This Justyn

(I’m not), here’s what I would look for in a startup:

Must Haves;

• BOTH Technical and Business-minded founders/team. By technical I mean the person who’s building it. By business-minded I mean someone who can sell it, drum up strategic deals and has a phenomenal sense of product.
• A prototype (at least). If you couldn’t find anyone to help you get the idea off the ground without money, I wouldn’t be convinced of a) the idea b) the leadership.
• A business model that a) exists b) isn’t ad based.
• A large, underserved market with money.
• Lots and lots of innovation. A significantly better mouse-trap.

Ideally;

• Cheap keywords
• CEO owns the product roadmap
• User Experience Fanatics
• 5+ years experience doing whichever function they intend to do with the company. CTO = coding. CEO = selling, leading, managing products. CEO could fall under the coding side too I suppose.

I’m totally biased on all of these things, and as I said I’m not an investor - but based on my current world-view, this is what I would look for.

Just read a great article/presentation related to the challenges of unsegmented social graphs (linked/embedded below)

The case used in the presentation to illustrate the problem was a swim teacher with young students who was also connected to gay friends and often commented on their pictures on Facebook - unknowingly exposing her students to photos from wild nights out from her friends.

The more common case is just that we normally behave differently with different groups of people (family vs. co-workers for example). Mark Zuckerberg would probably say that people with nothing to hide wouldn’t need any segmenting. That’s just not realistic. We interact with people differently.

The problem is, that as methods to segment social graphs emerge, it’s entirely too tedious to go *back* and put everyone into buckets. FB lists or groups (not sure what they’re called) are just too much work.

And that is why, in my opinion, Google’s social site (Google Me?) could win. People loved the blank canvas that moving from MySpace to Facebook provided. “OK, this is my REAL network”.

As Facebook has increased in popularity, people have started making much looser connections. What was once family and friends is now friends, family, industry connections, coworkers, etc.

More than that, adding people to ‘buckets’ of contact types at the time of connection is 1000x easier than going back and trying to do it now (think about your Twitter following, would you actually go back and group them all? You’d get about 1/10th of the way through and give up).

That’s why on Sprout Social, we have people add contacts to lists/groups as they connect. The same approach could make Google Me a very likable web property for the overwhelmed, OCD like me, and just people who want some walls between groups of online connections.

Users have different social graphs on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for that very reason. If Google Me offers a way to have that same distinction in one place, they will do amazingly well.

The Real Life Social Network v2

View more documents from Paul Adams.

When a company can claim the following, I will bet on their stock hitting $500

• Hottest phone on the planet
• Hottest laptops on the planet
• Hottest tablet computer on the planet
• Slickest consumer OS available
• People lined up for blocks rather than waiting for the UPS truck
• Stranglehold on digital music
• The most visionary product team our industry has seen

Apple has become a juggernaut we’ve never seen the likes of before. Their dominance is different than MSFT dominance 10 years ago - because it was put at the top of the pedestal by users, not necessity.