Chief Executive Officer
StockTwits
[PNR]

Howard Lindzon concedes that StockTwits, the interactive investor community he co-founded three years ago, was based on a not entirely original idea. He tips his cap to two 1990s-vintage start-ups: Motley Fool, which he recalls as “a cool, social community, but it was expensive,” and TheStreet.com, which “took advantage of the web going mainstream but was still an expensive proposition.” CEO Lindzon, 45, a Canada-born entrepreneur, angel investor and hedge fund manager, set out to build a “financial idea exchange” on the very different economics of social networking. StockTwits is idea-sharing for the age of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter — just three of the many linkages that San Diego–based StockTwits has forged with network and content partners. Lindzon says his “Web 3.0” technology costs a minuscule fraction of what earlier pioneers had to pay. He believes in the wisdom of his crowd of 100,000-plus news-reading, blog-­scanning, tip-touting subscribers. “When they scream with pain or joy, that lets us know what we should keep or eliminate,” says Lindzon, who sold a previous start-up, web video company Wallstrip, to CBS Corp. in 2007 and had investments in earlier ventures including Rent.com, which EBay acquired in 2005. His goal for StockTwits is to create “what people feel with iPhone: ‘Wow, this does more than I ever wanted. Now I don’t need anything else.’ ”