Founders

Randomly stumbled upon the BranchOut story while revisiting 7 powers:

June 2010. Rick Marini, 2x founder with a 100M exit, decided to tackle on LinkedIn through the open social graph Facebook had. He easily raised a 6M series A led by Accel. By that time, LinkedIn already had 70M users.

BranchOut users in 11Q1 went from 10k to 500k, they raised another round totaling 49M in funding — all while LinkedIn IPOd

By spring 2012, users peaked to 14M, but then, they dropped

“Few of BranchOut users where truly engaged, when FB banned the spammy wall post method, BranchOut churn outpaced it’s growth”

In 2014, Hearst acquired the assets and team for a fraction

Morale of the story: Users don’t want to mix up social graphs. In this case, each additional user that signed up detracted value for the rest

Applying a similar logic, how do web3 social protocols survive if people don’t want to mix social graphs?
 
Multiple decentralized identities + multiple social protocols + different clients

Product builder and investor — @socialgraphvc

kindness, compassion, forgiveness

Isn't the moral of the story: don't build a product the relies on a douchey distribution method?

Foresight, futures thinking, product & philosophy. Host of /foresight

Distribution is just a channel, and in this case it worked wonders — it’s probably more about the product retention here