TheBackplane.com

Backplane was founded by Matt Michelsen (UNX, Gunnars), Joe Lonsdale (Palantir, Addepar, Clarium Capital) and Alex Moore (Palantir) with a notable list of individual and corporate investors including Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google), Founders Fund (Peter Thiel), Google Ventures, Sequoia, Greylock, Menlo, Coke and Cirque du Soleil; just to name a few.

Backplane got its start by creating private social networks for music artists and major social influencers. It all began when Lady Gaga received 1.3 trillion social impressions following the release of her Born This Way album. The social wave that was created brought tens of millions of people on to social networking sites. Inspired by Gaga, they were looking for a place to share their passions for music, dance, fashion, and art - a place where they felt free to be themselves. It quickly became obvious that what was forming was more than a page on a social network. It was a social network. And while her massive following gained her millions of ‘likes’, it was the social sites themselves with ad revenues and data insights that stood to reap all of value.

Our product is a complete social networking system accessed via web and mobile applications. It provides tools for growing and managing your network, moderating user activity and deriving analytics on users and their engagement patterns. It’s being used by top brands including Nike and Cirque du Soleil, as well as artists including Lady Gaga and Guns N’ Roses. We’re currently working on a new social network formed in partnership with the Major League Baseball Players Association. Our product was built to help organizers retain the value of their network and we believe that our work has pointed to a new direction for social networking.

While we’ve had great success, we’re just getting started. Our focus now is on building a consumer-facing product, a platform for creating and connecting a web of public and private social networks. The future of social networking doesn’t lie in an all-encompassing network, but in niche, networks with purpose. We’re not simply connected to each other and we can’t really know someone with just a glance at a profile. The networks and communities we belong to are what provide the context for our relationships, and across them we may wear very different faces.

Place provides a home for these networks, but our vision goes much further. Our mission is to create a platform that will also serve as the basis for an entire social economy. We now live in a connected world and the networks we create have lasting value. It’s time for a new direction in social networking, one in which the networks themselves are able to realize and retain the value they create.

Place is headquartered in San Francisco, California, where they have access to top tier engineering talent from around the world. Product engineers and designers make up 75% of their team of 26. Scott Harrison (LiquidNet, UNX, ITG, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) manages the company as it’s President & COO. The company currently has over 1.2M registered users and achieves user engagement levels above those of Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+.

Articles which offer Industry Validation
It's Time Brands Build Their Own Social Sites
The Future of Social
What We Need in a Next Generation Social Network
What Companies Can and Should Learn from Lady Gaga
Social Networks Are Leased, No Owned