Confessions of matchmaker Thomas Enraght-Moony

Andrew Davidson Interview - The Sunday Times 9th March 2008

Thomas Enraght-Moony is boss of Match.com, the world’s biggest internet dating agency. Backed by a surge in use from the divorced overfifties, he offers happiness for all. Can he deliver?

THE WORLD is full of lonely people, but don’t despair. Thomas Enraght-Moony is here.

“My goal is to take internet dating into the mainstream,” he grins. “It should be the main way of meeting people. It’s better than going down the pub, having a few pints and hoping to bump into someone, isn’t it?”

He has a point, but he also has a vested interest. Enraght-Moony, a geek Cupid who looks too fresh-faced to advise anyone on love, heads a business that is galloping away.

Match.com, American-owned and based in Dallas, operates in 37 countries and is already the world’s biggest internet dating agency. In Britain it is about to get bigger still with a deal to run dating sites for The Sun and News of the World. You can’t get more mainstream than that.

“One of the interesting things about the UK is that newspaper dating sites are much more powerful than elsewhere,” says Enraght-Moony, sitting in the London offices of his UK chief. Short, skinny and smartly suited, he drawls the word “dating” with a transatlantic twang one notch east of Woody Allen.

In fact, Enraght-Moony, just 36, is a mongrel hotshot. South African by birth, with Irish roots, he followed a British university and French business school with an American tech career, and is now rising fast in the IAC internet empire headed by Barry Diller, former boss of Paramount and Fox.

IAC owns Match, and a gaggle of other online firms, including Ask.com and Evite. Last year Match made a $78m profit on revenues of $349m, of which 30% came from outside America. Many expect it to be a billion dollar business by 2012.

Enraght-Moony’s job is to push the firm, already growing revenues at 17% a year, to fulfil that potential. Hence last week’s flying visit to London.

“There are 93m single people in America – only 3m use online dating services. There are 12m single people in Britain. That’s set to rise to 16m by 2011. Almost everyone who could use these services, doesn’t. Our task is to get them off the fence.”

So if you haven’t used his services, you might yet. Once the preserve of the young and tech-savvy, internet dating sites now carry heavy traffic from the growing number of divorced overfifties.

And they have a lot to choose from. Match was founded in 1995 and has a near 50/50 gender split among users, but hundreds of competing sites have followed, many of them free to use. None, however, operates on the same global scale. Few are as good at making money.

“You can register for free, create your own profile with photos, but when you want to communicate you have to pay,” says Enraght-Moony. A six-month subscription in Britain costs £65.25.

The money invested gives you an assurance of quality control. Entries are overseen, scam-artists weeded out. “We have a zero-tolerance policy,” says Enraght-Moony. Anyone can browse the site, pulling out abridged profiles by locality, for free. The rest carries costs.

And for its managers, the meet-market world packs an emotional punch beyond mere business. A quick trawl of online links garners some angry complainers, who say they never found what was promised, or were hit on by predators. Not for nothing is Match nicknamed Snatch.com by some American males.

Enraght-Moony, who trained as a computer programmer before entering management, promises that every complaint is investigated. “If it’s upheld, you are out.”

Most customers have positive experiences, he says. “You are applying technology to one of the most important decisions people can make, and it’s such a great fit. We get photos of babies and wedding invitations. Wow! I just got one from a couple in Florida who would never have met without us. And yeah, I am going.”

But isn’t a happy customer by definition a lost customer? He laughs. “No, it’s the best thing that can happen. They tell their friends. When a couple marry through Match, you can guarantee what the bridesmaids will be doing the next day.”

So who are core users? Men and women aged 28-45, but the overfifties are gaining fast. “If you’re divorced in your fifties, and everyone you know is connected to who you were married to, you want to expand possibilities, and meet new people.

“We’re also getting kids putting their parents on, saying ‘Mum, you can do it. Just try it.’ As soon as they do, they find it works.”

Couldn’t they use free sites like Facebook and MySpace? No, says Enraght-Moony. “They are great for keeping in touch with people you know, but to meet new people you turn to a brand like Match.”

In Britain, where Match runs blokeish television commercials featuring Cupid and Fate, the market is growing fast. “The British are reserved. What the advertising says is, you need to be pro-active. People take a look, see the great quality people on the site, and that gets them over the next hurdle.”

The tabloid deal with The Sun and News of the World - owned ultimately by News Corporation, which also owns The Sunday Times - may bring Match a whole new demographic. Enraght-Moony is cautious.

“We work with a host of people - MSN and Yahoo in this country - business development takes time.”

It also reflects local preferences. Despite being a global internet business, Match needs people on the ground where it operates, as love comes with cultural quirks. Hence in France, women use the service for free. In Germany, men can subsidise women subscribers. In Japan, users want verification of bloodtype and income.

