TechStars Summer Camp is another entrepreneur farm that hopes to strike it rich on the cheap. Their 10 winners have been selected and if this is any indication it's going to be a very web 2.0 summer in Boulder. YCombinator runs a similar farm with startups heading to SF and Boston for Winter and Summer camps. TechStars doles out $15,000 to each idea over YC's $6000 and only takes 5% equity compared to YC's 6-8%. What now Paul Graham?

This one time at startup camp

Pack your birkenstocks and bring your bowl because this year is going to be the best! I can see it now: UStreaming the BBQ live as startup founders twitter each other TechCrunch reviews while drooling over the mildly attractive lifeguard. Seriously though, maybe during a game of capture the flag or flashlight tag one of these startups will stumble upon a business model.

Anyone can run their own business nowadays, right? Not really. At RailsConf this past year the room was filled with people starting up. Each had an application that somehow incorporated AJAX, pastels, friends, to-do lists and user generated content. None of them had a clue how to monetize it. By this time though there was almost a chorus for people to quit their day jobs and stick it to the man. Everyone could find nirvana developing to-do list applications and deploying them to TextDrive in hopes that anyone would notice their great Rest API. Right.

Every startup is that quick one in Rails

Don't forget your join models. You'll need those to define that Friendship model relation between User model objects. In fact just hand this out to the ten startups during the first ice cream social:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :comments
  has_many :taggings
  has_many :tags, :through => :taggings
  has_many :favorites
  has_many :inbox_messages
  has_many :sent_messages
  has_many :ratings
  has_many :memberships
  has_many :groups, :through => :memberships
  has_many :friendships
  has_many :friends, :class_name => "User", :through => :friendships
  has_many :friend_requests
end

Is it even worth it?

If all you need is $6,000 then bootstrap the idea by working part-time or chaining together founder credit cards. You're a guinea pig given a 10% chance to live. Unless you're one of those "business guys" without any technical skills I really don't see the startup farm as a necessity.