What do you do when you're a Stanford Business School graduate in the early '90s and you're searching for "the best woman in the world?" For Gary Kremen, the answer was simple: invent online dating.
The quest for a wife (and the financial security it would require to marry her) led Kremen to create Match.com, an idea that came to him after he realized how much revenue personal ads generated for his local newspapers. In 1993, Kremen founded Electric Classifieds Inc., the first company to provide online classified advertising, and in April of 1995, after raising $200,000 from investors, Match.com was born. Though the site's functionality was limited (it only allowed users to exchange messages and pictures via e-mail or fax),100,000 users registered with the site within its first 6 months. Now Match.com has over 1.7 million paid subscribers, and Web sites in 30 and 8 languages.
Kremen chalks up the wild success of Match.com to his "'relentless' work ethic." He ran the business from "a cramped, one-bedroom apartment that he shared with two roommates," often remaining in his pajamas while he "sat glued to his Sun workstation, designing Match's Web site and developing marketing strategies." Despite his hard work and the $1.5 million in venture capital he received, Match.com didn't initially pay off either romantically or financially for Kremen.
In 1997, much to Kremen's chagrin, Match.com's investors sold the startup to Cendant, a consumer-services company, for $8 million, and in 1998 the company was sold again, this time to IAC/InterActiveCorp (then still known as Ticketmaster), for $50 million. All Kremen got out of the transaction was a lifetime account on the site and $50,000 from selling his stock in the company.
Kremen was not discouraged, and in 2001 his perseverance was rewarded: Match.com partnered with AOL and MSN, which "brought in a large influx of people at a rapid pace," and in 2003 Match.com launched MatchMobile, its incredibly popular mobile phone service. 20,000 singles now register on Match.com every day, making it one of the largest and most influential online dating sites. It is consistently ranked among the top five online dating sites based on traffic.
Kremen finally found financial security after a judge awarded him $65 million in a dispute over the domain name sex.com in 2001, and after buying Electric Classifieds (then named Instant Objects) debt in 2004 so that he could retrieve its priceless patent. He held a foreclosure sale and sold the patent for $1.7 million.
Kremen's romantic goals were also met. In an age in which 1 in 5 relationships, and 1 in 6 marriages, are between people who met using online dating sites, and in which "roughly 74 percent of the 10 million Web users who are single and looking for a partner have turned to the Internet to find someone," Kremen met his match the old fashioned way - through a mutual friend.
Read the original article here. To find out more about this popular dating site, read our review of Match.com
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