Dave Lu, founder of Fanpop, attended the University of Pennsylvania for his bachelor's degree and received his MBA from Stanford. At Fanpop, he is the bean counter, janitor, graphic designer and web coder. He is a hard-core fan of Lost, travel, U2, Canon photography, and San Francisco. Visit his Fanpop profile here.

How does Fanpop differ from other social networking services?

Fanpop is all about content and community. We want to allow communities of fans to be able to easily find and share content about their favorite topics of interests in social portals. Unlike social networks which revolve around the individuals, our site revolves around people's common passions. Fanpop is focused on helping fans to share those passions with other like minded fans. The social network aspect of Fanpop supports that focus by highlighting that real people are an integral part of building these portals.

Most social networks are a collection of individual profiles of people who share about themselves and their interests. Fanpop is a discovery tool to find people and content that you care about. We see it as an alternative to search engines which require you to hunt and peck for content because there is no indication about context or quality. Search engines can also be gamed because they use algorithms. We also see it as an alternative to traditional social bookmarking sites because we want to create communities around the content not just a collection of links. Fanpop combines the best-of-breed features from all of these areas to build a fun and thriving network of communities of passionate people.

What do you see as the greatest challenge facing your service?

Our biggest challenge is going to be building critical mass in our "spots" (Fanpop portals are called spots). Because we have spots for just about anything and everything you can be a fan of, the size of our user base becomes very important. The more users we have in each spot, the more interesting it becomes. We also realize that there are already many existing communities for a lot of these topics. We don't really see ourselves trying to replace any of these established sites. Our goal is to complement them and in some cases help people discover them. The web is becoming overwhelming to the average user. There's simply too much content out there and it is difficult to filter the sheer volume of content for the best quality stuff. Fanpop hopes to change that by letting the experts and fans decide for you what the best content on the web is for any given topic. We like to think of it as a throwback to the days of web directories like Yahoo! was back in 1996. But Fanpop has now created very niche directories around very specific topics from favorite sports teams and television shows to favorite musicians and authors. Our greatest challenge is going to be drawing the passionate users to Fanpop. But we are confident that our platform of features and our intuitive user interface will convince them to come and stay. So far our user feedback has really reinforced to us that we're doing the right things to that end.

Describe your business model. Are you bootstrapping?

Because our network of social portals are focused on such specific areas of interest, we are positioned well for contextual advertising services like Google Adsense and affiliate advertising. We have plans for future revenue streams, but currently are supported by advertising. Most of our team members have seen the power of Adsense first-hand and wanted to realize the potential on a larger scale. We have taken minimal angel funding from friends and family. But for the most part, it's just four guys in a living room trying to live the dream and loving it!