This week, Doug and I spoke with Mareza Larizadeh, co-founder of Doostang. Doostang is a rapidly growing, trust-based and invitation-only social networking platform for recruiters and job-seeking professionals. Mareza explained the genesis of the platform he has built along with Pavel Krapivin, and touched upon the particulars of its invitation-model, data-privacy and the relative value of its actors and relationships.
The online recruiting market promises to be a powerful one with room for significant growth. LinkedIN has attracted upwards of $14.7m in Venture Capital, and Yahoo paid $436m for HotJobs back in 2001. Just recently, LinkedIN has announced that it will charge up to $5,000 for some new, premium services. Still, Forrester predicts that out of the $6.3b recruitment-advertising market in 2006, online advertising will only represent about 20%. Forrester also expects that share to grow almost a third by 2008. So the trick for platform developers, as we discussed with Mareza, will be to capture and monetize that growth by managing the flow of profiles and relationships towards sustainability and, hopefully, towards black ink.
Doostang is certainly well-worth a look, and anyone who would like an invite should feel free to send me an e-mail. Its address one more time is http://www.doostang.com. Thanks again to Mareza for joining us on the call, and we hope to hear back from him in the future.
You can grab the podcast by clicking here (WMA, 2.6MB).
There's a podcast index at odeo dot com.
I'm sure you can publish the URL of your podcast there...
Posted by: AndrobTech | August 11, 2005 at 04:50 PM