He was spending every waking hour working on the site, but a rift began to form in the boardroom. The first point of contention was the business model. The VCs wanted ECI to be a software platform that provided back-end technology to big newspapers, allowing them to put their existing classifieds online. The board also disliked the personals category. Some of the Match profiles were racy. The founder once publicly fired an administrative assistant who refused to work seven days per week.
Kremen liked Neustadt even though the newcomer was taking his former job. No one could have predicted what happened next. Neustadt died on the Yuba River that weekend. Then the board made a billion-dollar mistake.
Kamra, who had led the Match investment for Canaan Partners, said the move was one of the biggest missed opportunities of his career. Kremen was devastated. He had strongly opposed the sale, but the board outvoted him on the decision. It took me some time to let go," he said in a interview with SFGate. The VCs had let go of a gold mine. He retained stock in ECI, but that eventually became worthless, as the company went out of business in after continuing to pursue the flawed business model of providing back-end technology to newspapers.
A celebrity-packed Match. The loss of Match crushed Kremen emotionally, but it taught him a lesson that shaped his later career. He realized he was not a natural manager. Kremen founded it in to make it easier for homeowners to finance the often-costly installation of solar panels on their homes.
He seed-funded a water conservation startup, but as he watched the drought worsen in California, he wanted to get more involved. After a hotly contested election, riddled with personal attacks and in which he outspent his opponent 20 to 1, Kremen won a SCVWD board seat by less than 1, votes. In the longer term, Kremen sees himself going back into the private sector. He thinks his experience in government will set him up for even bigger wins with startups that tackle social and sustainability issues.
One of the orientation active days we had at Stanford and this was like going back to We had an orientations scavenger, hunter were in San Francisco, and Gary was on my team and sounds like you know Gary. Gary taught a mile minute and was both exasperating and brilliant. Andrew : Kidding why? Interviewee : Because Gary is a wild man. Andrew : Can you give me an example of, or may be a story that shows why people thought that he was a wild man?
Interviewee : Oh gosh! Andrew : And beyond. Interviewee : And when, I wanted the job so I recalled too, sorry for interrupting but I just start showing up at the offices and one night I bought pizzas, you know or Chinese food I think and that was a kind of a way you come in and grace yourself especially with a bunch of men. Andrew : So you just liked the concept so much before you agreed that you are going be working together, you just stop by the office, you bring pizza, you take an interest, I see and then it finally you just made sense for the two of you and work together, the group of you, at that they are a few other people working on match.
Interviewee : Yeah probably you know six or seven. Andrew : Wow, did you raise money before of after you joined? Interviewee : Gary had ways to persuade and long was there and you know during that time period we probably went through four CEOs , we raised another couple of rounds, most of the rounds were from firms and VCs who wanted to get to into the classify market, so honestly they were not selling their advert on match.
Interviewee : We set up a meeting and the whole thing. Interviewee : When was last time you went to personals? Andrew : And what was the perception of dating of personals in general back then? Interviewee : Personals especially very sleazy, sketchy, potentially unsafe. Andrew : I still see that today. Interviewee : I guess so. So we had to ask questions about whether or not you have children or want children or if your children are grown.
Which kind of was [include] to us that people were pretty serious about using this not just to date but for long term relationships. Andrew : I see, how then do you bring women into an environment like this that has such bad reputation that was associated back then with those ads? Interviewee : Okay, so very important. We were ahead of the [curve] I think in terms of addressing concerns that women would have.
We try to use…we try to make it a well lit place. So I remember the three words that we put around the grand positioning. They were safe, anonymous and fun. And we thought the safety one was really important. Anonymous of course just so you sort of reinforce that.
And fun like come on in and see what happens. Interviewee : Well they had to select a handle. Now do people really use their real name? They might have, how would you know? And you targeted the bay area at first. You talked about organizing parties and events. Of all of those different things, what worked best for bringing people from the bay area in? Interviewee : You know probably the B. C community. The internet community. There were so many parties and things like that going on and everything was so exciting.
It was really tremendous and so I would say in the end it became worth the mile, you know. And …. Andrew : Sponsoring parties where the VCs] and the people in the tech industry were going you…. Interviewee : Or just by going to those parties and passing out cards and then of course press. Getting press was really important. And it was part of the story. Andrew : How did you do that? Interviewee : I prepared at the beginning.
It was the novelty of it all. I think the focus on women was kind of interesting. So I remember I got a [opt ad] on the washroom post for targeting women on line. But we had so many partnerships and that sort of brought legitimacy too. So the global network navigator if you recall that, you were probably too young, would partner with trustee, I mean with match.
Andrew : And the partnerships like the one that you had with the company that became women. What was the structure of the partnership? Interviewee : They were early affiliate partnerships. So basically we would create a co branded match. You know yahoo was growing very fast, we really do have something special for you guys.
