Foreword

Foreword

Being an entrepreneur is hard. It’s a roller coaster every day. You need a

strong stomach, eyes on the future, a soul that wants to change the world,

and a heart that believes you can do it. You learn, you fail, you learn some

. The Internet landscape has changed a lot since I started my first

. Since Facebook launched, we’ve all been pushed to step up

. There’s been a shift in the technology field to move faster than ever

.

.” “Done is better than perfect.” Before these

Facebook philosophy—to ship code fast and continuously

. Although we’ve always moved pretty quickly in Silicon Valley, Facebook

. At BranchOut, we’re pushed to keep up

Facebook’s weekly development cycles because we’re an application built

. We’ve embraced the developer-driven culture behind the

make mistakes and learn from them.

There are a lot of competing interests at play when you’re building a company.

Facebook had a lot of interest early on in diverging from the path they were

on. In 2004, Friendster attempted to acquire Facebook for $10 million. Had

that happened, who knows if Facebook would have added photo sharing the

next year, eventually opened up to anyone with an e-mail address, and

ultimately made the world as open and connected as it is today? When you’re

building a company, there’s a lot of outside pressure to hit particular metrics

and deadlines. You get a lot of advice. But it all comes down to listening to

your users. If you don’t build a passionate company, they won’t come back. At

BranchOut, we’re trying to make our users’ lives better. We’re trying to help

people represent themselves professionally so they can network, find mentors,

and land their dream jobs.

Create value. Run fast, go big, and change the world.

Rick Marini

Founder of BranchOut

www.it