On Tuesday, the dating website Plenty of Fish got acquired by Match Group, an IAC/InterActive subsidiary that recently announced plans to go public later this year. Plenty of Fish sold to Match Group for $575 million in cash.
Markus Frind, 36, is the founder and CEO of the Vancouver-based Plenty of Fish.
Frind told Business Insider he started Plenty of Fish in 2003 “as a way to improve my résumé.”
“At the time there was a new programming language called ASP.NET, and I don’t like reading books, so I just went and created the site in two weeks, and then people started signing up, much to my surprise,” he said. “And it blew up from there. It wasn’t like I had a plan to create a dating site. It was just a side project I created that got really big.”
Frind, who was a developer before he founded Plenty of Fish, built the site without any venture-capital funding. He has retained complete ownership of the company, which has 75 employees.
“By the time I found out what VCs were, I was already making millions in profit, and I didn’t see the need to raise money because I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he told Business Insider. “It was a profitable company, and there was no need to raise money.”
Dispatches From The Front 