THE DREAM IN ACTION

This start-up is attempting to combine a social network of “start-uppers” and a nifty little AI tool that will predict the probability of success of a start-up. The community side is to fill in gaps for new companies. Example: you need a PM, graphic designer, lawyer? might help you do it. This is something that a site like LinkedIn does not offer. Great idea! However, there are a million other social networks for this crowd, so they’ve decided to differentiate themselves by adding this start-up success predictor to spice up their offering a bit.

YouNoodle | Welcome to YouNoodle! via kwout

It could work…I can’t see this tool being that accurate but I don’t think that matters much. It seems to me that the success of You Noodle will not be determined by the accuracy of the “success predictor” but more by the amount of people and start-ups that sign-up for and use the social network.

Also, the team behind YouNoodle is pretty impressive. These bio’s are from their about page.

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Bob Goodson, CEO, Cofounder (27) – British
Bob was studying for the MPhil Medieval English Literature at Oxford before being head-hunted to the U.S. by Max Levchin. He was one of the first employees at Yelp.com before starting YouNoodle. Chinese acrobatics is the latest pursuit.

Kirill Makharinsky, Business Development and Data Analytics, Cofounder (22) – Russian, British
Real World Magazine’s ‘UK Graduate of the Year 2006′, Kirill finished Oxford with a Mathematics degree and then worked on data and analytics at Slide.com before starting YouNoodle. He’s seriously into tennis, heli-skiing, piano and making sense of huge data sets.

Rebeca Hwang, Network Strategy and Development, (28) – Korean, Argentinean
Rebeca is a Chemistry and Physics Olympiad Medalist of Argentina, has 3 patents, donated to NGOs, and had a full Scholarship to MIT. She is a PhD candidate at Stanford on Social Network Theory, and is into rugby and white water rafting.

Joachim Krebs, Engineer (21) – Danish
Joachim was recruited by legendary game-developer Sir Peter Molyneux at 16.

Sam Purtill, Engineer (19) – American
Sam is a young entrepreneur and web engineer. Deferred university place to join YN. At 16, became a partner in the Romanian-based design studio, Okapi Studio (http://okapistudio.com).

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These are some pretty impressive bio’s and I’d guess that if this start-up predicting social network does tank they’ll find something else that doesn’t. I’ll look to this group for something real big.