Did you know this guy is essentially the godfather of online dating?

Gary Kreman launched match.com on April 21, 1995. The Stanford grad came up with the idea after struggling to make a love connection on his own. Within four months match.com was a huge success hitting 10 thousand users and by early 1996 Match had over 100 thousand users. Other dating sites popped up like the Singles online Network and the World Wide Web Dating Game but initially match.com owned the market.

So why haven’t you heard of Kremen?

Well a yea after Match launched he made the decision to leave the company after butting heads with venture capitalists over his desire to serve other markets including the LGBTQ community. When Kremen left, he received less than $50,000 in compensation. A few years later match.com was sold to Ticketmaster for $50 million. Today it is part of Match Group which also owns Tinder, Ok Cupid, Plenty of Fish and Hinge. It went public in 2015 and reported revenue of $1.7 billion dollars in 2018.