Do you want to disrupt social networking? Do you believe that someone has yet to bring a true sense of purpose, relevancy and broad-scale yet efficient utility to social networking?

I was a co-founder of GoTo.com (later called Overture), where we revolutionized search and online advertising by inventing the paid search business model, building it to $1bn in four years. Now, after a variety of other ventures in the Internet space in the U.S. and China and a few years working on the NYC public school reform initiative, I am building a platform to drive social networking to the next level, changing what it means to be socially connected on the Web.

I am looking for a few wickedly smart and highly driven engineers to build the prototype. The right people have experience in building distributed web-based systems of significant scale and are well-versed in the web technologies and standards of the “social semantic web”.
Other requirements that I need (although I realize they might not all come in one person):
- Good, clean and fast coder!
- High proficiency in JAVA, AJAX, Flash, XML, DHTML and PHP, etc.
- Embraces interoperability and data portability (and the belief that users own their data) and has a strong knowledge of OpenID, OAuth, XFN, FOAF, XRD, XMPP, RSS, REST, the Portable Contacts protocol and the other building blocks of data portability.
- Experience with software that communicates directly with 3rd party software (APIs, automation scripts).
- Experience with semantic technologies, including lightweight data/text mining and NLP to extract and create meaning from unstructured data.
- Experience with social network and search algorithms and applied machine learning to drive complex queries against massive data sets.
- Strong knowledge of data structures and database strategy.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills, and the ability to translate technical terms into plain English. Great collaborator.
- Passion about building a powerful and simple platform, with an elegant and intuitive consumer experience.
- Bonus points for experience with recommendation systems, SaaS and start-ups; some UX and design skills; a sense of humor and the desire to make a difference in the world.

This is an opportunity to come in on the ground floor of a start-up and build the prototype to take to investors. Since it is a pre-funded start-up venture that I am seeding myself, I’m looking for a few folks who can forgo salary for a while (3-6 months) in favor of equity and a cash salary once the business is funded. The company is based in NYC so please be in the tri-state area.

If you have the passion to build something that revolutionizes how we interact on the Web, and you feel like you have strong experience in some of the above areas, let’s talk. Changing the world takes amazing people and I am prepared to find them. Please email me at sassystefi [at] gmail [dot] com with a resume and a little about your experience, passions and why you’d like to be part of a start-up. I’m happy to discuss it in more detail.

p.s. No recruiters, web shops or other third party providers, please.