Rick Marini is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in social media with over a decade of experience in the consumer Internet space. Rick is the Founder & CEO of BranchOut-the leading career networking service on Facebook. Members can search the database to quickly find all of their professional contacts for the ultimate inside connections for great opportunities including jobs, leads and career networking. BranchOut operates the largest job board on Facebook with over 3 million jobs and tens of thousands of internships. BranchOut has more than 25 million users, with three users being added per second. The service recently announced the close on $25 million in new funding.
Previously, Rick was the Founder & CEO of SuperFan, a profitable social entertainment site that produced social games and Facebook apps for world-class companies including CBS, MTV, Sony, Universal Music, Warner Music and others
Prior to founding SuperFan, Rick was the Co-Founder, CF0 & Chief Strategist for Tickle.com, one of the largest social media sites on the Internet. Under his leadership, Tickle operated as a profitable company with close to $40 million of annual revenue. In 2002, Tickle won the "Rising Star" Webby Award as the fastest growing site on the Web and became a top 20 global Internet site with 200 million registered users. In 2004, Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide for over $100 million.
In the summer of 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy invited Internet luminaries, including Marini, Google's Eric Schmidt and Facebook's Marc Zuckerberg, to the eG8 Summit to discuss how the Internet can accelerate global economies.
Rick currently serves on the Advisory Boards of HR.com, Fwix, Lumos Labs, Founder's Den, Stipple, FIGHTER and Friendster (acquired by MOL).
He received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at the University of New Hampshire, magna cum laude and an MBA from Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration. Rick has appeared on FOX News's The Closing Bell and in several publications including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and Reuters.