Excellent point. Makes me think about information design in general. Stackoverflow is a great interface and a great site. But part of it's success is it's interface is well tuned to both the kind of questions programmers ask AND the kind of expertise that a programmer would accept to have their question answered.
Most professional programmers are successful at programming - they create programs that are released and so forth. So the understanding of what it takes to succeed is somewhat "democratically" distributed. Most startups fail, the distribution about the information needed to succeed is much less democratically distributed. Also, programmers generally don't have an incentive to hide information or to try to sell you things. People who talk about startup have some incentive to do both.
In investing, there's both different questions AND a different kind of expertise one would be looking for. As a programmer, I'll accept a programming answer that has been voted up by many random programmers (hopefully my peers). As a founder/investor/business person I might not want the answer "everyone" votes up.
Excellent point. Makes me think about information design in general. Stackoverflow is a great interface and a great site. But part of it's success is it's interface is well tuned to both the kind of questions programmers ask AND the kind of expertise that a programmer would accept to have their question answered.
Most professional programmers are successful at programming - they create programs that are released and so forth. So the understanding of what it takes to succeed is somewhat "democratically" distributed. Most startups fail, the distribution about the information needed to succeed is much less democratically distributed. Also, programmers generally don't have an incentive to hide information or to try to sell you things. People who talk about startup have some incentive to do both.
In investing, there's both different questions AND a different kind of expertise one would be looking for. As a programmer, I'll accept a programming answer that has been voted up by many random programmers (hopefully my peers). As a founder/investor/business person I might not want the answer "everyone" votes up.