I've always had a mind for entrepreneurship and come from a long line of entrepreneurs. One of my first start-ups back in my college days was a website called VGPro (video game pro) that let users upload/download mods for games. Users could put their own Adsense ads on their mod pages to earn money, and we facilitated the bandwidth and infrastructure needed to get their creations in the hands of gamers all over the world (this wasn't so easy back in the day before "the cloud"!). We had over 1M unique users per month before selling it. I created it with a good friend that actually recently also joined Vida as Chief of Product Noah Hayes (Noah is a big reason why the V2 of Vida is so much more awesome).
My last start-up which you mentioned was one of the first online-only business phone system platforms. I didn't have any telecom experience before but dove in, made a ton of mistakes, learned a lot, ultimately grew the business, and sold it to the largest wholesale telecom operator in the world by traffic volumes: Inteliquent. I worked for them for the past 5 years before leaving to start Vida.
Here's a "Wayback Machine" snapshot of VGPro back in 2009. Boy I'm getting old... https://web.archive.org/web/20090131042248/http://www.vgpro.com/
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I see a lot of the same monetization incentive schemes in that website as what you are doing with vida. Very neat.
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building a network is all about aligning incentives!
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