Rick Marini

"BranchOut Takes on LinkedIn In June of 2010 Rick Marini had a problem. He needed to track down a contact at a particular company—he was certain he knew someone there but just couldn’t recall the name. To most people this would constitute a soon forgotten frustration. But Marini was not most people. He was a Harvard Business School trained serial entrepreneur with significant recruiting industry experience—he had founded both SuperFan and Tickle.com, selling the latter to Monster Worldwide for nearly $100M. So a month later he launched BranchOut, a professional networking Facebook app. Marini went at this hard and by September had pulled together a $6M Series A round led by Accel Partners, Floodgate and Norwest Venture Partners with some notable tech firm execs joining the round as well. Recruiters want to make the best use of their time, so they go to the source with the largest number of listed professionals, while at the same time professionals want to list their names on the site with the most recruiters visiting. Such one-hand-shakes-the-other self-reinforcing upward spirals are known as Network Economies22: the value of the service to each customer is enhanced as new customers join the “network.” In such a situation, having the most customers is everything, and Marini knew exactly how this game was played: rapidly scale or die. Catch-up is usually impossible if there are Network Economies and LinkedIn already had 70M members. But Marini was betting that the game was not yet over. His idea was to build on Facebook’s base, which was almost 10x that of LinkedIn, enabling this with tools so that a user could seamlessly download all their information from LinkedIn. Marini positioned a Facebook tie-in as a key to better value: “Facebook has a strength of connection that LinkedIn doesn’t have. LinkedIn is"

"∴ Profits (π) = (P – c) Q – C                             Where P ≡ price faced by all sellers There are two businesses: S, the strong company, and W, the weak company As an indication of leader leverage, assess: Surplus Leader Margin: What governs S’s margins if P is set Э Wπ = 0? C H A P T E R   2 NETWORK ECONOMIES GROUP VALUE BranchOut Takes on LinkedIn In June of 2010 Rick Marini had a problem. He needed to track down a contact at a particular company—he was certain he knew someone there but just couldn’t recall the name. To most people this would constitute a soon forgotten frustration. But Marini was not most people. He was a Harvard Business School trained serial entrepreneur with significant recruiting industry experience—he had founded both SuperFan and Tickle.com, selling the latter to Monster Worldwide for nearly"