Doostang

In June 2007, Doostang’s cofounder, Mareza Larizadeh, was over-whelmed. His invite-only online career community for twenty-somethings had seen steady growth in the two years since its launch, but Larizadeh continued to run into problem after problem, including: how best to monetize the site, how to preserve quality of users and jobs as the site grew more popular, whether to maintain its outsourced product development (in Russia) or bring it back to Silicon Valley near headquarters, and finally how to convince investors that the small network effects business (small relative to sites like Facebook) was a solid investment despite having only 150,000 users.