James Altucher is the co-founder of Stockpickr. Visit the company blog here.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?

I basically have three backgrounds, all of which combined to help me with Stockpickr. In the 90s I started and ran a web services company called Reset. We did websites for Time Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney, BMG, and others. Sold it in 1998 to a rollup of web services companies and then got into the investing business. Was a partner at a VC firm and then, starting in mid-2004, started a Fund of hedge funds with Dan Kelly, a former CSFB banker. In 2002 I started writing for TheStreet.com and in 2004 I started writing a weekly column (every Tuesday) for The Financial Times. Stockpickr finally allowed me to use all three backgrounds: web development, investing, and financial media, in one project.

Describe your team and how the idea for Stockpickr was conceived.

We have several technical developers and several content developers on the team. The project was conceived because Dan and I were using the idea of piggybacking the best hedge funds and mutual funds for our own investing. If Warren Buffett likes USG at $50 and it goes down to $45 then who were we to argue. We knew Buffett likes to buy-and-hold and we knew he was probably a buyer at $45 if he was a buyer at $50 so then we would buy. We identified about 800 mutual funds and hedge funds that had these characteristics and we started automating the process of finding ideas from the public filings of these investors as well as from interviews with them and other public pronouncements.

Then we decided it would be even more powerful to make this a collaborative effort and exchange ideas with fellow investors and other hedge fund managers. We opened it up to the public with Stockpickr and the ideas that we've discovered on the site have been amazing. Its been a dream come true.

What unique problems does a service like yours face, and how have you dealt with them?

Finding fast, reliable information in the investment space is always tricky but we have hundreds of sources of good info and getting better every day.

Is there anything you've learned from Stockpickr that you could pass on to aspiring entrepreneurs?

Well, I'm still learning so if anyone has anything they want to pass on to me I'd be more than happy to listen and learn. Maybe one thing I can say is to don't hold back on features. Throw everything in that you think will provide value to your customers including the kitchen sink. And always put yourself in their shoes and ask, "would I use this". If the answer is "no" then its not a good feature. And expect to work 23 hours a day.