The guest post below was written by Reid Hoffman, CEO and Founder of LinkedIn. Reid, who’s been a prolific writer lately, is a strong advocate of entrepreneurism and the startup mentality. See his recent Washington Post article Let Our Start-Ups Bail Us Out, and the guest post he wrote here on TechCrunch, Stimulus 2.0: It’s The Startups, Stupid. Reid has recently appeared on Charlie Rose, and we had a chance to sit down with him earlier this year for a video interview as well. Reid is an investor in over 60 web ventures including Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Friendster, FunnyOrDie, Ning, Last.fm, Six Apart and Technorati. He is also a member of the nominating committee of our upcoming TechFellow Awards with Founders Fund.

TechCrunch and Founders Fund announced the first annual TechFellow Awards last week. This is a great time to stimulate investment and recognize and encourage tech entrepreneurs –starting up is cheaper, talent is more fluid, and people are more inclined to take calculated risks. If we can find more ways to spur investment, it will be good for the entrepreneur now and good for society later.

As a serial investor, I’ve enjoyed backing some good Web 2.0 companies, and it’s helped me develop a shortlist of criteria to cut the wheat from the chaff. After five minutes of a pitch, I know if I’m not going to invest, and after 30 minutes to an hour, I generally know if I will. Many entrepreneurs are product-focused, which leads them to pitch the brilliance of the product. Others are money-minded, so they can over think the business plan. But neither of these approaches answer the first few questions I want to know as an investor: