Bio

Rick is a serial entrepreneur and investor with 20 years experience in the consumer technology space. He founded and successfully sold 3 companies (Tickle, BranchOut and Talk.co). Rick is an active angel investor in 50 early stage start-ups including 6 unicorns (Snapchat, Reddit, Opendoor, Poshmark, PAX, and OutReach) and many more. In 2018, Rick was named one of the Top 50 Angel Investors by Forbes. Prior to Catapult, Rick served as the Head of Digital Innovation at Hearst Corporation. His team focused on the social and mobile efforts across all of the Hearst properties including TV, magazines, newspapers, etc. Previously, Rick was the Founder & CEO of BranchOut – the largest professional network leveraging the social graph with more than 800M profiles. BranchOut raised $49M in funding from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Norwest Partners, and a dozen of the top angel investors in Silicon Valley. BranchOut was acquired in 2014 by a publicly traded company in the recruiting space. Previously, Rick was also the Founder & CEO of Talk.co. Talk.co was a real-time messaging service focused on the enterprise. Talk.co was acquired in 2014 by Hearst Corporation. Previously, Rick was the Co-Founder, CFO and Chief Strategist of Tickle. Tickle operated as a profitable company with almost $40M of revenue. In 2002, the Company experienced tremendous growth and won the “Rising Star” Webby Award as the fastest growing website on the Internet and was ranked the 18th largest website in the world with 200M registered members. Tickle was acquired in 2004 by Monster Worldwide for $100M. Prior to Tickle, Rick began his career in 1994 working in Mergers & Acquisitions and Corporate Finance at Fisher Scientific International. Rick earned a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration at the University of New Hampshire, magna cum laude, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Rick is regularly featured in national press as a thought leader on entrepreneurship, investing, and technology. Rick was National Co-Chair of Technology for Obama.