Business:

I am a serial entrepreneur who has been the founder of several different startup companies across a variety of industries yielding me a diverse business and technical background. The industries I have been involved with include; telecommunications, transportation, and the Internet as a few examples. Over 17 years, my career has spanned the business planning, marketing, branding, finances, human resources, and technical aspects of the companies I have owned and worked for. My current skill set would be best utilized as the leader/contributor of a major business unit, working with both the business and technical departments of an Internet based organization.

In 1990, I founded the Dallas Internet based singles/dating and social networking website MatchMaker.com. The site was profitable and self funded (no venture capital) until February 1999. Under my leadership, Matchmaker.com had over 4 million users yielding up to 230 million page views per month and generating over $7 Million per annum. The company was sold to Lycos for $45 Million cash after the Internet bubble/crash of 2000.

Over the course of MatchMaker.com's history, I was the founding President and CEO, the first full-time employee and largest single common shareholder. Under my leadership, media metrics rated us as the 2nd stickiest site on the Internet, and was growing at a rate of 8% or greater per month, making it the largest online dating site at that time. In 1995 when I decided to make Matchmaker.com my full time job, I was the only employee. By 1999, I had created a fully functional corporation with 28 full time employees and 11 remote part time employees, generating over $7 Million in annual revenue. By the time we sold to Lycos in July 2000 Matchmaker.com employed 124 people in 8 separate departments. I had to become an expert in a variety of fields in order to grow this company over this very short timeline.

Branding and Media buys: One of my biggest responsibilities as the founder of Matchmaker.com was to create an identifiable brand both on and off line. I accomplished this through a combination of radio, print, and online marketing. In 1997 I formed a relationship with Yahoo! and started buying search engine keywords on a CPM basis. I locked down words like "singles", "dating", "personals", etc in the Yahoo! inventory for many years. This was critical for the growth and branding of MatchMaker.com. It drove relevant traffic to MatchMaker.com and kept the #2 Match.com from getting to those interested users. The return on investment was so high with these early search engine buys I expanded this contract 300% in the first 6 months of operations. Since Yahoo! was returning over a 9% click through rate, I also began buying traffic from other portals like Yahoo, InfoSeek, Excite, AOL, Lycos, LookSmart, Goto/Overture, Classifieds2000, Northern Light, Altavista, DoubleClick, CupidsNetwork, American Singles, and Hotbot. As our relationships with the various online marketing companies grew, I negotiated some of the first CPA and CPC contracts these organizations ever had. Off line marketing including billboard buys in several cities around the country as well as banners on buses and trains.

Membership Conversion: One of the key issues I had to deal with on a daily basis was how to get people to convert to paying members. The marketing discussed above got people to the site, but the revenue model was based on those trial members becoming paying members. At our height over 22% of trial members were converting to paid members. Those paid members continued to pay on average for 4 1/2 months. I was able to achieve such high conversion and retention rates by manipulating trial and paying member benefits, increasing and decreasing trial periods, membership rates/specials and providing a very high quality and responsive service. It needs to be noted that an online dating portal is the only business in the world where you are "doing your job" right when you send your customer away in pairs.

Strategic partnerships: First to form Matchmaker.com Inc, I had to convince multiple independent franchisees to give up their individual Matchmaker BBS systems to form a single Internet corporation. Over the course of 3 months I negotiated each franchise owner to trade franchise ownership for equity eventually forming a single unified Matchmaker.com Corporation. Once formed, I was the President and Chief Executive Officer. I also formed other strategic partnerships as the President of MatchMaker.com, including relationships with Blindgift.com, Savvis Communications, Nationwide Internet, CRL, Frontier / Global Crossing, and Freeside Networks, Worldcom, SWB/GTE.

Productizing: MatchMaker was originally a BBS (Bulletin Board System), a text based dial-up on-line service similar to CompuServe from the eighties. It was my initiative to forge forward and get my network on the Internet and provide dial-up and telnet services to my users. I then rolled out the concept of "Metro" and "Special Interest" niche Matchmaking sites to better group and productize the enterprise service. As a rule, people want to meet others in their area, the Metro sites were domestic mainstream dating portals targeted for specific US cities. The Special-Interest niche sites were worldwide dating portals targeting specific demographic groups in Age, Religion, Ethnic and various Lifestyles. Simply put, "birds of a feather flock together", I figured by putting people together with more common interests I would yield higher membership conversions. The revenue literally tripled in only one month from the completion of this strategic grouping and remained about 50% of the companies total membership revenue. It was this decision that set me apart from other matchmaker franchise operators in other cities and MatchMaker as a whole from other companies like Match.com in the on-line personals business.

Finances: The ultimate purpose of Matchmaker.com was two-fold; first to bring people together, second to make money. In order to make this second goal a reality I had to form both a long-term business strategy and a set of short-term tactical goals to grow the company and maintain profitability. Every venture we took on at Matchmaker.com had a calculated return on investment (ROI), and had to show profitability in the first 90 days or I did not approve it. As a startup company I also had to deal with the more mundane aspect of financing, including accounting, taxes, payroll, insurance, accounts receivable, etc…It was not until much later in the evolution of the organization I was able to have others handle these things on a daily basis. The advantage to working this way is I gained a working familiarity with all these issues, so I have a more critical eye looking at the financial organization of any corporate entity.

