ActSeed

William Attinger, CEO of the two-employee, San Diego-based company, which produces a community Web site for entrepreneurs:

I was an investment banker in New York in the early '90s and then in the Bay Area in the mid-'90s. I was very focused on how companies actually make money. If you don't have a business model that works, how far can you go? I wanted to give people a real framework, a checklist for creating a business. It was 2008, and I knew I wanted to create something that was not static. Often when you write a book, it is stale by the time it hits the shelves. Everything is moving so fast. So instead of consulting or writing a book, I knew social media could be the medium for this. Most entrepreneurs are using social media and the Internet to try to figure out where to start. That's a real challenge.