• Geek Wire, Friday, September 2, 2011 12:23 PM

Does the market really have room for another social network -- and one for college kids, no less? Jonathan Lazarus, who retired from his vice president role at Microsoft in 1996, thinks so. That's because his new venture, CollegeBrain, won't compete directly with other social networks -- or Facebook, at least. "I am not stupid enough to compete with Facebook," Lazarus tells GeekWire. On the contrary, "We are very complementary with Facebook."

CollegeBrain, which just landed $600,000 in start-up capital, "is a very broad look at everything from the campus to what classes and instructors are like," Lazarus tells GeekWire. "It is allowing them to share their overall experiences, what surprised them, what they expected, what changed over their four years." That differs from Facebook, according to Lazarus, which he says is more of an "unstructured conversation."

Adding to the $115,000 that Lazarus and co-founder Ron Craswell previously injected into the start-up, investors include Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures. Craswell, for his part, is a former vice president of engineering at M:Metrics, as well as a former engineering director at Google.

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