Conru

Andrew Conru doesn’t look like the master of online dating. A tall 41-year-old with short hair, glasses, and a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering design from Stanford, he’s more geek than gigolo. As we walk past an empty retail space in a trendy part of Seattle, he tells me about the virtual-reality restaurant he’s trying to build inside. Diners would eat in a real train car, with changing scenes from exotic locales projected on the windows—videos of Kyoto with your sushi, for example—as the train shakes and shimmies to simulate forward motion. ”I haven’t worked out the hydraulics yet,” Conru says.

Conru has the time—and the money—to dream. He’s the reclusive founder of FriendFinder, the largest network of dating sites online, with more than US $300 million in annual revenues. The FriendFinder empire includes more than 30 sites in every niche—from the conservative (BigChurch) to the risqué (AdultFriendFinder)—with 270 million members and another 150 000 joining each day. It doesn’t advertise itself on television, as Match.com and eHarmony do, but in February the network made headlines as a planned initial public offering was canceled. Conru rarely gives interviews, but as a lifelong engineer, he agreed to share his story for the first time with IEEE Spectrum.

Since creating the Web’s first online personals site in 1994, Conru has been coding online solutions, such as collaborative filtering (comparing the preferences of multiple users) and centralized online advertising for multiple sites, long before they hit the mainstream. FriendFinder’s combustible mix of massive revenues and working-engineer-as-CEO has fueled more than a decade of innovation and experimentation. ”When Conru sees inspiration, he’s very quick to react,” says Mark Brooks, a social networks analyst for Online Personals Watch, a New York City–based technology research firm.

Not every experiment works out. Back in 1998, Conru created an avatar-based interface (he calls it a ”2.5-D virtual environment”) for people in chat rooms. But it just wasn’t very popular, Conru says. ”It’s all about optimization. Nothing you build should be permanent, and that’s what made us successful.” The company also flirted with doing a more immersive, EverQuest-style virtual world but found that it didn’t suit customers’ needs either.

Conru’s optimizing started in childhood, fixing equipment on his family’s farm in Indiana. ”My parents had the attitude that if something doesn’t work, find a way to make it happen,” he says. At night, he’d code Bible quiz games on his Commodore VIC-20. After studying engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, in Terre Haute, Ind., and then at the University of Minnesota, in Minneapolis, he went to Stanford to pursue his doctorate. It was the early 1990s, in the heart of Silicon Valley, wellspring of the Web, so he got schooled in something else, too. At the moment of the Web’s creation, he says, ”five billion people got connected by electronics. I realized things were going to be very different.”