ReadWriteWeb

To kick off our new Gritty Entrepreneurs interview series, at the Web 2.0 Expo in New York we sat down with Jim Fowler, the Founder and CEO of Jigsaw, a business information and networking service that we noted in our recent review was a complement to LinkedIn rather than a competitor. As we sat sipping espresso in the Starbucks in the lobby, the CNN screen above us told of market mayhem. Ho hum, just another day in the life of a gritty entrepreneur. Let's find out how this particular web 2.0 company is competing in this climate...

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Times are now tougher. Which makes most people head home. The half-hearted entrepreneurs, the wannabes who thought it was going to be easy, the folks with connections to VCs who could get a $5m Series A for a copycat app. Who will be left? The gritty entrepreneur of the old school who knows that it is really, really tough to build a great company. At ReadWriteWeb we celebrate these gritty entrepreneurs and in a series kicking off today we will be writing about them - and for them.

I am a regular user of LinkedIn, using it both for biz dev and recruiting. I am a fan of the service, but still a bit of a skeptic on the business model. I decided to look at alternatives and the one that gave some use was Jigsaw. According to RWW Companies, Jigsaw is "a provider of business information and data services that uniquely leverages user-generated content contributed by its global membership." It claims to have 500,000 members and more than 500 enterprises using the product.