Rent time with founders from Parse, Hipmunk, Sincerely and Reddit through Exec

Here is some handy regex:

/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i

Also, libphonenumber from google works.

fyi: see itu-t e.123 for standardized phone number notation: http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-E.123-200102-I/e

This is just a promotion to get people to know about and maybe even try Exec. $100 / hour is far, far under the value of the Alexis, Steve, Tikhon and Matt's time -- they are donating it to charity.

The point isn't to be sustainable, although if people like it we might do it again with a different set of people as another promotion.

In this case it makes sense because these people already do consulting for a living, so this is just another way to get clients. And further, the person calling is going to be looking for expertise about a specific topic rather than looking to talk with a specific individual because of their accomplishments or whatever, so it's much less socially awkward.

I do still think there is an opportunity though to get celebrities who wouldn't normally do this to do it, it's just that none of the ways that have been tried so far have been suitable.

Yes and no. I've been used as a GLG expert a number of times. The only people who seemed to use their service (read willing to pony up for the very high per hour rates) were institutional finance research groups doing due diligence for M&A or similar transactions. That's a pretty specific market with very deep pockets.

I've done GLG (and other similar services) in the $700 range. It's not just for C-level execs at $5-10B revenue companies (I cofounded two venture-backed startups).

I started by charging $400. Then I realized that some of these calls last 15 minutes. At "$700 per hour" we're talking about a whopping $175 to do the scheduling routine (some back-and-forth), make time in my schedule, interrupt "flow", and take the call.

I now insist on a 1 hr minimum and bill $700 and do it occasionally when the offers come in (handful of times per year) because I like talking about the subject matter. It's not exactly the best use of my time.

This is genius. How do you vet your experts? When is this going to release? Please take my money.

Awesome, this whole issue has been a bugaboo for me a long time.

Make sure you create a embeddable widget that people can plaster on blog posts, articles, "maker" sites, Knol(lol, but I think something like this would have given that service more legs and actual buzz), etc. For tech people especially, if your widget lists their high price point, a widget could actually add further legitimacy to their expertise as they write. Win win.

One thing to keep in mind, some experts (depends entirely on their emotional relationship to money, brilliant people do this too) may tend to lower their level of engagement over time since there can be a reluctance to "increase price" when they start getting bored and feel your service is a burden at the income level provided, you should definitely have a mechanism to auto increment their list price as their involvement or acceptance rates decrease (or you can just add more experts, but ideally you do both, to organically implement tiered expertise).

As an example, Sean Hannity is an extremely busy guy (you used to be able to get him for 35k) and really doesn't like doing live one off events, his daily radio show is an insane time obligation, and he would rather be book touring, but you can still get him on the east coast for 100K and a private jet :-)

Well, yes it isn't new, there are also still 900 numbers. But just look at the offerings, Skype, AT&T(ether), the services are either a "value add" for the company or just look like crap. This space is begging for an implementation that doesn't suck.