LinkedIn Strategies - Doximity: LinkedIn co-founder now connects doctors

By - Ellen Lee
Category - LinkedIn Strategies
Source - http://www.sfgate.com

LinkedIn Strategies

Along with Reid Hoffman, Konstantin Guericke co-founded LinkedIn, the popular social network for professionals, in 2003.

Now Guericke, 44, is tackling a new social network, Doximity, a San Mateo startup that is linking doctors in the United States. Guericke joined the board this month.

While LinkedIn is open to just about all job fields, Doximity aims solely to connect doctors so that they can collaborate on medical cases, discuss the latest research and send private messages to each other. More than 50,000 physicians - about 9 percent of the total in the United States - have signed up with the site, the company said.

Guericke, a Stanford alumnus from Germany, talks about life after LinkedIn and how it led to Doximity.

Q: You co-founded LinkedIn. Are you still connected to the company?

A: I'm an avid user. Sometimes I use it six to 10 times per day, and I love the product.

The company is now very different. It has grown so much, so a lot of people I know aren't there anymore.

I was doing consulting work with LinkedIn until November of last year. I was helping them with their international expansion. We were focused on the German market, and we opened the German office in November, and so that was my last official thing.

I left LinkedIn in December 2006 to join Jaxtr (at that time an online phone service). Jaxtr was sold two years later. We had a great year and grew like crazy and then we ran into difficulty with the monetization of it. We realized we had to work more together with telecommunications companies. It got very popular in India, so we worked with Indian telecommunications companies. (Since then, it has turned into a text-messaging service and is headed by Sabeer Bhatia, who previously co-founded Hotmail.)

Q: What have you been working on since then?

A: I still love the industry and creating things, so I have taken two tracks. One is mentoring. I graduated from Stanford's engineering school. I benefited from people in the industry coming to the campus, so I feel like I should give back. I have started doing more things on campus. Meeting smart, great students who are the next generation of entrepreneurs is incredibly rewarding to me.

Now I have this thing: I love hiking, so if you want to run your business idea by me, or if you have questions about starting a company, I'm walking the Dish (a trail on the Stanford campus) pretty much every day of the week. Students now know they can join me for a walk. They can use that opportunity to talk about whether entrepreneurship is for them or their career or if they have a startup they're working on and they need feedback. I get a lot of hiking in, but I'm meeting the next generation of entrepreneurs, so it fits me very well.

People also started pinging me about joining the board (of tech startups) as an independent director. I thought that was pretty interesting. I first joined the board of Accolo (an online recruiting tool) and just recently joined Doximity.

Q: Why did you join Doximity?

A: (At LinkedIn), we had to find a method to target any professional anywhere in the world. That is a huge number of people with different types of needs. That's what we set out to be, and it's important that LinkedIn is so broad and there is so much diversity.

But it is hard to talk to groups of professionals. One of my theories for social networking is it is going to evolve to have more verticalization - in addition to LinkedIn as a platform. If you focus on a population, you can focus on (specific) features for the industry. It can be a much more engaging and productive experience.

I was interested in a physician's network. It is a small percentage of professionals, but they have a big financial and social impact. Health care is one of the challenges we are dealing with. Things seem very inefficient whenever I go see the doctor, and the area is ripe for information technology to make an impact there, using it to make health care more efficient. Something can and needs to be done there.

Source - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/05/17/BUQK1OJ3Q5.DTL