IAC

"Since I left corporate life some thirty years ago, there’s hardly an area of the internet that IAC hasn’t touched. The number and pace of transactions and attempts at transactions are dizzying. Some weren’t successful, but enough were to produce a combined value of more than $100 billion. Not bad for a company that started out on fumes with $40 million in revenue. That wasn’t my goal, because the money has always been a by-product, but as a report card I am proud of it. Far better this late in life to have some pride compared with the shame I’d felt for most of my early years."

"Around the same time I agreed to start an “innovation lab” inside IAC to develop ideas from scratch. I never thought much would come out of these internal groups, since stand-alone innovation rarely innovates inside a large enterprise (mostly it just copies what happens next door), but we birthed a giant exception to that rule. Tinder was the name assigned to a screen-swiping technology the innovation lab came up with, and within a year—with zero advertising—it became the biggest hit in dating. Our total investment was about $750,000, and it went on to be worth $15 billion."