Image by None via CrunchBase
Yinon Weiss joined the U.S. military before 9/11. After 10 years in the marines and U.S. Special Forces, he went to Harvard Business School. And a few years after that, he cofounded, RallyPoint -- what he refers to as LinkedIn for military talent -- that is operating out of Harvard's Innovation Lab.
And with $5 million in freshly-raised venture capital, Weiss and his five member team will spend the next year focusing on making RallyPoint work on mobile and otherwise improving the site.
RallyPoint's software lets military -- active duty, veterans, and Department of Defense civlians -- collaborate. And RallyPoint charges corporate hiring managers between $99 and $5,000 for "interaction opportunities" -- a combination of company sales pitch and job listings -- to connect with and recruit military talent.
As he explained in a November 14 interview, Weiss's like took a different turn in early 2001. "I grew up in Palo Alto, and got a degree in bioengineering from Berkeley. In my post-Berkeley job I did not feel that I was being challenged -- in problem solving, leadership, physically, or performing under stress. I joined the marine corps before 9/11 and checked in to my first unit on the day of the attacks," said Weiss.
Weiss was first deployed to Iraq in 2003 near Baghdad and first met one of his RallyPoint cofounders at a later 2008 Iraq deployment. They later reunited at HBS. Although his contract was up in 2003, Weiss felt he should stay in the service and he joined the U.S. Army Special Forces -- the Green Berets. After 10 years, he decided to apply to business school in the northeast and to his surprise was admitted there and graduated in 2011.
He went to work for WiTricity -- a startup founded by MIT grads -- and was its seventeenth employee -- while at HBS. The cofounder who he first met in Baghdad was entering HBS and the talked about business ideas -- that ultimately morphed into RallyPoint.
Weiss did research to discover why military talent really needed RallyPoint. As he said, "We interviewed people in the military and learned that most of them were on Facebook but were not on LinkedIn -- many of them had not even heard of it. They wanted a way to connect based on a military language system -- such as their unit, their rank, their specialty, and their deployment."
RallyPoint is targeting a big market but Weiss would not put a dollar estimate on it. "What is the market potential of Facebook? There are 24 million military veterans and many Department of Defense civilians, and military family members; overall tens of millions of potential members. We have a smaller target market than Facebook does, but we think our monetization potential per user is higher."
In early November, RallyPoint raised a $5 million Series A investment round -- bringing its total funding to $6.6 million -- led by San Francisco based DBL Investors, a firm that was also an early investor in Tesla and Pandora. Weiss previously raised a $550,000 first seed round and a second seed round of $1 million from angel investors.
RallyPoint has generated some significant traction since it launched out of beta on November 11 2012. According to Weiss, "RallyPoint now has more than 125,000 members, representing both active military and veterans, with up to 1,000 new members joining per day. Nearly 1 in 10 members of the active duty Army now use RallyPoint from bases around the world. RallyPoint's military veteran members represent over 10,000 employer-companies on the site."
Honeywell, DuPont and Bloomberg LP use RallyPoint. According to Dan Hawksworth, Honeywell vice president of global staffing, "We understand the value for candidates to be able to network with those who have shared military experiences and vernacular to transition to the private sector, which is why we're using RallyPoint to attract candidates earlier and more efficiently for ideal career matches within our company. RallyPoint is the ideal way for Honeywell to get in front of this talented group to brand and promote ourselves as a military friendly employer."
