I'm not sure why I'd use this instead of http://answers.onstartups.com/ - I'm much more likely to participate in a community founded and managed by intelligent individuals that I respect. The site makes no mention of who's behind startups.com, why I should trust them, and how I know they won't violate that trust.
That said, it's cool that someone has based a megabucks domain name on Stack Exchange.
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.
Why should you trust any of the info on http://answers.onstartups.com/ ? It's not like the founders are the ones answering every question. How do you know that intelligent individuals are answering your question? Isn't that a question you can ask about any internet forum?
Unless you can tell by looking at the site's history of intelligent responses. In which case you can do that with startups.com, if not most sites on the internet.
You're right, our fault. I just posted a comment and mentioned it a bit about us. We're internet entrepreneurs from latinamerica, that have build a few successful startups over the last ten years.
Our thoughts exactly. We didn't mention the killerstartups.com name because we thought it was more appropiate (mabye it wasn't a good idea.) KillerStartups.com was launched in January 2007 and it's getting a good number of visitors per day (90k). And yes, we did pay mid-six figures for Startups.com (ouch :)
Agreed. And Dharmesh got a lot of good startup founders to commit to using answers.onstartups. Startups.com is a great domain; perhaps they can work together?
That said, it's cool that someone has based a megabucks domain name on Stack Exchange.