Chris Riklin: How a Decade in Political Tech Led Him to Co-Found Topline — a Meritocratic Marketplace Disrupting Professional Services

Chris Riklin at a Glance

• →Co-Founder of Topline — a meritocratic marketplace for professional services
• →10+ years at NationBuilder, a pioneering SaaS platform for communities and political campaigns
• →Background in political science; studied entrepreneurship at the London School of Economics (LSE)
• →Saw firsthand how talented professionals lose opportunities to outdated hiring gatekeepers
• →Topline removes friction for fractional executives, consultants, and freelancers finding clients
• →Believes the future of work is multi-role, multi-income-stream, and non-linear
• →Mission: build a platform that empowers professionals globally — one connection at a time

The Career Path Nobody Prepared You For

The idea of a single employer for 30 years is a relic. Today's professionals juggle consulting engagements alongside full-time roles, build personal brands in parallel with W-2 jobs, and move fluidly between industries that didn't exist a decade ago. The infrastructure around them, however, hasn't kept up.

Resumes still dominate hiring. Referrals still beat merit. LinkedIn connections still open more doors than demonstrable results. Chris Riklin watched this play out for years inside political tech — watching talented operators miss opportunities not because of what they could do, but because of who they happened to know.

Topline is the platform he and co-founder Alex built to fix that.

Ten Years at NationBuilder: Learning What Broken Looks Like

Before Topline, Chris spent over a decade at NationBuilder — a SaaS platform that helped political campaigns, nonprofits, and community organizations manage their constituents. It was early-stage startup work that gave him an unusually deep view into how organizations actually build and leverage professional networks.

He saw enterprise clients struggling to find specialized consultants through traditional channels. He watched talented fractional executives get overlooked because their resumes didn't fit a template. He saw smaller organizations pay outsized fees for visibility in professional marketplaces that rewarded incumbency over impact.

The longer he stayed, the clearer the problem became: the professional services industry was ripe for disruption — not with a tweak, but with a fundamentally different model.

The Serendipitous Co-Founder Match

Chris had been circling the problem independently — running an entrepreneurship program at the London School of Economics and working through what a modern professional marketplace could look like. Then his future co-founder Alex sent him a deck.

"When Alex shared the original Topline deck, it was almost identical to the project I worked on during my entrepreneurship program at LSE. It was clear we were aligned on solving a massive, global problem."

That alignment — on the problem, the target market, and the long-term ambition — is the foundation most co-founder relationships collapse without. For Topline, it was present from day one. Two people had independently arrived at the same diagnosis. That's a signal worth acting on.

How Topline Actually Works

Topline is a marketplace with an embedded SaaS layer — think less job board, more operating system for independent professional services. Four mechanisms make it different from what came before:

Who Topline Is Built For

The platform is particularly powerful for fractional executives, independent consultants, and freelancers who spend too much time and money on self-promotion relative to their actual work. A fractional CTO, a cybersecurity consultant, a growth advisor — these professionals have valuable expertise and strong track records, but traditional discovery mechanisms (expensive ads, cold LinkedIn outreach, conference attendance) are slow, costly, and hit-or-miss.

Topline offers a direct line between expertise and client — removing the middlemen who inflate cost without adding value, and letting quality speak for itself through structured, comparable profiles.

"I've always believed in taking big swings. If you're going to do something, it should be impactful on a large scale. And for me, that means building something global — a platform that can truly change how people grow their careers."

The Lesson Behind the Risk

Leaving a decade-long career at a recognized company is not a small decision. For Chris, the logic was straightforward even if the leap wasn't: the best time to build something is when you understand the problem better than anyone else, and the window for doing it is now. Ten years at NationBuilder didn't just give him product and sales experience — it gave him an intimate understanding of a broken market and a clear picture of what the fix looked like.

His path — political science to political tech to enterprise SaaS to startup co-founder — isn't the kind you plan. It's the kind that emerges when you stay curious, stay close to real problems, and say yes to collaborations that align on something big.

What's Next for Topline

Topline's near-term focus is on deepening partnerships with industry associations and local business communities — channels that already aggregate the kind of professionals the platform serves. Rather than fighting for organic SEO traffic or paying to acquire users cold, the strategy is to embed Topline into ecosystems where trust already exists.

Long-term, the mission is unchanged: give every professional — regardless of their network, zip code, or career path — a fair shot at winning the work they deserve. Merit over incumbency. Results over relationships.

"Building something impactful requires a community of people who believe in the same mission. At Topline, we're creating that community — one connection at a time."

Start to Scale Podcast

Hear the Full Story from Chris Riklin

Chris goes deep on the NationBuilder decade, the co-founder alignment story, and the mechanics behind Topline's community distribution strategy.

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