I'd be curious to know whether LinkedIn is or will start working on a similar user-experience for medium-to-large organizations. On paper it would seem LinkedIn would have a strong lead ahead of CrunchBase with their own business graph model(s), but the existing LinkedIn UI would probably need some major overhauls.
Also, it's unlikely that LinkedIn would want to focus solely on early-stage startups since at this point in their trajectory there probably isn't enough money in that category to justify an additional LinkedIn Premium tier.
CrunchBase is immersed in the startup ecosystem and their Business Graph will probably provide and quickly return more relevant information based on their existing dataset.
This strikes me more as a question of measuring what we have got, not what is useful.
I think that helping individuals to build their own graphs is really really powerful - and thin that into a "company I am working for now" role relationship / recruitment tool is where the money is
Not really. Its more about me being helped to maintain my contacts over time (and occassionaly remembering to be y'know, sociable) and then being able to aggregate that. If I am looking for someone self-labelled as a good Perl programmer I could trust LinkedIn - or I could hire some good Perl guys and then ask them to scan their contacts list.
hmmm, that still sounds like LInkedIn but its not what I am after...
They've produced some really nice visualisations showing international company structures http://opencorporates.com/viz/financial/index.html