Equity Exchange

Client: Matt Johnson, Frontier (mjohnson@frontier.co.uk).

The crowd-funding proposition (e.g. Kickstarter) is simple - give us your money, we’ll make a product. So is Mechanical Turk - do our menial task, we’ll give you money. What about situations where everyone is adding value, and the rewards should be shared (or negotiated) in proportion? Many startups, indie video games, and social enterprises work this way. Because there are no suitable online platforms for negotiating and setting them up, at the moment everyone involved has to live in the same place, whether Silicon Valley or Cambridge, to work it out over endless macchiatos. Your task is to create an online service that uses artificial intelligence approaches to help potential co-founders form a team, and create a fair legal framework, financial structure and investor/market engagement mechanisms. Software startups would expect all of this to sit on top of a Github-style repository for content and code, customised to their individual needs. If there is a market here, you’re free to use the result to bootstrap your own business!