LinkedIn Founder & CEO, Reid Hoffman.

I was happy to read that Reid Hoffman, Founder and CEO of LinkedIn, also studied Philosophy before entering the business world.

I studied Architecture with a supplementary major in Philosophy at Notre Dame, and Reid earned a masters in Philosophy at Oxford. Some of my favorite thinkers are Socrates, Ayn Rand, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Reid is a great role model. He has dominated in Silicon Valley, helping to finance over 60 companies, 25+ from initial conception. He has been an angel investor for:

facebook.com, digg.com, bioscale.com, nanosolar.com, lulan.com, taxipass.com, naseeb.com, technorati.com, grassroots.com, friendster.com, socialtext.com, realtravel.com, rhythmnetworks.com, ravenflow.com, targetedgrowth.com, wink.com, wikia.com, adventsolar.com, bioscale.com, ning.com, tagged.com, tinypictures.us, etology.com, winster.com, rupture.com, jaxtr.com, kongregate.com, powerset.com, care.com, funnyordie.com, ironport.com, flixster.com, flickr.com, last.fm, grockit.com, and sixapart.com

These are some major Internet powerhouses. Ironically, I had a temp position at Ironport in 2006 before they were acquired by Cisco. I was living in Oakland at the time and temping in “The City.” It was a fun experience — data entry into Excel spreadsheets for eight hours at a time, hahah…. I also temped at Wired magazine during that period (answering the phone at the reception desk = BIG TIME BABY!) before I moved to Los Angeles in 2007.

Getting Reid Hoffman to invest in Vverdant, would be the equivalent of an up-and-coming rapper getting a co-sign from Jay-Z. Let me go brush my shoulders off….

Financing for my fledgling business venture has been on my mind. I’m currently in the start-up “Valley of Death,” that part of the financing cycle where you’re investing in yourself and going negative. It’s hard work to pull that curve back into a parabola, but I’m passionate about my idea so I think it’s very possible.

I can ask around, but the liklihood of an angel investor is not good. I could head to Vegas, but I don’t like my odds there either. The surest way to get this off the ground seems to be through diligence, creativity, and a solid belief that taking this risk will lead to a reward in the end. I go to Rick Ross for inspiration….The venture capital will come to me if I do this right.

Fyodor could have unknowingly been writing about me in 1868.

My wife said something like this to me today, “Only a complete idiot would come up with a brilliant idea to start a company, and then immediately go and post his idea on his blog!”

Granted, it’s possible that what I’m doing is idiotic. But to me, the chance of some deranged venture capitalist, finding their way to drewshula.com and stealing my idea, seems infinitesimally small.

My idea is not new, it’s just repurposed for my field. I’m not Jimmy Wales here. I’m not reinventing the wheel. I want to create a platform where the green building community can freely share information, and I figure that the more input I have from this community, the better my end product will be.

I hope my friends & colleagues find their way to this blog and feel free to contribute to the dialogue. The more people talking the better.

That’s really the thesis of “Web 2.0″ anyway — that collective action is more impactive than that of an individual.

So go on with your bad self and call me a “half-witted, simpleminded, imbecile”…. Just be sure to leave a comment with some feedback before you leave!