Gary Kremen
American businessman and politician
Gary Kremen (born 20 September 1963) is an American engineer, entrepreneur and politician who founded the personals site Match.com, was the first registrant of Sex.com and founder of Clean Power Finance, and was a board member of the Santa Clara Valley Water District from 2014 through 2022. Since 1993, Kremen has been a private and angel investor in over 100 companies (individually or through venture capital funds), of which several have gone public or had liquidity events.
Early life
Born in Chicago and raised in a Jewish household in nearby Lincolnwood, Illinois, Kremen graduated from Niles West High School in 1981. He then graduated with bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from Northwestern University in 1985 and an MBA from Stanford University in 1989.
Business career
Kremen launched the software firm Los Altos Technology and headed the company until late 1992.
In 1993, Kremen founded Match.com. Funded by private investors in November 1994, he launched the online personals service Match.com in April 1995. After troubles with venture capitalists over his insistence that the company serve profitable alternative market segments including the LGBT market, he left Match.com in March 1996, remaining on the board. Over Kremen's objections, Match.com was sold to Cendant Corporation for $7 million in 1998 and sold by Cendant to Ticketmaster a year and a half later for $50 million.
From 1995 to 1996, Kremen co-founded and served as president of NetAngels.com, Inc., an Internet profiling and personalization company that suggested web sites to users.
The public source identifies “Gary Kremen” as american businessman and politician. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Gary, Kremen and American.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5525391. VIAF identifies the subject as 73382130. The Library of Congress control number is nb2007021810. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1963, 2014, 2022 and 1993.
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This entry incorporates text from “Gary Kremen” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.