On the budding internet, the land was represented by domain names: the online equivalent of a physical address. Each domain name—a string of characters such as home.txt—represented a destination on the internet, say, a specific computer or a website—a system that dated back more than a decade to the days of the U.S. government’s ARPANET. At first, to keep track of the domain names, SRI International, a nonprofit research institute established by Stanford University, created the Network Information Center, or InterNIC. But in 1991, with about twelve thousand domain names registered, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency awarded the contract to a Herndon, Virginia–based technology company called Network Solutions, Inc., or NSI. By 1993, NSI, under a grant from the National Science Foundation, was the sole registrar for domain names online.
Getting a .com, .org, or .net address was just a matter of filling out a form and sending in a request and, best of all, it was free. For Kremen, a domain meant having a place to own, to build businesses upon, to sell. It didn’t matter if he was building on there yet, he had to get the domains, now. In 1994, it was a “land grab,” as he put it, and the domains were the land. He couldn’t help but laugh to himself. Having been early on the net, he knew that, as he put it, “no one was thinking about commercial shit.” And if they were, they were afraid to bust a move.
Grabbing a copy of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, he flipped to the classifieds in the back and ran his finger along the categories: autos, housing, jobs. His plan was simple, to register each and every category of classified ads online. He didn’t know what he’d do with the domains, maybe build a business, maybe sell them. He’d figure that out later. For now, he went on a mission to register as many as he could. One by one, he emailed the registration forms to Network Solutions to lock up the domains—and when he hit the limit of how many he could register under his own name, he hit up his friends. One day, Phil Van Munching got a call from his old friend Kremen. “Dude, you have to grab some domains,” Kremen told him.
“I don’t have money to buy houses,” Van Munching replied, “what are you talking about?”
“No, no, no,” Kremen told him, “the internet!”
Van Munching had been around Kremen long enough to know that he could come off like the mad genius, and he knew better than to misread him. Kremen saw two steps ahead of everyone else, and he trusted him implicitly. He would never forget how, hours before his wedding, Kremen took his hand, and held it for a minute, reassuringly. As Van Munching later said, “I thought it was the strangest, the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me from a friend.” So when Kremen suggested he register domains, he figured he was onto something. “Grab some domains, do what I’m doing,” Kremen told him. “This is the future!”
Within weeks, Kremen had registered more than two dozen under his own name including Jobs.com, Housing.com, Autos.com, and the one he chose for his online match-making company, Match.com. And, also, as an afterthought, he registered one more domain, inspired by the adult ads in the back of the Bay Guardian. On May 9, 1994, he registered Sex.com by sending in an email and a certified letter to NSI. He didn’t know what, if anything, he’d ever do with it. But for now, he had a bigger focus: launching the first dating site online, Match.com.
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“Anal sex . . . Abstinence . . . Animal rights . . . Very conservative . . . Marijuana OK . . . Children should be given guidelines . . . Totally open and honest even at the cost of being thought rude . . . Religion guides my life . . . Make charitable contributions . . . Not happy with job . . . Night thinker . . . Would initiate hugs if I wasn’t so shy . . . Can meet most of my own needs . . . Enjoy a good argument . . . Have to-do lists that seldom get done . . . Sweet food, baked goods . . . Sports in stadium . . . Artificial or missing limbs . . . Over 300 pounds . . . Drag . . . Exploring my orientation . . . Women should pay . . . To be happy, I must love my match.”
There was another four-letter word for love, Kremen knew, and it was data, the stuff he would use to match people. No one had done this, so he had to start from scratch, drawing on instinct and his own experience with dating. Generating data—based on the interests of a person in categories such as the ones he was typing out on his PC (“Mice/gerbils or similar . . . Smooth torso/not hairy body”)—would be the key to the success of Match; it was what would distinguish electronic dating from all other forms. They could gather data about each client—attributes, interests, desires for mates—and then compare them with other clients to make matches. With a computer and the internet, they could eliminate the inefficiencies of thousands of years of analog dating, the shyness, the missed cues, the posturing. They would provide customers with a questionnaire, generate a series of answers, then pair up daters based on how well their preferences aligned.
While Peng Ong and Kevin Kunzelman developed programming in the fall of 1994, Kremen worked late into the night in his office creating the questionnaire that each Match customer would fill out in order to generate the necessary data. He started from his own experience—putting down the questions that mattered to him: education, style of humor, occupation, and so on. With the help of others, the headings on the list grew—religious identity/observance, behavior/thinking—along with the subcategories, fourteen alone under the heading of “Active Role in Political/Social Movements” (“Free international trade . . . gender equality . . .”). Before long, there were more than seventy-five categories of questions, including one devoted to sex—down to the most specific of interests (“Muscle domination presupposes a substantial difference of physical strength between the two lovers, and a mutual interest in using this as a part of erotic games or love-making”).
But then the more he thought about it, he came to an important realization: he wasn’t the customer. In fact, no guys were the customers. While men would be writing the checks for the service, they wouldn’t be doing anything if there weren’t women there. Women, then, were his true targets, because, as he put it, “every woman would bring a hundred geeky guys.” Therefore, his goal was clear, but incredibly daunting: he had to make a dating service that was friendly to women, who represented just about 10 percent of those online at the time. According to the latest stats at the time, the typical computer user was unmarried and at a computer forty hours a week, so the opportunity seemed ripe.
