Chickens Vs Butterflies: can we talent-fund a butterfly?

YXHD has an interesting post about Chickens Vs Butterflies: Raising Venture Capital in a Down Economy

He classifies companies as either:

- Chicken that can be raised organically (he intended no pun) through sweat capital and bootstrapping
- Butterflies that start as an ugly worm and need a lot of R&D to turn into a real product

Clearly chicken are the typical talent-funded companies where a few partners work together to get the venture operational.

Can we talent-fund a butterfly?

I think that although it is much harder, by growing talent funding from the small group of close partners who build a project to a full community of potential partners who through small contributions create the full project, it is possible.

There remains of course some capital expenditures that have to be incurred. But in certain knowledge heavy domains even butterflies can be talent-funded.