Klout's Joe Fernandez: How a Math Mediocrity Became a Social Ranking Guru

Joe Fernandez, co-founder and CEO of Klout, at the Bloomberg Empowered Entrepreneur Conference in New York in 2011Photograph by Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg
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Joe Fernandez knows how much you’re worth—on Facebook and Twitter, at least.

He is the co-founder and chief executive of Klout, a website and app that ranks people on a scale of 1 to 100 based on the influence they wield online. The Klout Score is determined by an algorithm that tracks how many social-media connections someone has and factors in such sources as Wikipedia along with other information that the company keeps under wraps. The six-year-old company analyzes more than 15 billion pieces of data every day and computes more than 100 million scores.