Silicon Valley wedding list targets hungry programmers

A Silicon Valley couple with Web 2.0 aspirations have chucked out the traditional wedding registry and are instead seeking help from friends and family to fund their startup.

The couple, Drue Kataoka and Svetlozar Kazanjiev, are slated to tie the knot on August 29, so you still have time to help out with getting their marriage and their company Aboomba off the ground.

"No blenders, flatware or crystal here," write the couple on their online wedding registry. "Instead, feed an engineer for a day - or provide cloud hosting or coffee for a week."

So you can feed an on-site software engineer for a week, which is rated at a very precise $273.97, or a much cheaper outsourced engineer for a mere $150. You can kick in for lunch for a hungry venture capitalist at Madera in Meno Park for $291, which includes a seafood extravaganza as a starter, an oak-grilled ribeye steak, and a $170 bottle of Chateau Lynch-Bages Bordeaux.

Or, if you have lots of cash laying around, you can kick in lunch for an unspecified amount for Tim Draper, managing director of venture fund Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which helped bring us Skype, Hotmail, and a slew of other startups. You can also pay for an hour of a lawyer's time for $385.

For wedding guests and other contributors to the Aboomba and Kataoka-Kazanjiev causes with more modest means, you can buy lattes for a team of programmers for a week at $129.50, a keg of Red Bull - a week's supply as well - for $52.41. You can also kick in for a $300 gift certificate at Fry's electronics or $134.40 for a week's worth of web hosting on Amazon's ECS cloud. And finally, you can pay for one month's rent, at $250, to put the startup in a Silicon Valley garage to "make the startup official."

Don't waste $150 for Aboomba to buy online advertising, though.

Just like you never know how a marriage is going to turn out when you buy a gift, you won't know what you are funding if you kick in a gift at the wedding registry. Aboomba is still in stealth mode, and Kataoka and Kazanjiev are not spilling the beans. ®