The Love Techs

I am sitting in Kendall Square—arguably the techiest part of arguably the techiest city in America—and I am spilling soup. It's a screw-Al-Gore-cold day, and inside Legal Sea Foods, among the aquariums and brown leather booths, sit the technologically articulate. Professorish guys in tweed perch at the bar, seeming in no particular rush, while biotech staffers make awkward chitchat in rumpled business-casual. The place reeks of world-changing scientific innovation (and clam chowder). The perfect spot, I figure, to meet Max Krohn, one of OkCupid's founders.

Across the table from me, he's wearing a gray zip-up sweater and those small rectangular glasses favored by the users of MacBooks. His nerd-cool look is paired with an impressive résumé that he'll cap with a computer science Ph.D. from MIT later this year. The architect of the Web server that powers OkCupid, Krohn fell in with Yagan and Coyne when they were all freshmen at Harvard in 1995. This was at the outset of the Internet boom, you'll recall, and the meeting was one of those serendipitous, find-your-genius-partners deals that were oh-so-popular in Cambridge when the Web was first minting millionaires.

Employing their complementing talents—Krohn the technical wizard, Yagan the businessman, Coyne the creative visionary—they launched TheSpark in the spring of their senior year. The youth-centric site was a grab bag of early Internet standards, including SparkNotes (knockoffs of the ubiquitous CliffsNotes) and random humorous articles. It also included what Krohn describes as a "very rudimentary" dating service, SparkMatch. Within a few weeks of SparkMatch's debut, Krohn says, pausing to take a bite of his crab cake and then smiling, "we had 100,000 people using it."

TheSpark's irreverence was big with the college set—in 2000 it was honored by Maxim magazine as a "Site of the Year"—and particularly among students in Boston. Less than a year after its birth, the trio sold the site to the Web community iTurf, which then flamed out as the Internet bubble burst. When that happened, SparkNotes, the site's most marketable asset, was sold to Barnes & Noble (which still peddles the print version in stores, much to the delight of layabout students everywhere). The rest of TheSpark was scrapped. "They knew we had all these other features, but they didn't care," Krohn says. "The dating part fell by the wayside." The guys took gigs with Barnes & Noble, but eventually realized they hadn't become Web entrepreneurs in order to work for a bookstore. The partners parted ways. End scene.

Five years ago, convinced they might have been on to something with SparkMatch, the trio decided to get the band back together. "The idea was to be extremely focused on dating and not worry about the other stuff," Krohn says. But dating sites aren't simple to get off the ground. As with all networking sites, their creators have to surmount the so-called cold-start problem: In order to get people to visit a dating site to find other people, you need a bunch of people already on the site for the finding. The solution available to Krohn, Yagan, and Coyne was a convenient one. They reached out to their old Spark fans, and, with minimal marketing spending, took the site live. Within a month, it had 100,000 users.