels he has unfinished business. "Ahem... are we really going to wipe clean the slate of issues that materialized?" he wrote to the highly-active NYTM listserve after results were announced.

But most of the group was oblivious, as discussions on the listserve continued to center around office space, development, phones, and the other usual topics.

Korth was at a coffee shop when he saw a tweet from Sanford Dickert, another candidate, congratulating him and Dash.

"I'm looking forward to working with the other members of the board of directors as soon as possible," he said. "Specifically I want to continue doing what I've been doing for the past five years, strengthening the ties between New York's academic institutions and the New York City innovation community."

"I look forward to doing that with the New York Tech Meetup as one of the primary vehicles to help embiggen that pipieline," he said.

Korth's platform was focused on expanding initiatives like hackNY, a summer program that matches local startups to NYU students so they can learn skills outside the classroom, expand opportunities for students and strengthen the ties in the local tech and entrepreneurial communities.

He is also an adviser for the NYU Association for Computing Machinery, a student organization for computer science, and tech@NYU, which produces NYU Startup Week.

Dash was not available for comment but he tweeted his victory speech: "Honored to have been elected to the @NYTM board, along with @evankorth. Lots of work to do to make #NYTM more inclusive and effective."

Dash has a strong following in and outside of New York thanks to his blog, dashes.com, which he started in 1999. His platform included broadening the meetup to include the Maker Movement and technology beyond the mobile and web applications that are trendy right now.

He also emphasized that New York should be doing more to compete with San Francisco for talent, and that New York's techies should be more aggressive in flexing "our formidable financial and cultural muscles to make sure that elected officials know there are political consequences to ignoring the values of the technology community."

NYTM recently registered with the state of New York and is seeking not-for-profit status. The group will elect two more community members to its 13-member board over the next two years.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Beyond just selling out the Skirball Center every month, the organization is seeking official status as a non-profit and adopting a set of Governing Bylaws. 

As part of this maturation, NYTM is creating a 13 member board, with four of the seats to be filled by community-elected members. 

The candidates for the first two community seats will introduce themselves tonight and voting will take place online over the next three days. 

It's a strong field of contenders. "Once I saw the folks running I called Nate and told him I was dropping out," says SeatGeek's Ben Kessler. "There are people I would rather vote for than myself." 

Check out The Candidates! >>

Dash is a cofounder of the consulting agency Activate and the founding director of the nonprofit Expert Labs, which helps policymakers use Facebook and Twitter to glean insight into what their constituency is thinking. But he's best known for writing more than half a million words about technology and culture since 1999, at his site Dashes.com. He has 346,841 followers on Twitter.

He's running for one of two open spots on the board that will be decided by a vote after tonight's meetup:

I'm a passionate and unrepentant New Yorker, an advisor to New York-based startups, non-profits and events, and someone who doesn't lightly enter into commitments to a community without knowing that I can do the job well.

Dash's platform includes broadening the meetup to include more diverse presenters, trying to represent the interests of more than just the New Yorkers who can afford $600 smartphones, recognizing that NYC is in competition with San Francisco, and more lobbying:

When we are ignored or insulted by politicians who don't know or don't care about technology, we should flex our formidable financial and cultural muscles to make sure that elected officials know there are political consequences to ignoring the values of the technology community.

Voters, you have 11 hours to read Dash's 5,230 tweets and the half-million words on his blog. Go!

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries

Before he left New York to visit the small western Orissa village, the Obama administration had launched a redesign of WhiteHouse.gov with—of course—a blog.

“It was one of the few things in my career where my family understood what I did,” Mr. Dash told The Observer. “‘Oh, you helped make software that ran Barack Obama’s blog and that’s what you do.’ Between that and Britney Spears, they had the examples they needed.” (My.BarackObama.com and BritneySpears.com use software by Six Apart called Moveable Type.)

“That felt like a validation of all this work,” Mr. Dash continued. He was sitting at the 71 Irving Place coffee shop, just a few blocks from his home, his eyes bleary from overdosing on computer screen time.  “From then on out, I had this feeling that was going to be the trend.”

During the summer, Mr. Dash’s personal blog had its 10th anniversary. In August, he wrote a post titled “The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009.” According to Mr. Dash, it was the executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

“[T]he current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives,” he wrote, “and it’s remarkable how quickly they’ve remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.”

Mr. Dash wondered: Could WhiteHouse.gov be the next iPhone? Could developers get just as giddy over coding software to serve their country as they are over creating an app for the Apple store?

He’s about to find out.

Soon after he wrote his post, Mr. Dash received emails and calls from those “digital natives” in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, asking him if he’d like to help. They eventually approached him with an opportunity to lead a new Washington, D.C., incubator called Expert Labs. He got the job in early October.

With support from a $500,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and their Policy Innovation Network has launched Expert Labs as a nonpartisan, independent project that aims to improve the policy-making process by engaging experts and technologists.

“The government is already using technology to talk to citizens,” Mr. Dash told The Observer. “But we’re going to make technology that helps government listen to them.”

Expert Labs will borrow developers from the hallways of Google in Silicon Valley or start-ups like Foursquare and Kickstarter in New York to build government applications and social media tools in exchange for grants—and the chance to connect with some of the most powerful people in the country.

Mr. Dash plans to lure participants with a periodic, competitive model, similar to the Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge. He’ll ask government agencies about their policy initiatives (say, fighting childhood obesity) as well as operating issues (like expensive, licensed billing software) and then host competitions, asking developers to code social media platforms so specialists can provide innovative solutions. 

As director of Expert Labs, Mr. Dash, with his buddy list of powerful geeks, will serve as a government 2.0 switchboard—connecting the policy makers with technology innovators and experts to reinvent the way government works.

“Candidly, the name scared the hell out of me,” Mr. Dash said about the Policy Innovation Network. “This sounds like some scary think tank where you know a bunch of old dudes in suits are choosing how the world happens. I was like, this doesn’t sound like me.

“But, actually, this was really interesting; it’s just being marketed like it’s medicine, not candy. It needs more cherry flavor. I know how to present this as compelling as it is.”

Instead of the government dictating what kind of technology they need, Mr. Dash was providing the general public the opportunity to help them invent it.

Other good-for-government coding programs, like Code for America or N.Y.C.’s Big Apps competition, have similar models. But Mr. Dash said this is the first time there has been neutral ground for private developers to connect with their government in a big way.

“If people are skeptical about the ability of government to execute, then by all means, support our little entrepreneurial effort to do so,” Mr. Dash said.

Vivek Kundra, the administration’s chief information officer, and Katie Stanton, the director of citizen organization, wrote in a post on the White House’s Open Government blog that they are open to the public’s ideas on improving Web 2.0 technologies. “The National Weather Service does a great job of taking complex satellite data and making it widely accessible to people via new and traditional channels,” they wrote. “When you wake up, you can reach for your i-Phone, radio or newspaper and know whether it’s going to rain. How can we do this with other important government information, such as Medicaid and Medicare benefits, the state of the power grid or the Federal budget?”

Mr. Dash hopes to get answers for these types of questions—ready for review by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy—by spring 2010.

“To know that the White House read what I said, and was actually listening, that in itself is much more motivating than a million other things—like money or building something really cool,” Mr. Dash said. He hopes that developers and experts will feel the same way.

"This is the promise they all made in November," to contribute to change by getting more involved in the political process, he said. "I can't wait to pull that trigger on them."

greagan@observer.com