Name: LetsLunch
Quick Pitch: LetsLunch is a new networking service that introduces you to the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley.
Genius Idea: Social climbing is an art form often perfected over the business lunch. For entrepreneurs, these lunches could help them network their way to crucial industry partnerships or funding deals.
Newly launched startup LetsLunch facilitates these potentially serendipitous lunch dates by matching passionate professionals, based on their social reputation scores, for lunches. With enough positive feedback from lunch dates, regular Joes and Janes can score their way to lunch with a dream business date.
After signing up with LetsLunch, users add their Twitter, LinkedIn, Hacker News and Stack Overflow accounts. The startup will then churn that data to spit out a reputation level from one to 10, and that score will be used to match the user with other would-be lunchers.
The LetsLunch user then defines a personal radius for lunch get-togethers and ticks off days and times that he or she is free for meeting up. LetsLunch e-mails the user on the day of the lunch with information on the who, what, where and when details of their lunch. Afterwards, the lunchers are invited to share feedback on each other, which in turn affects their reputation levels.
LetsLunch’s ultimate reward is a lunch meeting with a vetted VIP user — industry veterans and investors. The site selects users with the highest ratings — having participated in a minimum of four lunches — each month to have lunch with one of the coveted VIPs on their wish lists.
The list of VIPs is still quite...
