BranchOut
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
BranchOut was a professional-networking service built as a Facebook app, founded in July 2010 by Rick Marini. It let users turn their Facebook contacts into a professional network for job hunting, networking and recruiting, and by March 2012 it was the largest professional networking service on Facebook, with 33 million users. The company raised $49 million across three rounds from Norwest Venture Partners, Accel, Mayfield Fund, Redpoint Ventures, Floodgate and others. After Facebook changed its viral channels, BranchOut pivoted to the mobile chat app Talk.co; in 2014 the team was acqui-hired by Hearst and the company's assets were sold to HR software company 1-Page for $5.4 million in cash and shares.
02 / BranchOut FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
TechCrunch (15 Sep 2014) reported BranchOut starved after Facebook changed viral/wall-post channels; most users were unengaged, the recruiter product never gained serious traction, Graph Search in Jan 2013 took the core use case, and the Talk.co workplace-chat pivot also failed to gain steam versus Slack.
Facebook banned the wall-post viral growth method and later launched Graph Search, which TechCrunch said stripped BranchOut’s core use case and left the company starving.
Few of the 33 million sign-ups were truly engaged; recruiter search never got serious traction.
Workplace chat Talk.co failed to pick up much steam as Slack became the enterprise-chat darling.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Acquisition
TechCrunch: Hearst announced 20 Sep 2014 it acquired assets and the BranchOut product/UX/engineering team (Rick Marini) for a new Silicon Valley digital product group; Talk.co had already been quietly shut and apps removed.
- Asset sale
TechCrunch called BranchOut a failed startup and reported 1-Page bought remaining assets (app/data) for about $5.4 million ($2M cash + 7.5M ASX shares) versus $49 million previously raised; founder selling leftover assets, not a going-concern merger of the Facebook recruiting product.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
BranchOut was founded in July 2010, grew to 33 million users, and raised $49 million across three rounds.
- 02
Facebook changed its viral channels, starving BranchOut of growth; the company launched the mobile chat app Talk.co, which was shut down in September 2014.
- 03
Hearst acqui-hired the BranchOut team and executives in September 2014 to form the core of a new Silicon Valley digital product development group.
- 04
In November 2014, HR software company 1-Page bought BranchOut's assets for about $5.4 million - $2 million in cash plus 7.5 million shares payable in 12 months.
- 05
No reliable realized loss figure with clear subject, period and basis has been disclosed; the $49 million raised is not a loss, and the gap between funding and sale price is valuation loss, not an accounting loss.