Not only that, online dating could explode thanks to a new and considerably more accessible way of navigating the internet. In December 1994, Netscape Communications, an outgrowth of the Mosaic team, released a powerful new web browser called Navigator. Navigator transformed the budding web into an even more fluid and alluring experience, with faster-loading pages of graphics and text that created a familiar experience, almost like reading through a magazine. A company called Yahoo!, founded by two Stanford grad students, was created to help people search for the page they wanted. Kremen knew immediately that these were game changers—and ones that, as soon as possible, he would implement with Match—which, for the time being, would be designed as an email service.
To enrich his research into what women would want in such an innovation, he sought out women’s input himself, asking everyone he knew—friends, family, even stopping women on the street—what kinds of qualities they were looking for in a match. It was an essential moment, letting go of his own ego, understanding that the best way to build his market was to enlist people who knew more than him: women.
In his mind, if he could just put himself in their shoes, he could figure out their problems, and give them what they needed. He’d hand over his questionnaire, eager to get their input—only to see them scrunch up their faces and say “ewwww.” The explicit sexual questions went down with a thud, and the notion that they would use their real names—and photos—seemed clueless. Many didn’t want some random guys to see their pictures online along with their real names, let alone suffer the embarrassment of family and friends. “I don’t want anyone to know my real name,” they’d say, “what if my dad saw it?”
Kre
men went back to Ong and Kevin, and had them implement privacy features that would mask a customer’s real email address for an anonymous one on the service. But there was a bigger problem: he needed a female perspective on his team. He reached out to Fran Maeir, a former classmate from Stanford business school. Maeir, a brash, dark-haired mother of two, had always been compelled, albeit warily, by Kremen—“his fanaticism, his energy, his intensity, his competition,” as she put it. When he ran into her at a Stanford event and told her about his new venture, he was just as revved. “We’re bringing classifieds onto the internet,” he told her, and explained that he wanted her to do “gender-based marketing” for Match.
Maeir, who’d been working at Clorox and AAA, jumped at the chance to get in on the new world online as the director of marketing. To her, Kremen’s passion and pioneering spirit felt infectious. And the fact that he was turning over the reins to her felt refreshingly empowering, given the boys’ club she had been used to in business. Maeir showed up to the basement office with pizza and Chinese food and got to work. One day, an engineer at Match asked her “what weight categories do you want in the questionnaire?” She arched her brow. “Oh no,” she said, “we’re not asking that.” Women never want to put down their weight, she explained to the dubious guys. Instead, she had them include a category for body type—athletic, slim, tall, and so on. She also cut down Kremen’s intimidating laundry list of questions. Fewer questions enticed more people to register, which meant a larger database, and a greater selection of potential matches.
But they had a catch-22. Women weren’t going to join unless there were other women online. Maeir, along with other women brought on to help spread the word, started with their friends. They created a friendly logo—a radiant red heart inside a purple circle—and printed up promotional brochures. To entice people to try out the service, they held promotional events at happy hours in Palo Alto, only to have, as Match marketing executive Alexandra Bailliere put it, “thirty guys with pocket protectors and no women in sight.” Trish McDermott, a marketing executive who’d worked for an upscale matchmaking firm and had founded a dating business trade association, and the others would slip on fake wedding bands to ward off the guys. “Are you interested in meeting new people?” she’d say. “This is a new dating site, like personals in the newspaper but it’s on the internet.” Then she’d get a blank stare as the person would ask, “What’s the internet?”
They weren’t just targeting heterosexual women, they were going for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community. Match’s marketing consultant Simon Glinsky pointed out to Kremen how his gay community had already been early adopters online, using bulletin boards and the nascent communities such as America Online, CompuServe, and Prodigy for dating. Glinsky related from his own experience, having grown up in Georgia, where meeting other gays was a struggle.
Glinsky went to a gay computer club, where members gathered to talk about AOL, and the latest deals at Radio Shack. It was in a small theater south of Market Street. He sat onstage with their computers as they explained Match to the crowd. “Now we’re debuting this new service,” Glinsky explained, “it’s going to be online. You could match; you could make good use of your time to meet the right people. You could eventually meet, we’ve a lot of people on there and you could see a lot. I think I remember saying it would be free but there would be subscriptions later.”
They held a promotion during a gay skate night at a roller rink in Burlingame, just north of Palo Alto. Bailliere and Glinsky urged skaters to come over and learn more about Match, offering to take their photos with giant digital cameras—which seemed exotic at the time. One by one, the skaters marveled at seeing their faces appear on the computers, and word, in fact, began to spread. The San Francisco Examiner ran an early piece on Match, speculating this could transform the “grand old dating game,” as it put it. “What happens when singles have an alternative to bars,” the article went on, “and don’t just meet based on first impression/physical attractiveness alone?”
