Gina Bianchini is the co-founder and CEO of Ning. She started Ning with Marc Andreessen in October of 2005 and Ning has been growing ever since. A true role model for all women entrepreneurs. Read more about what they do on their blog.

Gina was at this year's Web 2.0 expo and gave a session on "Social Networking Winners & Losers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." See the session description here.

Marc Andreessen commented on LinkedIn that he was impressed with your strategic thinking. On this note, what is your strategy for Ning in the next 3-5 years? To put things into perspective, how do you plan on differentiating Ning from other social apps such as Goingon, Peopleaggregator, or Multiply?

We have a different approach. We empower people to create their own social networks and social websites. By giving our customers’ full access to their application code, we are essentially giving them their website, their own features, and their own brand, not to mention free web hosting.

From a marketing standpoint, what direction would you recommend for new startups that are trying to penetrate the current Web 2.0 space to take?

Empower and inspire your target market to create their own thing, in some sense, to build their own brand. Single feature startups that don’t allow its users to customize, are no longer going to work because the web 2.0 space is too crowded. It’s about the power of self-expression.

People say that a large part of building a successful startup is having a GREAT team, so on that note what advice can you give to new entrepreneurs when they have a great idea and want to promote it?

Building a great team is critical, but it's important to define your team in terms of who is getting the work done. It's much more important to have fantastic engineers and smart product people on the ground than it is to create the perfect advisory board or board of directors with big names.

The other beautiful thing about creating great teams, especially in technology, is that anyone can do it if they are passionate. In this industry, you don't need 20 years of experience to know what you're doing. We've taken bets on people with little experience who are smart and have passion and they've knocked it out of the park.

In fact, it's actually more important to have a team that works really well together than it is to have superstars who can't play nicely with each other.

In your “About Ning” page you briefly mentioned your team being worldwide. Could you give us a few characteristic examples in the type of people you look for before putting that person on your payroll?

We look for people that are passionate about what we do and possess an innate talent and diverse background of work experience in the Web 2.0 space such as blogs, web pages, and other online products that people have built.