This week, we take a look at Jigsaw, a leading provider of business card and company data services that leverages user-generated content contributed by its community of some one million members. Our guest host was Aydin Senkut, an early-Google employee-turned angel investor, is becoming known as one of the more prolific seed-to-early-stage investors in Silicon Valley, having invested in 40 companies since 2006.

Here are some observations made by myself, Adyin and Ezra Roizen (Vator Box regular and digital media investment banker):

– Jigsaw CEO and founder Jim Fowler gave a solid pitch.

– It’s clear they’re addressing a key pain point. The big challenges for marketers and business professionals are data mining and getting clean data. Jigsaw is helping to provide reliable data.

– Jigsaw’s information exchange idea is a great one and they nailed the trade-for-trade information model. 

– There may be some concerns over privacy as Jigsaw’s model allows users to trade in contact information about people who may not want that information publicly available. But privacy concerns are overblown. Wiki sites across the Web, such as Wikipedia, rely on third parties to give up information about people who may not want information available. You don’t see many people fighting Wiki sites.

– Why is it that LinkedIn has 40 more million registered users and Facebook has 300 hundred million whereas Jigsaw has under 20 million? It seems that the company’s list should be much larger since it started in 2004. Given the relative difference, the question is: Has the company reached its peak? Or is this a company that can significantly ramp up its profiles?

– Jigsaw is providing a disruptive service that is definitely encroaching on the services that Thompson Reuters, Dow Jones, and Dun & Bradstreet’s Hoovers are offering.

– The potential for Jigsaw isn’t the aggregation of information, but the layer of services on top of the information, such as a preferred way of being contacted.

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