Gary Kremen is an American engineer, entrepreneur and public servant who invented online dating, founded the personals site Match.com, was the first registrant of Sex.com and founder of Clean Power Finance, and is a board member of the Santa Clara Valley Water District. Since 1993, Kremen has been a private and angel investor in over 100 companies, of which several have gone public or had liquidity events.
Kremen launched the software firm Los Altos Technology and headed the company until late 1992. In 1993, Kremen founded Match.com. Funded by private investors in November 1994, he launched the online personals service Match.com in April 1995. After troubles with venture capitalists over his insistence that the company serve profitable alternative market segments including the LGBT market, he left Match.com in March 1996, remaining on the board. Over Kremen's objections, Match.com was sold to Cendant Corporation for $7 million in 1998 and sold by Cendant to Ticketmaster a year and a half later for $50 million. From 1995 to 1996, Kremen co-founded and served as president of NetAngels.com, Inc., an Internet profiling and personalization company that suggested web sites to users. It merged with Firefly Networks, and then was sold to Microsoft. In 1999, Kremen was listed as an equity-holding officer or director of Brightcube, Inc. The same year, he sold Computer.com for $500,000. Kremen is credited as a primary inventor on a 1995-filed patent for dynamic web pages, US patent number 5,706,434, which he later sold for over $1,000,000. Additionally, Kremen holds two other patents in financial-related systems management: US patent number 7,698,219 and US patent number 7,890,436. and a patent for verifying employment online: United States Patent number 8,533,110. A 2007 New York Times article on "millionaires who don't feel rich" reported that Kremen estimated his net worth at $10 million. Kremen is the founder of residential solar financing start-up Clean Power Finance, Inc., which raised $6.9 million from investors in January 2010, $25 million from Kleiner Perkins, $75 million from Googlein September 2011, and $62 million from other investors. He was also founder and chairman of Sociogramics, a financial services company that focuses on bringing credit to the underbanked, having raised seed capital from Tugboat Ventures, Harmony Venture Partners, , Greylock Partners, , and . Kremen is the founding investor and a board member of CrowdFlower, WaterSmart Software and CapGain Solutions as well as involved with local non-profit organizations. He is also a co-founder of Menlo Incubator, which is an early-stage startup program that focuses heavily on mentorship and . On February 24, 2014, Identive Group appointed him a member of the Board of Directors. He is a University of California, Merced foundation board member. He was an elected board member and president of the Purissima Hills Water District from 2010-2014. Kremen was appointed to the Proposition 39 Citizens Oversight Board by California State ControllerJohn Chiang in January 2014. Kremen was elected to the Santa Clara Valley Water District of Directors in the 2014 election. On January 13, 2015, the Board elected him as the 2015 Board Chair. He was re-elected in 2018. Kremen is also a board member of the and was elected as Vice Chair to the .
Sex.com legal case
Kremen first registered the domain namesex.com in 1994 as well as jobs.com, housing.com, and autos.com. In 1996, Stephen M. Cohen contacted Network Solutions and fraudulently had the domain transferred to his name. Kremen sued Cohen for the return of the sex.com domain name. As Cohen had profited from sex.com while assigned to him, Kremen was awarded a judgment of $65 million against Cohen. Cohen fled to Mexico and moved the money offshore. Kremen obtained Cohen's Rancho Santa Fe mansion, to which he relocated after the court case resolved. In 2003, Kremen successfully litigated against Network Solutions. On October 28, 2005, the Los Angeles Times reported Cohen had been arrested in Mexico and turned over to US authorities. Kremen sold sex.com in 2006 to Boston-based Escom LLC for $15 million in cash and stock, and sold sex.net for $454,500 later that year.
Additional reading
David Kushner, The Players Ball. NY:Simon& Schuster, 2019 .
