Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 5)

SM: I have to believe that you could tell us what the top five reasons people pay to search on your site are. JT: Very broadly, the two primary reasons people search are because they want more information about a person and they want to get in touch with a person. About 60% of our

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Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 4)

SM: Essentially, you have created a search engine for people where you crawl the Web and put information together? JT: Correct. You can run a search in one place to get information about anyone. You can also find your own record and find out who has been searching for you. Some people who search for

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Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 3)

SM: What did you do after being the CEO of GreatDomains? JT: We ran into a company which at the time was called Snowball and which eventually became IGN. They were performing terribly as a publicly traded company. Their market cap was below their cash on the balance sheet. I approached them about a property,

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Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 2)

SM: If you did not have the original idea, how did you wind up as the CEO and the largest shareholder? JT: I got a little bit lucky. I had met the founders of that business because I was trying to work on putting real estate online. I contacted them because I saw an ad

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Monetizing People Search: MyLife.com CEO Jeff Tinsley (Part 1)

Jeff Tinsley is the founder and CEO of MyLife. He created the company in 2002 under the name Reunion.com after meeting his wife at his 10-year high school reunion. The company now has a membership of more than 50 million. Prior to MyLife, Tinsley was a founder and CEO of GreatDomains.com, the world’s leading secondary

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Online K-12 Education IPO In The Great Recession: Archipelago Learning Co-founders Cameron Chalmers, Dave Muzzo, And CEO Tim McEwen (Part 7)

SM: What is your sales model? Do you do direct sales, telesales, or other approaches? DM: We have a marketing group that does a lot of Web optimization, e-mail marketing, and direct mail marketing. We generate leads that go directly to the salespeople. They get an appointment at the building with the principal and the

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Online K-12 Education IPO In The Great Recession: Archipelago Learning Co-founders Cameron Chalmers, Dave Muzzo, And CEO Tim McEwen (Part 6)

SM: After you became CEO, did you have a different content strategy? TM: We introduced reading and math first, and then we followed with science and social studies. We also focused first on elementary schools and then on high schools. Two years ago we started addressing kindergarten, first, and second grade programs.

Online K-12 Education IPO In The Great Recession: Archipelago Learning Co-founders Cameron Chalmers, Dave Muzzo, And CEO Tim McEwen (Part 5)

SM: Let’s go over the terms of your transaction. I think that can be educational for a lot of people. TM: It was basically a $100 million sale, and then Dave and Cam each reinvested in the business.