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….

I just found the Bloblive video post (below) of my presentation from the event I spoke at in Santa Monica on June 4, 2009. This was totally unrehearsed, so please excuse the ambiguity. This was also before I started blogging here at drewshula.com, and began to think about my idea more seriously. Watching the video makes me want to go back and refine my pitch! Especially now that I have a name for my company (Vverdant), and a more clearly defined concept.

The presentation format at Bloblive is to speak for 90 seconds and then receive 3 minutes of feedback from the audience. There were about 100 people there and the idea was generally well received. One guy thought I might be “late to the game” though. What do you think? Check it out:

I recently took the stage at a “Bloblive” event in Santa Monica, to share my idea for Vverdant with the crowd. The Bloblive website introduces the concept as, “The city’s open mic night for ideas.” It’s a forum to, “Grab the mic and hit the crowd with your best elevator pitch.” People have 90 seconds to talk and then get 3 minutes of feedback.

There were about 100 people there, and it was a great feeling to give my pitch to a room full of other entrepreneurs. I got mostly positive feedback from the audience. One guy must have read the same article I had, because he told me he thought Web 2.0 would be “growing up” this year. A UCLA Anderson Entrepreneurship professor patted me on the back on the way out and said “You did a great job tonight!”

Overall, it was a very positive experience that’s driving me to push forward. Here’s a great link to a Time article about the Web 2.0 “revolution.”

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!