Jonathan Abrams

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Jonathan Abrams is the founder of the social networking website Friendster. Venture capital investors Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers and Benchmark Capital replaced him as CEO of the company with Scott Sassa in June 2004.[1] Abrams remains the chairman of Friendster.

Jonathan Abrams is an award-winning serial entrepreneur, most recently the creator of the pioneering social networking service Friendster. Jonathan founded Friendster in 2002 and ran the company until 2004. Previously, Jonathan was the founder & CEO of HotLinks, and worked as an engineer at companies such as Netscape and Nortel. Jonathan holds an Honors B.Sc. in Computer Science from McMaster University.

Update: As of 2006, Jonathan has launched a brand new social networking website Socializ [2]

Jonathan was named a "Breakout star of 2003" by Entertainment Weekly, and as one of Advertising Age Magazine’s "Entertainment Marketers of the year." Jonathan has also been honored as one of the world’s top young innovators by the MIT Technology Review, and nominated in the software designer category for the 2004 Wired Rave Awards.

Jonathan is a member of the advisory board of the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, and has been extensively involved in the silicon valley entrepreneurial community, including past roles such as co-chair of the SDForum Venture Finance SIG, and a judge for the Stanford Entrepreneur's Challenge business plan contest, the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition, and the Stanford-Berkeley Innovators' Challenge. '->from his site: www.jabrams.com

[edit] Testimonial

One of the innovative features of Friendster is that any friendster user can write a testimonial to people they respect. The testimonial feature provides written verification by those people invited onto friendster that they accept the member inviting as a friend. Possibly, a testimonial to the founder of Friendster could be construed as the ultimate sign of Respect. Just as in any social relationship, the testimonial can be rejected or kept. At this point, an invitation is no longer needed, and this posting might be better left on Friendster.[3].