What a difference two dozen years can make! For Markus Frind, it meant amassing a huge fortune that totals over $500 million.

Trailblazers like Frind Leave us inspiring stories worth telling, embracing and emulating.

Who is Frind: Frind is a Canadian entrepreneur and computer science graduate whose maiden venture is the online dating site Plenty of Fish (POF). POF was founded in March 2003 and managed by Frind himself until 2008. As the site’s user base swelled to 15 million and revenue to $10 million by 2008, Frind hired its first employee.

By 2014, POF was generating $100 million in sales per year. When Frind sold the company in 2015, it had an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) of $90 million.

“All of this was done without ever taking a single investor dollar or having other shareholders/partners,” he said LinkedIn profile Remarks.

Due to POF’s success, Frind negotiated a deal to sell the company Match Group, Inc. MTCH in July 2015 for $575 million. At that time, Match was a subsidiary of IAC, Inc. IAK, a holding company that owns multiple brands in 100 countries. Today, Match is a separately traded public company with subsidiaries that include OkCupid, Match, and Tinder.

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The inspiration & the success: Frind was excited about the idea of ​​starting a dating website while working for a Vancouver-based tech company. Luke Sophinos, a tech entrepreneur friend, said in a thread tweet highlighting the POF founder on Saturday.

Frind, who settled on the tried and true business idea of ​​improving an existing product or service, was reportedly dissatisfied and frustrated with existing dating sites. He therefore wanted to create a better and more user-friendly platform. Frind initially set up POF as a simple dating site that was “incredibly simple” and had a list of plain text suggestions….