Good morning…

Happy Birthday Sir Paul McCartney – 66 today…

All well in WEXO’s world as we approach signing up our target of 100 Godfather companies and append functionality before going live to users.

Excitingly, you can now see our first WEXO interviews with Captains of Industry in association with t5m.com’s new Prince’s Trust Channel: http://www.t5m.com/the-princes-trust (Download Silverlight on t5m to view).

I spoke with Lord Young (one time Cabinet Minister and FTSE 100 Chairman and ever active start-up investor), Lloyd Dorfman (Founding Chairman of Travelex), James Caan and Deborah Meaden from Dragon’s Den and Ex-Apprentice Tim Cambell amongst others. They share their inspirational experiences and advice for those trying to ‘get on’.

Interviews can also be seen at http://uk.youtube.com/user/the5thmedium and will soon be available here…

Otherwise, we’ve been embroiled in development and closing our angel investment round hence the radio silence but I have been inspired to put the following together for our final potential investor:

News out this morning that Bain Capital Ventures have bought a strategic 5% stake in LinkedIn for $53m in 4th round financing implying a valuation of $1Bn

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-linkedin18-2008jun18,0,6631759.story

Claiming 23m users and calling themselves “professional networking” (an apparent sub-section of our term ‘utility networking’), LinkedIn claims to have relationships with executives from all FTSE 100 companies and to be able to generate revenues of $100 million this year from: premium subscriptions, blue-chip advertisers, job listings and corporate services – a much more diverse revenue base than e.g. Facebook’s advertising driven model.

This is clearly encouraging in that it highlights the appetite for Web 2.0 (and – new term – “Enterprise 2.0″) investments in an otherwise limited investment space. We have always seen LinkedIn as our closest benchmark but are spurious as to its potential in Europe with its:

* clunky interface
* focus on paying ever increasing sums of money to open up the 6 degrees of separation
* inability to engage the ‘digital natives’ / ‘generation-e’.

We obviously prefer our more niche focus on work experience in the UK whilst:

* encouraging growth based on incentive / reward
* engaging companies themselves as opposed to just (but as well as) myriads of their employees
* focusing on smaller companies and increasing ’stickiness’ through e.g. video interviews

VALUATIONS: Might sound a bit like the old price/sales or even price/click of the tech bubble but people now seem to be focusing on price/user (P/U). So (ignoring that UU’s can arguably be divided by up to multiple of 4):

* LINKEDIN (TODAY): On this implied valuation of $1Bn LinkedIn’s 23m users are worth $44 each.
* BEBO (2008): AOL paid $850m for 40m users implying P/U of $21.25
* FACEBOOK (2007): Microsoft’s strategic 5% stake in Facebook implied P/U of $300
* MYSPACE (2005): Newscorp paid $580m for 21m users implying P/U of $27.62

Our own implied valuation remains confidential…