Most people—myself included—aren’t willing to throw more than a few dollars at a stranger with no guarantees, no matter how good the quality of their idea is. What I’m trying to envision is an environment where I, as a potential donator, feel comfortable ponying up cash for a project even if it’s being run by someone I’ve never heard of, with no previous business experience.

If I’m the sole financier of his project, then I have all the power—he signs a contract and if he skips out, I can afford to hire a lawyer or a collection agency to track him down and make sure he holds up his end of the bargain. If I’m a Kickstarter donator, he has all the power—he signs nothing, and if he chooses he can disappear with my money. I can’t afford to hire a lawyer to recoup a $15 investment.

What I’m envisioning is a system where a company kind of like Kickstarter gives the guy with the idea a platform. Potential investors “donate” to a project they like. The Project Manager agrees to a boilerplate contract with the donation platform which makes the money conditional on some sort of performance on his part—if he tries to just disappear with the money, or funnel parts of it into his pocket, or just use it to create a product that’s totally unrelated to the one they said they would make, then the donators have recourse. Individual $15 donators might not have the ability to go after the guy who scammed him, but the platform for donation has deep enough pockets to take action.

I’m not talking about crowd-sourcing the decision making. I’m talking about about protecting donators from scams.

My brother and I are working on opening a bar, in Austin TX, for gamers (see http://pixelsbar.com). Right now we haven’t been able to fully fund the project, so we don’t have a location yet. Acquiring funding for something like this is very difficult—we have an awesome idea, but you don’t know me from Adam, and if you handed me $15 to try and make my dream a reality, what guarantee would you have that I wouldn’t just disappear? If the place went on to make billions of dollars, wouldn’t you want to get a check for $300 in the mail? If you have that option, wouldn’t you be more interested in shelling out the $15?