A fascinating interview. Waldorf is one entrepreneur who's not only made a lot of money by giving people what they really care about but has been transformed in the process. But what caught me was the company's vision.
The Wall St Journal interviews The Matchmaker, Greg Waldorf, CEO of eHarmony.com, the online dating site that projects $200 million in revenues in 2007.
Consumers, Mr. Waldorf explains, are far more disposed to pay for goods rather than services on the Internet. "People expect things on the Internet to be free," he says. "So how have we built a business that will have nearly $200 million in revenue this year? We grew our subscriber base by about a third from 2005 to 2006. How? Because this is something that people care a lot about."
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Mr. Waldorf, now 38, has been an entrepreneur since the age of 13, when he started his own software and consulting company in L.A. ...In 2000, Mr. Waldorf became a founding investor of eHarmony, joining forces with founders Greg Forgatch and Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist with three decades of experience counseling married couples. Dr. Warren's research shaped the company's scientific approach: Compatible singles are matched based on their answers to an elaborate questionnaire. The site, with its relatively lengthy process and subscription rates of around $60 a month (almost twice the price of other dating sites) reaches out to users who are clearly looking for much more than just a date. It seemed like a good business idea," Mr. Waldorf explained. And also, "it seemed meaningful."
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Yet now, Mr. Waldorf may have unexpectedly fallen into his own niche. "If you want to call it the dinner party test, people are fascinated by talking about relationships. It's an addictive business. Think about it from my point of view, I've been involved in a lot of companies, enterprise software, mobile application deployment . . . then all of a sudden you're involved in a business like this . . . How do you get involved with another business after this? What's the next thing to relationships in terms of involvement with the customer?"
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The vision behind the company is not simply to create marriages, but to create happy marriages by using scientific research to unite compatible individuals. "I know it sounds corny when I'm talking about this," Mr. Waldorf says, but, "if you can lower the divorce rate by 1%, it could affect a million people in a generation. I don't know if that's an exact number, but it gives you a sense of how many people's lives are impacted."
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The popularity of Internet dating is just one more sign that we're witnessing a fundamental change in the way people interact, a difference that can be particularly pronounced across generations. "I'm 38," Mr. Waldorf says. "I ask my friends' kids this: "If you had to give up email, text messaging or IM, which would you give up?' And I have yet to meet a person who's under 20 who would not give up email first. I find this fascinating. I find this unbelievable. . .
The very IM and texting that so enthralls the younger set often leads to high tech abuse. A newly released survey shows that more than one in three teens report a boyfriend or girlfriend has harassed them with text messages, one in four reported insults, one in five had pressure for sex and one in ten was threatened with violence. Nearly all were reluctant to tell their parents for fear of losing access to their phone or computer.