Startup Addict Musings

I read an interesting article on Valleywag today regarding the imminent battle of Facebook and Linked In. The battle in my opinion never needs to take place because Startup Addict is the perfect blend of Facebook for the LinkedIn community. Just as search has gone into hundreds of verticals and notably successful verticals (see simplyhired purchased by Google), so has the social networking scene. StartupAddict is not intended for 64 million uniques (Myspace) or even 20 million uniques that Facebook holds. It is intended to scale somewhere in the 1 - 6 million territory for the social vertical of entrepreneurs and investors bursting to create and fund startups respectively. Linked In is widely successful and pioneered by the great Reid Hoffman but it still feels like an online rolodex rather than a social experience that will keeps you coming back for more.

Which means “drink-fest” in English is upon us. I’m off to a festive bash at my building superintendent’s McMansion in one the nice communities I developed over the last few years Sugar Brook. It was one of the first subdivisions in New Hampshire to be classified “low impact development” (LID). We are about 35% sold out and extremely pleased with sales thus far for such a small town like Newport, NH.

Located in the heart of the Lake Sunapee - Dartmouth region Sugar Brook is close to town, boating, skiing, and events but yet away from it all. Now that I finished my shameless plug for Sugar Brook, I have worked up and appetite for Mexican food. Hasta Manana.

I attended the live production of CEO Exchange last Thursday with a friend a mine from Timken. The round-table session consisted of GE’s CEO Jeff Immelt and Kraft’s CEO Irene Rosenfeld with host Jeff Greenfield. Jeff Immelt spoke of major initiatives GE has focused heavily on since he took the reigns in 2001. From the ecomagination campaign that was launched in 2005 to positioning NBC to be more compelling and monetizing the digital content space. The major shift under Immelt is R&D spending and globalization of GE being less dependent on the US.

Irene Rosenfeld explained Kraft’s focus on healthier foods (growing trend) that tastes delicious. She feels Kraft’s technological experience in food categories and development is positioned very well to meet the every changing and multi-cultural consumer.

The show format itself was very interesting and reminded me of a pilot I helped develop with several producers a Scout in 2001/02 called Vision to Value. Entrepreneurial success stories.