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On April 21, 1995, Kremen launched Match.com. He had taken out a patent for another one of his formidable inventions: dynamic web pages, the means through which information could be entered and processed online. Match was a free service, supported by ads, with the idea to charge for subscriptions when it grew. And there was only one way for it to get there. “We need more women!” as Kremen shouted, storming through their basement office. “Everyone wants to go to a party where there’s women!” he said. “Every woman means ten guys join!”
Since they didn’t have real women, they had to create some themselves. Maeir dispatched interns to the Usenet groups, where they posted laudatory reviews of Match. When Rolling Stone wanted to run a piece on Match, along with a sample profile of a female member, the women at the office scrambled to invent one. Bailliere drew the short straw, slipped a black jacket over a white T-shirt and smiled for the camera. Her fake profile, “Sally,” said she was seeking a twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old guy for an Activities Partner, Short Term Romance, or Long Term Romance to “go hiking and have LOTS of fun.”
Having her profile, albeit fake, in a high-profile magazine sent a stream of messages to the email she’d set up. A German in Brazil told her he wanted to use her to re-create Nazi youth camps, and became so obsessive that she became nervous. “Gary,” she told Kremen, “I don’t know who this person is or if he’s really even in Brazil.” Concerned, they worked with consultants to develop safety guidelines, such as meeting prospective men from the internet in public places. Maeir had them market Match as “safe, anonymous, and fun.” They also invented self-policing tools for people on Match—such as giving them the ability to block and report others for bad behavior.
The site’s PR executive, McDermott, began hosting a weekly chat session called “Tuesdays with Trish” to dole out dating advice. She billed Match as the dating solution for the emerging online generation. “We’re delaying marriage,” she’d tell reporters. “Many of us moved away from home, and many were just moving from suburbs and starting careers and we lost all that fabric of informal match matching when we stay home. . . . You can put a profile up this morning and that night have a response waiting for you.”
It wasn’t just Match they were marketing, it was their lovelorn leader, Kremen—who, at every opportunity, advanced Match as the fix for his own romantic quest. “I started the company because I decided it was the best way, maybe the only way, to find the best woman in the world,” he told the Mercury News. “It was a fantasy thing, and I was tired of eating and drinking alone.” Kremen’s love life became a running narrative. He was the Charlie Brown of the internet. “Will Gary Kremen’s success . . . help him find a date for Saturday night?” read a headline in Websight Magazine. With all the business, “Kremen may not find his perfect woman any time soon,” as Interactive Week put it. Or, as Kremen told San Francisco Focus, “I’m a success-oriented person. It kind of irks me that I haven’t met someone yet.”
Managing Kremen for the media proved a challenge, however, for McDermott. She implored him to wear certain colors that looked good on camera, no patterns or stripes, only to see him show up in a dirty tie-dye T-shirt. She felt overwhelmed by him, how smart he was, a mind that moved a mile a minute, with an almost avant-garde sense of direction and purpose. When she watched him tell one reporter that he was going to bring more love to the world than Jesus, she gulped. But there was something about him that made her trust what he was saying: his authenticity, she realized, was a lot more interesting than some executive who had been coached.
The press ate it up. There were profiles of Kremen and his company in Wired, Forbes, the San Jose Mercury News, and elsewhere. “If the poet Elizabeth Browning were around today,” read a story in the New York Post, “do you think she would say to Robert Browning, ‘How do I love thee? Let me switch on my Power Mac, send you an E-mail and count the ways.’ It’s hard to say, but in 1995 the search for romance and f
lirtation is clearly flourishing on the World Wide Web.”
There were soon competitors in the wake—with names like the Singles Online Network and the World Wide Web Dating Game, but Match.com, the pioneer, was dominating. Within a couple months, they’d reached nearly a million hits on their website, with a large chunk of the traffic coming from America Online. They were going back and forth to Kinko’s, scanning photos of prospective daters—and tossing the occasional nude shots in the trash. Before long, word spread around the office that two of the people who had met on Match were getting engaged. The group gathered to watch it unfold in a chat room, as the guy made vows straight out of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (“I will not go into my man cave when I need to communicate . . .”). They had to pass a Kleenex box around the office for everyone who was crying.
Kremen was riding higher than ever before. And he wasn’t the only one. A new gold rush had begun. It had started, it seemed, on August 9, 1995, with the initial public offering of Netscape Communications, makers of the first mainstream web browser, Navigator. Though the start-up had yet to show a profit, that didn’t stop the stampede of investors—who more than doubled the price of the shares on the very first day they were available. Over the course of one day, the company’s cofounder, Jim Clark, became worth more than a half billion dollars. And the dream of the new dot-com multimillionaire was born.
By that month, Match had hit more than 10,000 users—and was getting hundreds more each day. Once they crossed the 25,000 threshold, the plan was to start charging for memberships. The plan, as Kremen told Interactive Week, was to build out his other domains—such as jobs.com, autos.com, and housing.com—in similar ways, and fulfill his vision of being the classified ads king online. As for his own love life, Kremen claimed that building his empire was consuming all his energy. “Now I’m so busy,” he said, “I don’t have time to use the service.” Privately, however, he still longed for someone with whom he could share his life. But it was easier to distract himself with his business than lament that he had still not found a deep connection of his own.
The Players Ball Page 6