This person is unknown and undistinguished. He hasn’t gone to MIT, Stanford, or any other four-year college for that matter, yet he is deceptively brilliant. He has been bouncing aimlessly from job to job, but he is secretly ambitious. He builds his company by himself and from his apartment. In most stories, this is where the hard work begins — the long hours, sleepless nights, and near-death business experiences. But this one is way more mellow. Frind takes it easy, working no more than 20 hours a week during the busiest times and usually no more than 10. Five years later, he is running one of the largest websites on the planet and paying himself more than $5 million a year.
Frind, 30, doesn’t seem like the sort of fellow who would run a market-leading anything. Quiet, soft-featured, and ordinary looking, he is the kind of person who can get lost in a roomful of people and who seems to take up less space than his large frame would suggest. Those who know Frind describe him as introverted, smart, and a little awkward. “Markus is one of those engineers who is just more comfortable sitting in front of a computer than he is talking to someone face to face,” says Noel Biderman, the co-founder of Avid Life Media, a Toronto-based company that owns several dating sites.
His hometown, Hudson’s Hope, is a cold, isolated place not far from the starting point of the Alaska Highway
Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is “a complete joke,” Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is “a cult,” and Match is “dying.” Says Mark Brooks, a , “I’ve never known anybody so competitive. He always says exactly what he thinks.”
With friends and family, Frind expresses affection through playful pranks. Frind will spend hours hiding in the three-bedroom apartment he and Kanciar share, furtively flipping light switches, tapping on doors, and ducking into rooms to play on his girlfriend’s fear of ghosts. Continue reading “I t’s a 21st-century fairy tale: A young man starts a website in his spare time”