Thanks :) Didn't mean to sound defensive. I posted expecting responses similar to yours. Initially I was naive but a little networking in the tech community solved that pretty quickly.

Don't take this the wrong way ... but I've had an inside perspective on how investors (who actually write checks, not blog articles about how cool they are) think. You'd be shocked to discover what little value they place on your code. And investors are not even the most important part of starting a business - customers are. They could care even less than investors do. If coding was that all-important, why doesn't every hacker code their way to multi-million dollar success stories? IF ONLY STARTING A BUSINESS was as easy as you say. I've been and am in a similar position, have come across COUNTLESS "hackers" with their own pet project, and coming up now a little over a year after they've all turned me down, amazingly, nobody cares about their excellent code - just like a year ago, and probably a year from now. Yes, product development is important. But alone it gets you nowhere. You need communication skills, ability to motivate during hard times, ability to redirect hostility and stress found at many startups, ability to sense people's needs (for example, most people I've ever met that write more checks than blogs about themselves as investors usually have manic-depressive natures and are looking for the "high" of being involved in something cool/worthwile/humanitarian/state-of-the-art). You need awesome design skills, ability present information in ways that make sense to non-technical users. You need ability to document work processes that keep everybody current and on-track. You need to be able to follow massive amounts of information to figure out who is likely to enter your space and where your space might branch off 6 months / a year etc. You need the ability to quickly figure out countless people and pitch them on their secret desires, not your startup. You need to be able to respond to massive, systematic changes in the market that can render your entire business model useless and be able to quickly figure out a whole new business from scratch that can still be built with dwindling resources. You need to be able to write countless business plans at a moment's notice in case you get interest from who knows where who knows when. You need to be able to figure out how to cheaply or freely market to your customers while overcoming a decade's worth of internet-enabled skepticism. TELL ME, who the hell is doing all of these things and countless more things I forgot to mention while you're busy coding? Or do you plan on doing these things "after you're done" coding? If so, how can you compete with a startup that has people doing all these things WHILE their programmers code?

"Great deal for you." If someone does years of market research, comes up with a clever way to make money and beat potential competitors and figures out a way to get money to finance the project, you think it's a "great deal for them" if they get 50% of a company they start while a hacker hacks, as if though the hacker is doing them a favor? Do you have any idea how many 1-person hacker companies trying to sell their "product" (ie, code) with no users to a larger company I have come across while looking for programmers for my startup effort? As much as you may hate hearing this, remember all those snobby ivy-league MBAs during the dot-com bust that thought they were a gift to the rest of us, you know, the ones hackers hate? You've replaced them. You're the next version of them, and 10 years from now I guarantee you as the dollar falls and your value to the market is reduced exponentially as more and more eastern-european/chinese/indians are graduating with PHDs and work histories for major overseas companies starting from even high school all the way through their grad programs, I guarantee you you will be replaced by another class that will recall, "Remember the days a decade ago when programmers thought they were God's gift to the world just because they could do what a billion foreigners with better educations can do just as well, or better these days?" Hubris cometh before the fall, amigo, and you U.S. based programming gurus have cornered the market on it.