In the last several months, EatWith has received thousands of applications from hopeful cooks, who range from kitchen dabblers to professionally trained chefs.
But they are still mere dabblers beside the housewives of Hong Kong and Taipei, who crowd their cities' brokerages in a day-long frenzy of market gossip and gambling.
Despite its high-tech facade, Idealab is something of a throwback to an age when entrepreneurs were dabblers and practically everything depended on one man's ability to keep inventing new ideas.