Rick Marini

Summary

Rick is a 5-time founder with 25 years of operating and investing experience in the technology space. He is an active angel investor in more than 50 tech start-ups including 13 unicorns. Rick was named a "Top 50 Angel Investor" by Forbes. Rick is the Co-founder, President & COO of Rails. Rails, a self-custodial crypto perpetuals exchange that eliminates the risk of fraud and theft by allowing users to maintain complete control of their funds using audited smart contracts on the blockchain utilizing zero-knowledge proofs while trading on a proprietary, state-of-the-art matching engine. Rails raised $20 million in funding from Slow Ventures, CMCC Global, Round13 Capital, Quantstamp and Kraken. Find Rails at https://rails.xyz/ Rick is the Co-founder & Managing Partner of Catapult Capital - a private equity firm that focuses on consumer tech transactions. In May 2020, Catapult partnered with San Vicente Capital to acquire the dating app Grindr for $600 million. Rick became the Chief Operating Officer of Grindr. Catapult rebuilt the team and virtually every system and process within the company and grew both revenue and EBITDA by over 80% in 2.5 years. Under Catapult, the app ratings increased from 2-stars to 4.6 stars. The Glassdoor rating from employees increased from 18% to 93% approval. After 2.5 years of hard work, Grindr went public on the NYSE in Nov 2022 with a market capitalization of more than $2 billion. Rick is the Founder & Managing Partner of Protocol Ventures - the first fund-of-funds focused on crypto assets. Rick has invested in crypto since 2014. Rick was the Founder & CEO of BranchOut, the largest professional network leveraging the social graph with more than 800 million professional profiles. BranchOut raised $49 million in funding from Accel, Redpoint, Mayfield, Norwest and Floodgate. In 2014, BranchOut was acquired by Hearst Corporation. Rick ran the Digital Innovation Group at Hearst from 2014-2016. In 1999, Rick co-founded Tickle.com, one of the largest social media sites on the Internet. In 2002, Tickle won the “Rising Star” Webby Award as the fastest growing site on the Internet. Tickle grew to more than 200 million registered users and was a top 20 website. In 2004, Monster Worldwide acquired Tickle for $100 million. Rick received his MBA from the Harvard Business School. He holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of New Hampshire where he graduated magna cum laude. He was National Co-Chair of Technology for Obama. Rick was inducted into the University of New Hampshire Entrepreneur Hall of Fame in 2021.