Noel Biderman sounds like your run-of-the-mill technology chief executive: he peppers his speech with words like “disruption” and of course, his start-up is not just a business, but a vehicle for “societal impact”.
“I am making it easier for women to catch up to men,” he says of AshleyMadison.com, the website he founded in 2001. The catch, of course, is that Ashley Madison is the website for cheating spouses, with the unsubtle tagline, “Life is short. Have an affair.”
And Mr Biderman, a former sports lawyer who says he was often forced to deal with the aftermath of his clients’ affairs, says he is helping women catch up to men not by giving them equal pay or more education, but by allowing them to cheat with just as much frequency as men do.
“There’s a lot of brick and mortar business from brothels to escort agencies that cater towards men, so I really wanted to focus on the female side of the equation,” he says.
That’s why he named the site Ashley Madison, after the two most popular baby girl names in the United States at the time.
Whatever your view on that equality proposition is, his bet that cheating could be profitable seems correct: the company, which lets women use it for free, but charges men fees to create profiles and send messages, notched $150m (£95m) in revenues in 2014, all from subscriptions.
But the big question now, as the firm attempts to raise $200m in a public share sale in London – which would value it at nearly $1bn – is whether or not anyone will be willing to publicly invest in infidelity.
This isn’t the first time Mr Biderman and Avid Life Media – Ashley Madison’s parent company, which also runs the websites CougarLife.com, EstablishedMen.com, and TheBigandtheBeautiful.com – have sought a public share sale.
In 2011, the company attempted to list in its home city of Toronto, but was ultimately forced to withdraw its offering when the Toronto Stock Exchange and investors baulked at the proposition. Mr Biderman chalks the failure up to squeamishness and timing. The site, which is now in 46 countries and has 30 million global members, was only in the US and Canada then.
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