Rick Marini

Rick Marini is the Managing Partner at Protocol Ventures and an active angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Previously, he founded and served as CEO of BranchOut, a professional networking application that raised $49 million before being acquired by Hearst Corporation in 2014. Before BranchOut, Marini co-founded Tickle, a media company that grew to 200 million registered users and was subsequently purchased by Monster Worldwide for $100 million in 2004. As an angel investor, he has backed more than fifty technology startups, holding early stakes in prominent companies such as Snapchat, Reddit, and Poshmark. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science from the University of New Hampshire. Marini currently focuses his efforts on venture capital and cryptocurrency investments while advising early-stage technology enterprises.