Founders at Work, by Jessica Livingston. 2007.

Last weekend I sat down at Bay Cities Deli in Santa Monica with my friend Justin Brandon for input on my idea for Vverdant. I wanted to meet with him, because I greatly respect his opinion on web related projects. He worked at Google and has developed several great websites, including The Road to Fondwa site for a film he directed and produced. Justin thought the concept for Vverdant seemed pretty solid and told me to go for it. He also turned me on to several great websites including the Four Hour Workweek Blog, and Venture Hacks.

Additionally, he let me borrow a copy of Founders at Work, by Jessica Livingston. So far I’ve read write-ups on: Apple, Gmail, Craigslist, and Flickr. It’s one of those perfectly timed reads and I can’t put it down. It’s amazing to read these narratives of people who succeeded at doing exactly what I’m trying to do: follow their passion, build a company, and create value for people.

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….

It’s great to have a network of talented friends! Today my man Lawrence Santiago volunteered to help me with a logo design. There is so much thought that goes into a logo….The company philosophy ought to be evident in its design. I told Lawrence, “I just want it to look clean, simple and progressive. I want to come across as a cutting edge green company. I like simple logos.” I think he nailed it. The idea needs a bit of tweaking, but it’s most of the way there. I’m interested in some color variations, but I love his font, and how he made the “t” into a leaf. He sent me a few mockups:

Vverdant logo mockup #1 by Lawrence Santiago: June 23, 2009.

Vverdant logo mockup #2 by Lawrence Santiago: June 23, 2009.

Vverdant logo mockup #3 by Lawrence Santiago: June 23, 2009.

Vverdant logo mockup #4 by Lawrence Santiago: June 23, 2009.

Then Lawrence started working on an idea for the slogan, “To the Power of V.” This has a lot of great potential. As he pointed out, it could be used to say, “Raise your impact to the power of V,” or “Increase your reach to the power of V,” etc….I love this mirror image “v” concept.

Vverdant logo mockup #5 by Lawrence Santiago: June 24, 2009.

These got me excited and I started sketching:

Vverdant logo sketches by Drew Shula: June 23, 2009.

We’ll be working toward finalizing these concepts soon. Until then, leave a comment to let me know what you think!

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:

Since I began thinking about starting a company, I knew I had to have a great domain name. But I had no idea how difficult this process would be. Not only should your domain name also be your company name, but it should be short, memorable, and easy to tell people about without having to spell. It’s not simply a matter of coming up with a great name, but coming up with a great name that is available.

Domain names are essentially web real estate, and the market becomes more and more crowded each day. Most good names are taken and finding one that is available seems to involve considerable creativity. These are two strategies I’ve been using to come up with new domain names: combining Latin roots to create new words, or making a list of names I like and combining syllables from different words to create a new word (check out dot-o-mator).

I’ve been using GoDaddy to check availability, but a friend also sent me a link for Instant Domain Search, which is a better search tool, because you never have to use the back button. So far I’ve had a couple decent ideas, but nothing I’m too excited about. The process is consuming. I’ll get out of bed in the middle of the night to write down an idea and get up in the morning to find that it’s taken. I hope inspiration strikes me soon….I’m in domain name hell.