Interesting couple of days
Had a very enjoyable lunch yesterday with the CTO of LinkedIn, Eric Ly at a Thai restaurant in Mountain View.
LinkedIn is the best implementation of a business networking site, and it was very interesting to talk about our two companies business models including many similarities. LinkedIn is part of the hot segment called "social networking" that's seen the rise of Friendster and Blogging Network. Sequoia has just funded LinkedIn which makes tremendous sense since they're also the VC fund behind Plaxo and Google etc.
I met Eric a couple of years ago at a party at John Doerr's associate's home in Menlo Park, I think it was. One of those unassuming ranch homes on a tree-lined tree with a pool in the backyard. Eric joined up with Reid Hoffman, earlier this year to help start LinkedIn. They're planning some great things (more on this later) for the service which continues to grow and now has a patent edge over its competitors (more on that story from Matt Marshall in the San Jose Mercury News today).
And then today I was interviewed by a wonderful reporter who's doing a story on blogging and Blogging Network's business model. Maybe we'll see this reporter blogging on the site soon!