Most brides and grooms want pots, pans, sheets and towels. Not in Silicon Valley. Try engineers, venture capital and the all-important start-up garage.

A Palo Alto, Calif., couple is forgoing traditional wedding gifts. Drue Kataoka and Svetlozar Kazanjiev are asking their wedding guests to instead donate money through PayPal to get their start-up, Aboomba, off the ground.

A look at the registry provides viewers with a few laughs, as well as an inside, on-the-ground look at what it takes to start a tech company.

This is probably the only couple in history to ask for a week of Amazon.com Web hosting ($134.40) or Windows XP SP2 Home Edition OEM ($95.64.) Guests can feed an outsourced engineer for a day for $150, or finance lunch with a venture capitalist for $291. (Ms. Kataoka and Mr. Kazanjiev have shown their guests all the calculations — including the exchange rate for an Indian engineer and the cost of a bottle of Bordeaux at a Menlo Park restaurant.)

Guests can also supply the couple with pizza and Red Bull to get through the long start-up hours, a month’s rent in the requisite start-up garage or lawyer’s and accountant’s fees. The public is encouraged to suggest other gifts on the registry site.

The tech world’s influence on the wedding does not stop at the registry. The couple will cut a “Wiki cake” — the Meyer lemon chiffon cake will have plain white frosting and guests will be encouraged to write messages in colored frosting. (There will be vanilla frosting on the side in the case of editing wars, a la Wikipedia.)

Charlie Ayers, the founding Google chef, will cater the rehearsal dinner. At an unmanned photo booth, guests will use a remote control to take pictures that will be uploaded in real time to the Web.

For many of Ms. Kataoka and Mr. Kazanjiev’s guests, the items on the registry will be familiar. That is because most of the 180 people invited to their Aug. 29 wedding are in the start-up world, including venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and academics.

The couple are marrying on the Stanford campus, where they met. They graduated in 2000. Ms. Kataoka is an accomplished Japanese brush painting artist and co-writer of the blog ValleyZen with Bill Fenwick of Fenwick & West, the Silicon Valley law firm. Mr. Kazanjiev has worked at start-ups including NexTag, SideStep and Turn.

The two started Aboomba, a consumer Web company that is still in stealth mode, in May. Starting a company and planning a wedding at the same time has been an intense experience, the couple said, and that led to the idea for the registry.

“Our ambition is to bootstrap the company or at least to grow as far as we can without having to raise capital, so that is one of the impetus factors for the registry,” Mr. Kazanjiev said.