social-networking
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Marriage Pact
Marriage Pact is a research-driven matchmaking company, born as a 2017 Stanford economics class project, that runs an annual values-based questionnaire on college campuses. Instead of judging looks or swiping, students answer roughly 70 questions about their deepest values, and a stable-matching algorithm pairs each person with their single most compatible 'backup plan' on campus. Founded by Liam McGregor and Sophia Sterling-Angus, it has expanded from one campus to more than 100 schools and over 600,000 participants, and raised a $5M seed round in 2022 to keep building relationship technology.
CoffeeSpace
CoffeeSpace is a mobile-first, AI-powered matchmaking platform that helps founders, talent, and startups find each other - swiping their way to a cofounder, a first hire, or a team to join. Often described as 'Hinge for cofounders,' it uses granular filters and dual-sided compatibility matching to pair ambitious builders by skills, working style, time commitment, and equity preferences. Founded in 2024 and based in San Francisco, the app has grown to 30,000+ users across 100+ countries.
Jobcase, Inc.
Jobcase is a Cambridge-based social platform built for the workers most job sites overlook - hourly, frontline and blue-collar Americans. With more than 110 million registered members and roughly 20 million monthly actives, it pairs a community forum and resume tools with machine-learning job matching, earning rankings among the largest U.S. online career destinations. Founded by Fred Goff and Tony Deigh out of the wreckage of an AI hedge fund, Jobcase makes money from employer advertising and recruiting partnerships while keeping the core product free for job seekers.
Clubhouse
Clubhouse is a voice-first social app built by Alpha Exploration Co. It started as an invite-only live audio room platform that briefly mesmerized Silicon Valley in 2020-2021, then pivoted to friend-centric voice messaging and custom AI voices as the live-audio boom cooled.
Daniel Yousefian
Daniel Yousefian is a co-founder of Clubhouse, the voice-based social networking platform that captured the world's attention during the pandemic. Built under Alpha Exploration Co. and backed by $112M from Andreessen Horowitz, Clubhouse pioneered drop-in audio rooms before boldly pivoting toward intimate friend-to-friend voice messaging - complete with AI-powered custom voice cloning. Based in Yerevan, Armenia, Yousefian is part of the founding trio alongside CEO Paul Davison and co-founder Rohan Seth.
Paul Davison
Paul Davison is the co-founder and CEO of Clubhouse, the live audio social platform that hit a $4 billion valuation within a year of launch during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer turned serial entrepreneur, Davison previously co-founded Highlight (acquired by Pinterest in 2016) and served briefly as CEO of CoinList. His career has centered on one obsession: giving people better ways to find each other and talk. Clubhouse - which he built with co-founder Rohan Seth - brought the intimacy of voice to the scale of a social network, attracting tens of millions of users and sparking a live-audio wave across the industry.
Rohan Seth
Rohan Seth is the co-founder and CTO of Clubhouse, the live audio social networking app that captured the world's attention in 2020-2021 with a $4 billion valuation and over 10 million weekly active users. A Stanford-trained engineer who spent six years at Google on Android and Maps, Seth has a track record of building and rebuilding - launching nine failed apps with co-founder Paul Davison before Clubhouse broke through. He also co-founded Lydian Accelerator, a nonprofit dedicated to finding genetic cures for rare diseases, named after his daughter Lydia.
Hazim Mohamad
Hazim Mohamad is the Co-Founder and CEO of CoffeeSpace, a San Francisco-based AI-powered cofounder matching platform that functions like Tinder for entrepreneurs. After spending four years managing a $40 billion portfolio at the World Bank, he traded financial risk for startup risk - building a mobile-first platform that has amassed 25,000+ users and 2M+ swipes by connecting founders, early hires, and collaborators across the global startup ecosystem. CoffeeSpace raised $1M in pre-seed funding and was featured at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024.
Vanessa Didyk
Vanessa Roth Didyk is the CEO of ZeeMee, a social platform serving 2.6 million college-bound students across 3,000+ institutions. A serial edtech entrepreneur with 16+ years in the field, she founded Scholar's Station at UC Berkeley, sold it, built a tutoring marketplace at Rev.com, ran MathElf, then took over a struggling ZeeMee in 2018 and turned it into a top-10 App Store social networking app used by roughly 1 in 3 US college freshmen annually.
Tony Xia
Tony Xia is a computer vision engineer turned venture scout and startup founder who built his technical chops at DJI, AutoX, and Arraiy (acquired by Matterport) before co-founding Crema Social - a video-call-meets-food-delivery international dating platform that amassed over 1 million signups in 8 months. After graduating from a16z speedrun's Cohort 003, he became a Scout for a16z speedrun, backing pre-seed founders with $10K checks and a direct path into one of Silicon Valley's most competitive accelerators.
Konstantin Guericke
Konstantin Guericke is a German-born entrepreneur and venture capitalist best known as a co-founder of LinkedIn, the world's largest professional networking platform. As LinkedIn's first VP of Marketing, he helped grow the company from a stealth startup to 10 million members and profitability. After LinkedIn, he served as CEO of Jaxtr, a social communications startup that raised $20M and reached 10 million users. Since 2012, he has been a Partner at Earlybird Venture Capital, investing in European startups with global ambitions. Known for his relationship-first philosophy and hiking meetings around Palo Alto, Guericke embodies the bridge between European engineering rigor and Silicon Valley growth culture.