I'm pretty sure they're not trying to this for sustaining/profit reasons – they're donating the money made to charity.

It's more of a promotion/marketing approach, and depending on the response, then they'll decide where to go next.

This is just a promotion to get people to know about and maybe even try Exec. $100 / hour is far, far under the value of the Alexis, Steve, Tikhon and Matt's time -- they are donating it to charity.

The point isn't to be sustainable, although if people like it we might do it again with a different set of people as another promotion.

calls-with-experts has been done and is huge.

http://www.glgresearch.com/

In this case it makes sense because these people already do consulting for a living, so this is just another way to get clients. And further, the person calling is going to be looking for expertise about a specific topic rather than looking to talk with a specific individual because of their accomplishments or whatever, so it's much less socially awkward.

I do still think there is an opportunity though to get celebrities who wouldn't normally do this to do it, it's just that none of the ways that have been tried so far have been suitable.

It's not just consultants. They connect you with industry experts. One of the biggest spammers on linkedin I find are these types of companies looking for domain experts.

Yes and no. I've been used as a GLG expert a number of times. The only people who seemed to use their service (read willing to pony up for the very high per hour rates) were institutional finance research groups doing due diligence for M&A or similar transactions. That's a pretty specific market with very deep pockets.

I worked at GLG - you are right about the main concentration of their work, but there are also a lot of other groups that use the service.

I don't have any data on this but I think "have lunch/coffee/dinner with a celebrity" is a common thing to raffle off in charity fundraisers.