I have a lot of amazingly talented incredibly smart friends. I don’t know how I managed maneuver my way into their good graces, but it happened, and I’m incredibly thankful for them.

Many of these friends have the brains and skills to create some really fun or cool or world-changing businesses, but they have jobs and hobbies and not nearly enough time to build and launch something from scratch in their limited free time. But they should, they really really should.

Thus MACE Ventures was born this Summer over burgers and beers at Amity Hall in Greenwich Village. Four friends who wanted to make stuff, pooling time, effort, cash and resources to learn how take an idea, iterate it, get customer feedback mould, sculpt and launch it. The structure is a novel one I think. Each member pays monthly dues into a collective pool of money. We meet regularly to brainstorm business ideas. We have a constitution that documents how we allocate time and funds to an idea. We collaborate with or hire the best people we can find to help us launch. We try our best to deploy a Lean methodology building prototypes and soliciting lots of early feedback throughout the process. We make it happen. It’s fun and we’re learning an enormous amount.

I would love to be unveiling MACE Ventures alongside some wildly successful business launch. While we have been learning an incredible amount, our sole product launch amounts to an iPhone app that lets you put robot dinosaur heads on top of photos and share them. Seriously.

But we’re not the kind of group that toils away in secret for ages and then unleashes our creation on the world. The reality is that we need help. We have a lot more projects in the pipeline and we need feedback. We need you to download our crappy prototypes and tell us how we can make them something you would actually use. We need to find and hire people to do all kinds of marketing, graphic design, programming, supply chain activities, maybe that’s you or your friend’s friend. If you’d like to get beta access to our apps, be in the loop when we’re hiring for contract work or looking for collaborators on specific projects drop us a line. I’m tyler@maceventures.com and you can probably guess the rest of our emails.

So we’re still working hard on a big win, but I’m incredibly pumped about what’s coming down the line and loving every minute of it.

MACE Ventures is: Michael Conti, Sam Temes, Daniel Hobbs and Tyler Tringas

Gentlemen, please take a bow.