First installment of the serial. Enjoy!

From StartupCamedy.com, the website of the serial (the text on the site contains hyperlinks): 

Praise for the Business Plan This Serial Adapts, Updates and Expands On

From a 2004 email sent to the author of this serial by Amazon.com's first Director of Personalization:

"Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that companyΓÇÖs personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems. . . . I guess IΓÇÖm mostly just fascinated that weΓÇÖve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it ΓÇÿthe age of the amateurΓÇÖ or ΓÇÿnetworks of shared experiencesΓÇÖ instead of CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you haveΓÇöit's fascinating stuff." 

Prologue

From 2013 book Who Owns the Future?, by Jaron Lanier:

"A tiny website with no financing, but just the right design at just the right time, just might grow like Facebook did, changing the world. It might be something like a social network where people are encouraged to pay each other for contributions from the very start [e.g., by paying with a virtual currency]. . . . [The] startup can introduce a new template for personal activity that can evolve to have the key benefits of a job even though it isn't called a job.

. . . Ordinary people will initially start to earn a little when others are interested by their tweets, blogs, social network updates, videos, and the like. This will not in itself generate enough business to transform the economy, but it will serve a crucial transitional, educational function. People will become used to the idea of looking online for opportunities to earn real wealth.

    . . . From a Wall Street perspective, the heretofore unacknowledged but valuable contributions of ordinary individuals will finally be counted in the cloud. That will mean that finance can be built on all that people do to create value in the network age. Suddenly investors will be making money from having bet on a confederacy of bloggers . . ."

Time magazine named Jaron Lanier one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010. 

. . .  From an October 29, 2013 article in The New York Times:

"To be accredited, universities have had to base curriculums on credit hours and years of study. The seat-time systemΓÇöone based on the hours spent in the classroomΓÇöis further reinforced by Title IV student aid: to receive need-based Pell grants or federal loans, students have had to carry a certain load of credits each semester.

. . . In March of this year, the Department of Education invited colleges to submit programs for consideration under Title IV aid that do not rely on seat time. In response, public, private and for-profit institutions alike have rushed out programs that are changing the college degree in fundamental ways; they are based not on time in a course but on tangible evidence of learning, a concept known as competency-based education.

. . . Frederick M. Hurst, who directs Northern Arizona University's new Personalized Learning Program, says that competency transcripts do a better job of communicating a graduate's value to employers."

From an August 2013 essay by Paul Graham, co-founder of leading ΓÇ£startup acceleratorΓÇ¥ Y Combinator:

"Experienced investors are well aware that the best ideas are also the scariest."