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!

The green light bulb went off in my brain (and it was a compact fluorescent).

So I have this idea to start a company:

I’ve been thinking about it for a couple months, but the concept is just a sprout. It’s barely started to germinate in my brain. This blog is meant to change that. I plan to write about my entrepreneurial ideas here, both to catalogue my thoughts, and to provide a forum for feedback.

This is the concept:

I want to create a global Web 2.0 platform for the green building (GB) industry. A knowledge center: news, jobs, links, community, calendar. With user generated content. This will be a one stop shop for GB professionals — a resource I would use every day in my profession (I’m an architect), but which does not currently exist. I think this is a big idea because the construction industry is one of the largest in the world, and the entire thing is shifting to green. There is a large potential user group for this site.

My idea is to organize a website by location (similar in concept to Craigslist), so GB professionals can tap into their local networks. I plan to start with my current local network of Los Angeles, and spread to other cities if this is a success. I’m using Curbed as a model of a similar idea that is working for the real estate industry.

Phases:

I: Create GB network for Los Angeles. II: Spread to other cities in the U.S. and globally. III: Apply this model to other professional communities: artists, non-profits, financial executives, etc….

It’s all about scalability:

I think I’ve generated a model that could have a lot of potential. We’ll see how this blog and this idea continue to grow. Stay tuned.