And at that point we had one of the very first payment models on the internet. Which was pretty cool. At the time it was just us and Wall Street Journal of any significance anyway. Andrew : How did you decide the charges? This was, you launched in 95 , in 96 you [went] paid. How did you make that decision? Interviewee : Well we waited first until we thought we had a critical mass in some key cities and if my memory is correct, we had about sixty five thousand people on match.
Sounds very small right now I know but at the time it was big. And I know that we had it in San Francisco, New York, a few big cities that we found there was enough people. And that was immediately evident. Andrew : Oh wow. Interviewee : Because that qualified the guys. They were making an investment in the relationship. Interviewee : Right. Paying also helped with the distribution of relationships because why,you know why an affiliate partner typically if you are not going to get paid.
The other thing that we learnt very quickly was bundling really improved results in a very big way. Andrew : How do you mean? Interviewee : Oh by the way one of the marketing things we did was, we did search engine optimization and a lot of email. Tell me. Interviewee : Oh we would just send emails, we would try to find email addresses and just send them.
Now you look at the way that we do online marketing now trustee compared to, what I call the most sophisticated online marketing approach at March back in and we are talking completely different worlds there. Interviewee : Exactly. So for example Amazon got famous for their [affiliate] model but we were doing that before and hotmail got famous for the, you know the viral stuff by putting in the footer you got a hotmail account.
Well of course we were doing that at Match. Andrew : How did you guys do that at Match? Interviewee : The same thing, you know, in the footer of the email. Andrew : If I was emailing another member then in the footer, it would say that, I see okay. Interviewee : Yeah, so yeah you know.
Andrew : Got you. And did we talk about bundling? Interviewee : Yeah so what we learned it is for example I did a partnership with I think its called the Net Magazine. But what the heck? And immediately you would see people would take advantage of that offer. Andrew : I see that because you are giving them some, because you are giving them something else, the more likely to join. Andrew : Were you getting paid by the magazine to do that? Andrew : I do remember the affiliate program being really big back then you guys were, because you charging you were able to go out and pay for affiliates, how did you find affiliates?
Interviewee : We had business development just like every other internet company that would go out and see who was, who had communities basically and so it was good working with them.
Andrew : Where did the idea for an affiliate program come from? Of course affiliate program is where you say anyone who sends me a new customer, will gets a share of the revenue that I make from that customer.
So where did you guys come up that? Interviewee : I would have to credit that to Gary. And over the years, over the years I still like to do a lot of these developments. I like to do, I like to make deals.
Andrew : At the time there was another company called One and Only that was also out there soliciting affiliates. When did they come on? Did they come on before or after you guys? Interviewee : You know I have no memory of One and Only other than, I remember there was a company, or a person called Russell [Resnick] who later went on to run an email company and did really well.
She was making a lot of money she had a nice, nice environment going on there, she was making good, good money. And so she wants to start her own dating service and leverage her reputation from AOL. So she kept on telling us how she was going to beat us, beat us, beat us and never happened. The funny thing is she. And match. Roselyn went on to start an email company. Andrew : Yeah and that what she became really big for and for and fighting scammers and for creating a double opting email list.
I think they invented a blocked in. Did you do any work together? Interviewee : Well, we had a,we were at a [neck] girls meeting in New York and she was very aggressive and angry at me, and that was interesting. And days later of course we got to go, I hired somebody who worked for her so we connected over a reference chat and it was fun. Andrew : I see, do you remember who that person was? Andrew : I remember Colin vaguely. Roselyn is a good friend I remember her back in the days.
Interviewee : oh, okay, so does that surprise you? I remember you guys were out there building and you were fighting hard. I admire that a lot. Interviewee : It was fun. Andrew : How was it? Today, Match is the undisputed leader of online dating. According to Internet data provider comScore , Match attracts more people than any other dating site in the U.
And early this year, it announced the acquisition of OkCupid, one of the fastest-growing free dating sites.
Incredibly, however, Kremen has no ties to the Match brand today. He started the site at the age of 30 and left merely two years later. A Chicago native, Kremen attended Northwestern University and graduated from Stanford business school in His former colleagues describe him as a high-energy visionary. Kremen is about as quirky as he is smart. He is a big Grateful Dead fan— he attended 50 of their concerts. His availability for phone conversations rarely exceeds six or seven minutes.
Kremen took his first stab at entrepreneurship after graduating from Stanford, launching two software companies. But his own search for a woman led him to a larger business opportunity in He found the number services inefficient, and one day it hit him: if he could create an online database of personal advertisements, it would allow people to search for significant others more quickly, more anonymously, and at a lower cost.
By May , Kremen owned Match. Kremen founded Electric Classifies, Inc. ECI in to realize his vision of an online personals database. In his pitch to get investor funding, he positioned Match as the first online classifieds site he would launch, soon to be followed by other, more traditional online classifieds such as jobs, housing, and cars.
Match went live in April ; it was among the first few online-dating sites to launch on the web. Match grew rapidly in the year of its inception; at one point traffic was ballooning by 3—4 percent per day.
Kremen was successfully realizing the marketing vision he had since day one: get women to join, and men would follow.
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