EHarmony an Idea Made in Codes and Homophobia
“I have said that eHarmony really ought to put up $10 million and ask other companies to put up money and do a really first class job of figuring out homosexuality. At the very best, it’s been a painful way for a lot of people to have to live. But at this point, at this age, I want America to start drawing together. I want it to be more harmonious.” The man is highly anti gay and believe is a disease that can be cured if every body puts it’s minds and money to together for a cure.
The video is part of CNBC’s “Off the Cuff” series, which is billed as a chance for viewers to get to know corporate executives “outside the boardroom,” and is presented as a monologue, sans interviewer questions.
And while eHarmony has been sued in the past for discriminating against gay users, it’s hard to what kind of “figuring out” Mr. Warren is proposing. An attempt to build a better gay dating site? An initiative to deprogram those people once and for all? Something having to do with robots?
EHarmony Inc., the operator of a website designed to help guide singles into happy marriages, is ending some relationships of its own.
At age 78, Neil Clark Warren, who founded the company 12 years ago, is taking back control. Since becoming chief executive officer in July after a series of CEO changes, he’s fired 100 people, cut the board from nine to two and bought back stock from Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures, which invested $110 million in 2004.
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~~~~~~Bloomberg Media:
At age 78, Neil Clark Warren, who founded the company 12 years ago, is taking back control. Since becoming chief executive officer in July after a series of CEO changes, he’s fired 100 people, cut the board from nine to two and bought back stock from Sequoia Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures, which invested $110 million in 2004.
{Sales growth has slowed from 16 percent in 2008 to 6.3 percent in 2010 and an estimated 3.8 percent this year to $275 million, according to IBISWorld. EHarmony doesn’t disclose its finances.}
An initial public offering, which had been expected in 2010, is now off the table and Warren said in an interview he has no interest in selling the Santa Monica, California-based company. Instead, the trained theologian and psychologist will spend next year building EHarmony’s portfolio to add services that help people find the right job, understand themselves and build relationships to reduce loneliness. Gone from the company are the business degrees, and in are social scientists.
“Building a relationship business is so different from trying to build something with machines or widgets,” said Warren, who’s been chairman of EHarmony’s board from the beginning. “To put it in the hands of people that only want to look at it as a source of business success, revenue success doesn’t make sense anymore.”
Not that Warren views EHarmony and its $60 monthly subscriptions as a nonprofit. If run correctly, he says the company can be worth $1 billion in two years and $5 billion in five years. With 14 percent of the U.S. dating-services market, the company trails onlyIAC/InterActiveCorp, (IACI) parent of Match.com, which has 24 percent, according to industry researcher IBISWorld.
Warren at 78 now has control and ownership of EHarmony, and he plans to stick around for at least five years. That’s how much time he has to build a $5 billion company with an unconventional approach. He’s confident he can do it.
NYT: According to psychologists at eHarmony, an online company that claims its computerized algorithms will help match you with a “soul mate.” But this claim was criticized in a psychology journal last year by a team of academic researchers, who concluded that “no compelling evidence supports matching sites’ claims that mathematical algorithms work.”
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Adam Gonzalez on this blog: The man (Neil Clark) has a strong point in the way he gets couples' together. It’s a mash up of what is offered today by any other dating company plus the ex Revered Moon norma, in which couples meet the day they are to get married and not know each other before (I said the idea). In this company couple seekers are not aloud to do the searchers themselves, EHarmony gets them together, they do the searching and matching. The love seekers do the $paying$ and giving out his/hers information. Maybe that is the secret. Sometimes we don’t know what is good for us. Sometimes we are afraid to be honest. We need a match maker like in the Yiddish tradition. How do you explain a person who everyone considers a good catch with all the looks one can wish for coupled with a cousin of Notre Dame’s infamous man of the bells? It happens all the time.
Where they(EHarmony) went array is when they mixed it up with religion and the bia’s that religion has ingrained in it’s self otherwise it wouldn’t be a religion. What I mean is, in known religions there is always is got to be them and us, good and bad and nothing in between. When you tell millions you wont serve them because they are sick and don’t deserve in that condition to be coupled you are going to the deep ends. Another good idea thought out by a charlatan like Neil Clark is certainly has the traits of a Henry Ford who built the model T and started the factory idea of the past generation by one person screwing the same nut over and over until they went mad. This little part of the assembly doing the same thing over and over again and today having computers taking over the men and women. Henry Ford can be called the father of the industrial revolution. Yet he was a very ugly individual in admiration with the political idea of Narcism (Nazis) and other not noble ideas. He never gave importance to the single individual but the combine effort of the many ( You could call it communism almost except he was a capitalist the one not to share unless it has many returns).
EHarmony a good idea of having the match made in codes thought of by a bigot and homophobe not by a Gandhi.
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