Gary Kremen

This is From Scratch.

My guest is the serial entrepreneur Gary Kremen.

Gary is the founder of Match.com, an online dating service that he started in 1993.

Gary is also the founder of Clean Power Finance, an online marketplace for the solar energy sector, and Sociogramix, a financial services company that uses social media and behavioral economics to provide capital to consumers who don't otherwise have access to credit.

I don't know if I rubbed one person wrong.

I think I rubbed everyone wrong.

So did you kind of get a rise from challenging authority? Was this something that you liked to perpetuate? Or this is just, you know, Gary Kremen?

Just the way I am.

But the facts of Kremen are just staggering.

In 1994, during the absolute infancy of the commercial Internet, an entrepreneur named Gary Kremen registered the domain name sex.com.

And at the time, domain registrars were basically giving them away.

But Stephen Cohen, a man with a long history of fraud, recognized the immense future value of that specific digital real estate.

It essentially justifies a forced sale for the full fair market value of the property at the time of the conversion.

Let's actually apply these rigorous rules to a wild landmark Ninth Circuit case, Kremen versus Cohen.

In nineteen ninety-four, Gary Kremen registers the highly lucrative domain name sex.com. Later on, a con man named Stephen Cohen forges a transfer letter to the domain registrar, Network Solutions, claiming Kremen's company was abandoning the domain.

Then, Network Solutions transfers the domain without even verifying the facially suspect letter.