Somewhat off topic, but every year or so I check the domain milk.com to see if the owner ever sold it. Just checked again. He's been sitting on it for 17 years now with the following message:

http://milk.com/value/

Would really suck for him if domains changed in some way as to make it not worth all that much. If it was me with the domain I'd sell now, to much potential for downside in the future.

Uh, is your comment intended to be as anti-Semitic as it sounds? Or am I totally missing some alternate interpretation?

Preserved in case of editing (so I don't end up looking like an idiot for asking): "'Bornstein', how am I not surprised? This guy will get nothing because of his greed."

I imagine their first product will be a photo sharing application, that does group messaging, offering deals. Then they'll go on to raise 1 trillion dollars. You heard it here first folks.

It is investors who are investing their portfolio money and time. If you want to, please go-ahead and write apps, raise money and become successful.

Let's congratulate the folks who raised the money to build something.

Yeh so I am going to go out on a limb and say that this is very risky - I guess the mitigation for the risk is the small amount per angel, but considering that they only raised $1.5M an have 6 people on payroll....that just seems excessive.

Should be interesting to see what Kevin comes up with and if he can re-invent another industry.

I didn't realize that Ashton Kutcher is an angel investor.

He's actually quite an active angel. In fact, he has invested in at least 2 YC companies that I can think of off the top of my head.

Off-topic:

Does anyone here work in one of these "development labs" who's able/willing to talk about it?

You could call YC PG's personal development lab ;)

if i had a killer idea and a ton of money, i'd fund it myself.

It's better to have buy-in even if you don't need the cash.

If you really want to work there, that shouldn't stop you.

As the article points out, Kevin says they're likely "done hiring".

I am very excited to see what comes out of this shop. In fact I would like to see more entrepreneurs who cashed out the first time, start their own min-idealab.

Well, this will be interesting to see what happens.

They have min. 1.5 MM in funding - assuming they are all taking between 75 and 150K salaries, that should be ~24 months of runway -- shrink the salaries back a bit, and expect equipment / development costs and I'd expect thats realistically 12 to 18 months of funding.

So far, skull ninjas have produced (3?) projects, two of which seem to be about sharing (locations, and ranked lists)...

So we have 3 co-founders on the list, one of which appears to be biz-dev focused, a couple devs and some idea guys.

What I want to know though, is what they showed the investors to push them off the cliff to the tune of 1.5MM - divided among 22 people is an average investment of 68K per person, lets assume that the range is 25K++ as a base.

That is both a lot of faith in Milk, and a wide spread on the total amount...

I certainly hope they come up with something killer, but I just get the feeling that Kevin put a lot of work into getting investment into his own little idea incubator solely based on cult-of-personality and not based on the-next-big-idea, that is awesome, and I know that every geek in the valley would wish to do the same - but lets see what they actually produce.

(p.s. Kevin, if you were the Kevin in the wompt chat thread - you should reach to to that kid from MIT)

Random small companies are able to raise 1mm right now with little difficulty. A .5m delta to here isn't that big.

The co-founders might not have taken salaries..Kevin Rose is certainly set up to that type of $1 salary trend..