Looked at charitably these could be mitigated with good contracts and governance. E.g:

  * Well defined procedures for choosing what to work on and for how long
  * Agreement on what metrics to to base go/no-go decisions for continuing with an idea past the initial stages
  * Contracts to specify how spinoff equity is assigned. One interesting proposal I've heard involves a calculation based on developer hours worked over the initial development period.

Might be interesting outside of major tech markets where where VC funding is unlikely anyway, which could be an added benefit to the traveling idea factory/accelerator.

I appreciate that this is hard (if possible) to do in practice, and that lack of vision might be a fundamental problem. It also feels like it could be an excuse to treat developers poorly -- which was one of my concerns when I had the opportunity and seems to have happened in this case.