Human Resources: Matchmaker.com grew at such an exponential rate it was almost impossible to hire people fast enough to meet the ever increasing demand. In order to address these personnel demands I formed several major departments and staffed them with outstanding department heads. I then empowered these department head to go recruit and hire the people they need to run their individual departments efficiently and within the prescribed budget. The results were we had an outstanding staff and were able to grow from 5 employees to 124 employees in 2 years. I was able to recruit very high caliber people from much larger, well funded companies such as; Cisco Systems, Fidelity Investments, American Airlines, and Sabre, etc..

Alternative Revenue Sources: As the Internet business model evolved I was able to have Matchmaker.com evolve with it, and take advantage of new revenue opportunities. Matchmaker.com created an affiliates program to increase both traffic and membership revenue. In addition, I added a new chapter to our business plan called Data Mining. The idea behind this is, singles creating profiles provide a tremendous amount of demographical information, including zip code, income level, profession, hobbies, living arrangements, and more. Sponsors and potential advertisers will pay much higher then standard advertising rates to serve ads and gather survey information from very targeted demographic groups.

Venture Capital and Funding: In January 1999 I felt Matchmaker.com could grow even faster with an infusion of outside capital. In a very short 2 months I was able to secure $5 Million in venture capital through a private placement with investors in Dallas and the Silicon Valley. I was able to obtain this capital while only surrendering 22% of corporate equity and I maintained voting control with the original founders.

Technology: The Evolution of Matchmaker.com [top]

When e-commerce was in its infancy, in 1990, MatchMaker.com was performing Internet email and online financial transactions before most people even knew how to log on to the Internet. The amazing success of MatchMaker.com literally created the business case for other companies to enter the online dating market. (For information on the sale of MatchMaker.com please see TheStandard.com )

As MatchMaker.com formed and grew, I was forced to design and implement an ISP/CSP IP network to keep up with demand. In 1995 the Internet network began with 1 T-1 and expanded to 11 T-1s routed to 6 different upstream providers in the first 24 months of operations. Due to the overwhelming traffic, these T-1s were replaced with 6 DS-3 fiber circuits as soon as they became available. This massive growth forced the development of flexible and scalable network architecture. This design included all the physical and logical components of the network, as well as encompassing specific tasks including: contract negotiation, local loop provisioning, port configuration, IP setup, BGP routing policies, testing and performance optimization. This network hosted over 120 servers delivering over 6 Million web page views per day.

The IP network design for MatchMaker.com was years ahead of the industry standard routing protocols. As a result I was forced to develop a routing model/tool to optimize the content delivery for Internet traffic. These tools assisted a networking engineer in building the routing tables for a gateway router before BGP was able to calculate these factors. This product, for which I have retained the intellectual property rights, enabled me to tune the BGP tables and set the routing policies across diverse networks.

In addition to creating the web sites themselves, I developed a set of tools to submit web pages to the Internet search engines. This tool set helps a web master score high relevancy within the search engines for specified topics and keywords.

I have a unique talent of being able to quickly prototype solutions to critical business problems. This helps the business team make informed decisions more rapidly, staying ahead of the competition. My experience allows me to come up with unique and effective engineering solutions to solve real business problems.

I acquired many of the assets from the MatchMaker.com facilities in Bedford, Texas. I did this in order to form a new series of companies and expand my success in the Internet market. My goal was to continue to form web communities or portal to bring people together online using a paid membership business model. In order to accomplish this goal I once again hired the most talented people I knew, many from the former MatchMaker.com, along with some newly recruited talent. Together we forged a team that has been able to take the web portal concept and "build a better mouse trap". I formed eWitness LLC to address the need of lawyers to find subject matter experts. This has proven to be a very profitable business model, as experts buy listings to advertise their services to potential clients. Due to the incredibly flexible nature of the core software, we have been able to use this core library to build several significant web portals, both for ourselves and for other companies. I have formed strategic partnerships with companies such as, eWomenNetworks, PeopleMatching, Fellowship Church of Texas, and others. We have also used this same software to form some of our own business units, including SoulMate.com, our new online dating community and Undo Spam, a protected email service.

Branding and online marketing are much different now then they were in the early days of MatchMaker.com. Due to decreasing effectiveness of banner advertising and email I have had to go in new directions to promote our new portals. One of the more effective methods I have utilized is the search engine trusted feed. By buying an XML feed to providers such as Inktomi, Alta Vista, and LookSmart I have been able to show a 250% ROI on an per month basis.

Current Technical Status [top]

I have completely built from the ground up a scalable web portal architecture for building on-line web communities. This turn-key platform is designed to rapidly develop and roll out core web communities for targeted niche affinity groups in as little as 30-60 days.

Internet Dating Portal
Founder/President/CEO/CTO
Bedford, Texas
1995-1999 F/T
1990-1995 P/T