More info on Match.com founder Gary Kremen in WIRED.
In 1994, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers offered to invest in the online classifieds business that Match.com was part of, but the VCs wanted to merge it with Architext, which would become Excite.com. Kremen said no, because he wouldn’t be made CEO of the new company. Instead, he accepted money from a group of investors led by Canaan Partners.
Match.com was sold for $8 million in 1997 to Cendant, a Connecticut consumer services company. (A year and a half later, Cendant sold it to Ticketmaster Online-CitySearch for $50 million.) All Kremen got was $50,000 and a lifetime account on the site – his login is “The Founder.”
The rest of the article is about the famous domain name scandal over sex.com.
