Serial Entrepreneur: Peng Ong (Part 2)

Previously, we discussed Peng Ong and his background. Today we begin to explore his first true entrepreneurial venture, Electric Classifieds, which spawned the creation of Match.com, the worlds largest online dating service.

SM: How long was match.com?
PO: I spent probably a total of less than a year totally active there.

SM: So you were co-founding at an idea level, and you were there for a year, but you did not really bet on it completely.
PO: No, I did not. The reason is not the business or the partners or the people at all. If you look at my history I am a hardcore software guy.

SM: And match.com is a marketing business.
PO: A marketing business, a systems integration business. I realized I could help Gary articulate the technical requirements and help him find the right folks on the technical side, but I would not have the kind of fun I like to have doing that.

SM: Doing the hard core technology stuff?
PO: Yes, and I was upfront with Gary and he knew it going in.

SM: How did you come up with the idea? Were you looking for a girl friend? [laughing]
PO: No, Gary was! [laughing]. Just kidding, I should let Gary talk to that. I met Gary when he was at Sybase at the Software Entrepreneurs Forum in 1992, I don’t think it exists now. It was a very effective forum for a lot of entrepreneurs of my era; late 80’s early 90’s. I met Gary then because he had been doing another startup, Los Altos Technologies I think, and that was his first startup. We had similar backgrounds, both EE’s, and we both got along pretty well, so we started brainstorming on different things to do.

SM: So in 1993 you started match.com
PO: It was actually called Electric Classifieds, and the idea was larger than dating. Why should human beings process 50 newspapers to find what they are looking for? Why can’t you get computers to do it?

SM: So it was more a Craig’s List kind of concept?
PO: It was classifieds, somewhat like Ebay in a sense that it was vertical. The idea was to create a marketplace to facilitate using different kinds of exchange mechanisms (a Double Dutch auction for example). Classified ads were one of the models of doing the classified exchange. We zoomed into match making because when we did our research into classified ads we discovered a lot of newspapers generated a bulk of the revenues from the personal stuff.

SM: So that is where you went?
PO: We thought we would build our first vertical element with matchmaking. We actually were fairly early on in the dot com days, in fact we were debating whether we should do faxes, email , voice, that kind of stuff and then the web came along and we decided to just use the web. We got a lot of the vertical dot com addresses. We had cars.com, and a whole bunch of really good one word domain names. I can’t remember how much we got out of that portfolio when we sold it, but I remember we made something.

SM: How big did Match.com become in terms of revenues and scale before you sold it?
PO: I actually don’t remember because in the middle of all that, when they were selling match.com, I was already into Interwoven and was preparing to take it public.

SM: How did you fund match.com? Did you raise venture capital?
PO: Initially no. Gary actually funded it himself, but within 6 months to a year we got some VC’s involved.

SM: Was it a good exit?
PO: There are a lot of lessons learned there. It was the first dot com, and it was very early on. But I think we did the right thing by selling it, because through the handoff it is now the world’s biggest dating site. In some ways I look at Electric Classifieds as a failure because all it did was Match.com. If it had been successful it would have looked more like an Ebay. It would have had multiple verticals.

SM: And you sold it fairly early in the game?
PO: I think it was like 1998 or 1999, just as I was going out with Interwoven.

SM: So that was four years already?
PO: Yes. I had left operations by 1996, when I was in full swing with Interwoven.

(Next time : Interwoven)

[Part 5]
[Part 4]
[Part 3]
[Part 2]
[Part 1]

This segment is part 2 in the series : Serial Entrepreneur: Peng Ong
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