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Adult Friend Finder (not safe for work!) founder Andrew Conru was profiled in the Mercury News. I met Andrew a few years ago at a dating event in San Francisco. Come to think of it, I met Evan Katz and Mike Jones from Userplane at that event as well. That was the beginning of an era for us all.
The general gist of the story is that Andrew runs a significant cog in the adult entertainment wheel and makes a few hundred million a year doing it. Problem is, investors can’t get in on the red-hot adult action due to “sin clauses”.
I know few people who have gotten married to people they met on AFF. Swingers love AFF, while employees complain about being micro-managed.
I technically don’t consider AFF part of the dating industry, it’s adult/porn and I’m sure they have their share of money-losing sites, same as Spark Networks does.
The writer compares AFF’s valuation to Facebook, comparing Alexa rankings of all things. Ridiculous. I think AFF is worth a heck of a lot more than Facebook. A bunch of college kids blogging about doing keg-stands doesn’t sound so sexy after you’ve been through the titillation of hooking up on AFF. Just ask Andrew, he’s an unabashed member.
Single geek in the Valley worth millions of dollars, swinging his way through his 30’s. Not bad for a Steelworker’s son from Indiana.
I bet Markus loves that Andrew has 100 programmers making sure the empire runs smoothly. Speaking of Markus, here’s a video of him people interviewed in Canadian television.
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http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail310.html
AFF needs the servers and people. AFF is a league all of their own. cams.com alone probably requires more processing power and storage than match.com