Adam Rifkin is the co-founder and CEO of Renkoo. He is a man of multiple talents having headed up project mod-pubsub at Commercenet, jaw-dropping creativity, and to top that off a killer sense-of-humor. Take another look at Renkoo's logo if you are still unconvinced. Congratulations to them, they've just rejuvenated themselves with another round of funding so to find out more goodies they have in store for you, read their blog here.

Where do you get your source of inspiration? Who or what is your Aphrodite?

My source of inspiration is my own social life. Also, Jamie Zawinski’s classic gruntle, “Groupware Bad”.

Other than play Frisbee Golf, what do you do in your free time?

I work with 106 Miles, a group of entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley. To join the list, send us an email.

Can you give us a list of the RSS feeds you would recommend other entrepreneurs to read if they wanted to try to achieve your success?

I’m not successful, so what would I know? *grin* That said, here are some feeds I enjoy:

Noah Kagan’s Okdork, Niall Kennedy, Dare Obasanjo, O’Reilly Radar, and VentureBeat.

What was your motivation for having penguins and bees in your logo?

The Renkoo Bee is a regular in our logo. Bees are social and hard-working! The penguins are just visiting us for a month, to liven up the logo for the winter.

Renkoo takes the cake for having one of the cutest interfaces I’ve ever seen for any Web 2.0 startup. Other than its female-killer cuteness, how does Renkoo differ from other Web 2.0 planning social events apps such as Evite and Skobee?

Thank you for calling our interface cute! What makes Renkoo different is that it solves a problem we’ve all had: arranging to get together with groups of friends when you know who you want to invite, but you need to figure out when and where together.

What were some of the major failures you faced towards Renkoo’s road to success and how were they overcome?

In 2005 and 2006, we spent a lot of time working with two cutting edge technologies, a JavaScript framework called Dojo Toolkit and a Comet server called mod-pubsub, that were themselves in the process of evolving. Over the course of two years, we fixed lots of usability problems and profiled performance and scaling issues (something we continue to do).

With Renkoo’s recent success in securing of $3m from Matrix Partners, can you shed some light on some strategies Renkoo used to improve its chances for getting that seed money?

Every company has a different path to finding the investor who understands where it’s coming from and where it wants to go. What helped was holding nothing back. We showed exactly where we were with the product and where we wanted to go.

With the advent of wiki’s, RSS, and video-sharing, just to name a few of the Web 2.0 technologies startups can use to improve their marketing campaign, What would you recommend entrepreneurs to take into consideration when formulating their Marketing strategy?

Do a little bit every day. But don’t spend a lot of time on marketing. What matters more is continually improving the product and learning from the users.

What is the “best” advice you'd give to entrepreneurs that are looking to “expand” their startup?

Many people we’ve hired were introduced to us by people we know. So my advice to entrepreneurs is to employ their professional networks when looking to hire.

Also, many people we’ve hired started by contracting with us, so they could see what it’s like to work with our team (and vice-versa) with a short-term goal in mind.

Where do you see our heavily-based Web 2.0 market heading? To put things into perspective, can you give us the names of some Web 2.0 startups you'd invest in if you were a VC?

There are so many Web applications that haven’t even been created yet! Think of all the Web applications you use today that didn’t even exist five years ago. We’ll still be able to say the same thing five years from now.

What startups I find most compelling? Videoegg, Pbwiki, Sphere, and Automattic are the first ones that come to mind. Obvious Corp. would be on that list too, but they’re not available for VC investment.

There seems to be startups popping up like crazy trying to jump on the Web 2.0 bandwagon for a quick buck. Some have been lucky while others have not. Where does an entrepreneur with a startup idea know to draw the line between determination mentality (“never give up”) and wisdom mentality (knowing when to “cut your losses short")?

To paraphrase entrepreneur Naval Ravikant, "no one should start a company to make a quick buck. There are much easier ways to make money on Wall Street."

Starting a company is a personal journey, and you do it for personal reasons, you have the desire to make a real product that embodies your vision and you want to talk with the people using the product to make it even better.