TechCrunch’s recent post about Popsugar’s $5 million series A round by Sequoia got a lot of comments from readers befuddled about the world of venture capital. Will Scroter, CEO of GoBigNetwork, has the site for you. GoBigNetwork solves the problem of the disconnected startup community by creating an online marketplace for investors to find inventors.
With GoBigNetwork, users create personal profiles, labeling themselves as startups, investors, job seekers, service providers, and advisors. You can then place a classified listing for about what you need (money, employees, investment opportunities). GoBigNetwork has come a long way since the begining of the year, allowing your to search through listings posted by over 22,000 startups by keyword and location. Posts can be made to your personal network of friends, or to the whole community for a premium fee. Posting to the public costs a minimum of $59/month the post runs, up to $199 for non-expiring posts featured on the homepage. The system also has some built in intelligence that maps funding requests to investors interested in those areas via account notifications.
Go Big also has the social networking features of a LinkedIn, allowing you to add friends, and form groups. If you’re not connected with someone else on the network, you have to subscribe to the service to message anyone in the system. However, the networking component is still not a good replacement for real world connections. The spartan text only profiles make it hard for me to believe I could really sign on and start making connections out of the blue. It lacks the recommendation and newly added voting feature of the more established LinkedIn. But GoBigNetwork isn’t so much a networking site as it is a marketplace for financing, and it looks like it will help a lot of dot com outsiders get a foot in the door.
