Web 2.0 Startups need solid b-plan to survive…what discovery!!!!

I’m really annoyed. I just finished reading Web 2.0 Startups: Who will survive? in the Nov 17th Business Week issue.

I have been a long time subscriber of Business Week. I normally like their simple to understand articles with good insights. Well, today I cannot say the same. If Business Week is going to spend pages on promoting companies that they invest on with zero value articles, I am going to close my subscription very fast.

The article in question just says that web 2.0 startups will go out of business if they don’t have a good way to get cash…..what surprise!! come on people! I thought that everybody knows for a while now that a solid business plan for startups is needed regardless the economic downturn.

To make this “surprising and interesting” point, Business Week wrote an interview with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn ( business oriented social networking site). The article has a full page picture of Mr Hoffman. I admired Mr Hoffman for his vision of founding Linkedin 6 years ago so I thought that the article will be insightful. Well, judge by yourself, these are the quotes from Mr Hoffman’s interview about how startups will survive in the downturn:

“Pull up a chair.”

“Here’s a guy from Minneapolis who wants me to help on a social-good project he’s doing.”"Looks like it’s based on bad math.”

“You want to stay in the game,”

“Essentially,” he says, “every individual is a small business.”

Talking about when he founded Linkedin. “The common wisdom was that the consumer Net was dead,” he recalls, and “that it was controlled by Yahoo, eBay, and Google. I thought it was just beginning.”  “This is the only time in human history when, for somewhere between $5 million and $30 million of capital investment, you can create a sustainable ecosystem for 10 million-plus people,”

Are you kidding? is this the whole insight that a guy like Hoffman has to share about startups in the economic crisis?

Through the end I understood what was going on here. Pretty simple, Mc Graw Hill companies (the parent of Business Week) invested $22.7 million in Linkedin on October 22nd.  Sooooo, now I am sure that this lousy article it was just free advertisement for Linkedin and Mr Hoffman from an interested party taking care of their investment.

Honestly, even if this could be expected, I really would like that Business Week justify this free Ad article with good and insightful content…