Content area
Full Text
My school pal Gary Kremen was sire he owned the most valuable dot-com Grand. Was he in for a slack.
Considering that his current legal battle with the undisputed king of net porn has enormous implications for your brand's online identity it's amazing that you don't know who Gary Kremen is. Allow me to introduce you.
A graduate of both Northwestern University (where I met him in 1981) and the Stanford Business School, Kremen is, in his own way an Internet pioneer. In 1994, while most of us were just starting to play with e-mail and online chat, he was building the first of many e-businesses he's been involved with. This one was called match.com, and it was, simply put, computer dating for those with personal computers. It was brilliant, in that it used cutting edge programming to eliminate the stigma of professional matchmaking. No more trips to the mall, no more humiliating self-promotion, now lonely hearts could look for their true love in the privacy of their own homes. Some five years after it was created, match.com was sold to Ticketmaster for $50 million.
Those of us who knew Kremen were not at all surprised by his first foray into e-commerce, because it showcased both his preternatural ingenuity (the design and applicalion of advanced privacy models) and his fondness for all things tacky (dating services). If anything, it confirmed the twisted-genius status he had among his classmates. We'd always seen him as something of a character; unpredictable, a little manic, and yet endlessly fascinating, and fascinated.
And, at his core, just basically whacked. Kremen was the guy who, in the middle of a San Francisco Giants baseball game, would wonder aloud whether a fly ball, falling into an outfield fissure created by a sudden earthquake, would be considered a ground rule double. Kremen was the guy who, when he owed you money would write something that you completely disagreed with on the back of the check, just above where you'd have to sign to endorse it. Kremen was the guy who would take to the desert on a whim, for a seven-day fast, and then send you a postcard describing how the experience affected his plumbing.
So, when he called me in 1994,...