Life as a Venture Capitalist

KickStarter is such a brilliant service: intelligent, clean, elegant, simple.  It's exactly the sort of thing that makes me envious I didn't come up with it myself.  It's real genius lies in making us feel connected to the projects that inspire us.

I started out perusing it just to understand it from a technical standpoint, but it quickly became part of my daily routine.  Frankly I'm obsessed with it.  I can start out exploring for new ideas in games or technology and quickly end up with a nearly unmanageable number of tabs open in my browser.  Suddenly I discover I'm not just surfing - I've become a low-stakes venture capitalist - listening to investment pitches with the willful abandon of a Hollywood casting director.

I've built a small but growing portfolio of projects I'm backing, and I've always got a bookmarks folder full of potential projects I'm currently following.

Here are just a few of ones I'm proud to support:

Amanda Palmer's Theatre is Evil

Drifter - A Space Trading Game by CGS

And here are a few that, although successful, I'm horribly upset I didn't get to them quickly enough to be a supporter myself:

Phil Tippett's "MAD GOD"

The Banner Saga - by Stoic


Consider how weird that is ---I actually feel badly that some internet supplicant panhandled from the masses but didn't get to me in time to scrape my wallet too.  I feel left out.  Successful projects tend to re-enforce the idea that we're not just supporters, we're participants.