“To them, love is a temporary disease - why make an important decision on the basis of a temporary aberration? Marriage is different, it’s a contract between two families, combining ancestors and people not yet born,” he says.

Four years ago Enraght-Moony was running online sales for AT&T Wireless, America’s biggest mobile-phone service. You can only imagine how different this job must be.

“Yeah, but being in a big company made me realise it’s not what I wanted to do. When AT&T merged with Cingular Wireless in 2004, they said it would only take them three years to build a fantastic new network. With the speed the internet is moving, you can’t sit around waiting for that.” Enraght-Moony is used to living on the hoof. Born in South Africa, the eldest son in a medical family, he was brought to Britain in 1986 with his three siblings to escape apartheid-era conscription.

By the early 1990s he was at Glasgow University, researching his history degree on the first PCs. “I was blown away,” he says. He joined Andersen Consulting to be a computer programmer, working with Shell, Barclay-card and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

He retrained again at Insead business school to get into management. He married an American - they met at Andersen - and in 2000 followed her work at Goldman Sachs to San Francisco, just before the tech stock crash.

“We bought our house the week after the Nasdaq bombed. I know that because someone else bought it the week before.”

He started at online broker Etrade, moved to a software start-up, then AT&T Wireless in Seattle, following his former Etrade boss Jim Safka. When Safka became chief executive of Match in 2004, Enraght-Moony went, too. He took the top slot last year.

Safka calls Enraght-Moony a get-it-done guy. “You want something moved A to B, ask Thomas. You sleep easy. He’s worked through all sides of business.”

The current Match boss says they had complementary styles. “Jim was gut-feel, I was numbers. Now I have a great guy running Match in America who is the opposite of me.” Safka went on to head Ask.com.

Enraght-Moony clearly loves that jump-around speed of new technology. His UK chief, Jason Stockwood, cites his boss’s “sheer passion for the power of the web”.

Within Diller’s IAC, says Enraght-Moony, that’s harnessed with an informal but results-driven ethos. “IAC has scale and resources to bring to bear on a problem,” says the Match boss, “but also a culture of leaving operators alone and judging them on results. That’s exactly what I want.”

And what is the input of Diller, the veteran media dealmaker? “Barry has a real understanding of the consumer. We talk every week. If you go to him with a problem, he always has another way to tackle it.”

IAC is promising to intensify that focus by spinning off subsidiaries Ticketmaster, Interval, Lending Tree and HSN (Home Shopping Network) into separately quoted vehicles. Match will then be left with the 30 small to medium-sized firms inside IAC. That could increase its firepower.

But Enraght-Moony is cagey about possible acquisitions. Chased by different competitors in different markets – Dating Direct in Britain, eHarmony in America – there are other priorities. “We’ve got a terrific brand; we are growing fast; we are in the markets we want to be; we have a ton to do.”

Currently, he says, they are rolling out a higher-end option called Chemistry, based on research commissioned from an acclaimed academic anthropologist. Clients fill out a detailed character questionnaire and are matched with suitable partners.

And if that all prospers, will he be off up the IAC ladder into the arms of another?

Too late. A head has popped round the door. “Barry needs to talk to you right now.”

Enraght-Moony stands up. “Clear a meeting room for the call,” he says, before turning to me apologetically. It’s all right, I have my answer. Diller on line one. Got to go.

THOMAS ENRAGHT-MOONY’S WORKING DAY

THE Match.com chief executive wakes before 6am at his home in University Park, north Dallas, and drives a mile to his local gym to work out. Later Thomas Enraght-Moony drops his children at preschool and is at his desk in the Match.com office before 9am.

“I check sales, look at what customers are telling us, listen in to calls, visit competitor sites, see if anything new is going on.”

He has eight executives reporting direct to him, many running regions round the world. He talks to Europe in the morning, Asia in the afternoon. “My day finishes late. I don’t get home to bath the boys as often as I’d like.”

VITAL STATISTICS

Born:September 13, 1971

Marital status:married with two sons

School:Rugby

University:Glasgow

First job:computer programmer at Andersen Consulting

Salary:undisclosed

Home:Dallas

Car:white Toyota Prius

Favourite book:The Cook’s Illustrated Guide to Grilling and Barbecue

Favourite music:Bach

Favourite film:‘I don’t watch films’

Favourite gadget:Bialetti Mukka Express Cappuccino Maker

Last holiday:skiing in Utah

DOWNTIME

“WITH two small boys aged three and five, I don’t get much time to relax,” says Thomas Enraght-Moony. But at weekends he likes to have a barbecue. “Coming from a South African background, and moving to Texas, if you’ve seen it, I’ve barbecued it,” he says. He uses the smallest barbecue he could buy in Dallas, but it is still bigger than a dining table. “There’s a debate between charcoal and gas. I like gas for convenience.”

Having worked in San Francisco and Seattle, he finds Dallas a different experience. “I drive a Prius, and for a while, people would stop and ask, why would you do that?”