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The reason the social-networking phenomenon is something that I invested in early and massively - I led the Series A financing for Friendster; I founded a company called Socialnet in 1997; I founded LinkedIn; and I was part of the first round of financing in Facebook - it sounds trivial, but people matter.

Every successful business, even Google, Facebook, Twitter, started with a combination of manual improvements and friends of the founders using the site.

I'm just more excited about helping new entrepreneurs create the next Facebook or Google.

In the space of three weeks, I met a fair bunch of the guys who were just starting those little programmers' co-ops, and everybody was talking about starting businesses.

I started off with a company, InfoSpace, with my own funding. The company was listed among the most successful companies and I went on to start Intelius and Moon Express. Now, I focus my time on using the skills of an entrepreneur to solve many of the grand challenges facing us in the areas of education, healthcare, clean water and energy.

Yelp has been in this business since it really became something worth thinking about in 2004, when the transition started happening from the world of the Yellow Pages to the world of searching online for local information.

The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.

Even when I lost my job at CBS News, I set up shop in my youngest daughter's bedroom and started Brainstormin' Productions and the Hannah Storm Foundation. And guess who was there, visiting me and enthusiastically making business charts and graphs that covered my entire kitchen table? My dad, of course.