Rob Kramer
Rob Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Hip-swap, a Santa Monica, Calif., developer of a mobile and web peer-to-peer marketplace for used goods.In 2008 Rob started a politically minded social network called Pop rule . A start up veteran with several successes under his belt, he and his business partner sank their own money into the venture, built the product and put together a talented advisory board. Things promptly went downhill. The social media team behind Barack Obama's presidential campaign built a popular social network of their own, and Facebook's star was rising in the political sphere. Investors began to grumble.Around the time in 08 in the presidential election Kramer decided to put Pop rule on hold "The idea wasn't getting enough support. There was too much diffusion and fragmentation in the market," he says. Kramer's outside investments were taking a hit, too. He did the math and realized it would take far more money than they had to get the user numbers they needed to succeed Kramer regrouped in January 2009 to try morphing Pop Rule into a "Digg for politics," but that lasted just a couple of months. "We had such a bad taste for the scene that we ended up shuttering that, too," he says. "It was the right decision but one of the most painful, because I had always been able to give investors a return
Kramer did contract work while he and his partner came up with their next project. "Building companies is all I know how to do, and I love the process," he says. "If this is what you do for a living, you take the knocks and say, 'On to the next one.'" The answer came to them in 2011: a business that could address the problems of secondhand and peer-to-peer marketplaces. Hip Swap has some 200,000 registered users, $250,000 in sales and has partnered with celebs and small businesses to drive traffic. The average sale price of an item on the network is an industry-topping $75. HipSwap has closed on a $1.1 million round of seed funding.
