Fran Maier helped build Match.com in the 1990s and now helms BabyQuip. (Credit: Courtesy of Fran Maier)
Match.com Co-Founder Reflects on Sexism, Dating Apps and a Career in Tech
Now running BabyQuip, Fran Maier is busy as ever, but takes time to counsel other women entrepreneurs and help close a stubborn gender gap in VC funding.
The year was 1994. “Friends” had just premiered, Bill Clinton was still president, and online dating – if it happened at all – was a sketchy, skewed and dubious-at-best proposition. A startup called Match.com was trying to persuade the romantically inclined that the World Wide Web (as it was then known) was a hot spot to meet potential mates, better than back-of-magazine personal ads. With not enough women signing up to create profiles, Gary Kremen, one of Match.com’s male co-founders, brought on Fran Maier to make the profile questionnaire – well, one that women would actually want to fill out.
The first thing Maier, a Stanford MBA with a background in marketing, decided to nix was an ill-conceived question thought up by the men, which asked women to reveal their weight. Three decades later, Maier still shakes her head about that one. “Have you ever done any online dating? Have you ever had to put in your weight, in pounds!?” she asks. “That’s because of me.” Instead, she gave women options like “slim” or “athletic” or “tall” – more palatable descriptors, and ones that kept the focus on connection, not just physical appearance. Within a few years – thanks to Maier’s female perspective, good timing and changing norms – Match took off.
Today, Maier is looking back at her years in the tech industry, with some pride but also regrets and a tinge of irritation at continued sexism. She now serves as co-founder and CEO of BabyQuip, a baby gear rental platform with over $5 million in net revenue – and jokes that she’s gone from “marriage to carriage.” She’s also built several other companies, including Women.com, BlueLight and TrustArc, and mentors female founders via How Women Invest, an early-stage venture fund focused on women.
But back to Match – and an experience that still stings. By 1998, Kremen had departed and Maier was running the startup. Needing to raise cash, and pressured by the company’s board, Maier says she sold Match too soon and for far too little – less than $8 million. “I knew almost immediately, I made a mistake there,” she says. That was confirmed a year later, when Match was sold again, this time for $70 million to what would later become IAC. “Through all that, I got a couple hundred thousand dollars, which isn’t nothing, but come on, look at the valuation,” she says. Match Group, which now owns Match.com and other dating sites, posted $3.3 billion in revenue in 2023. “It still hurts.”
Maier, who spent her early years in San Francisco but now lives in New Mexico, recently posted about the Match experience on LinkedIn. At 62, she’s been sharing her story as a cautionary tale for other women. Rather than sell Match, “I should have put together the investment group and led it,” she told The Story Exchange. “Why didn’t I? One thing, honestly, is I’m a woman, and nobody suggested I could do this. I think if I were a guy, somebody would have.” Back in the late ’90s, she remembers being “beat up and tired,” with two small children at home and not much confidence in the tank. “Looking back at the time, there wasn’t a lot of support for entrepreneurs in general, but certainly not for female entrepreneurs,” she says, let alone women in tech.
These days, the environment for female founders has improved, thanks to women-focused accelerator programs, business incubators and networking programs. Yet at the same time, a frustrating gender gap remains when it comes to access to capital, particularly venture capital funding. “It’s still really, really hard to raise money,” Maier says. “The stats for women are depressingly low.”
Only 2.4% of VC funding goes to all-female founders, a figure that has remained stubbornly consistent for three straight decades, according to Harvard research. And Maier worries that AI — still a hot investment area — is even more of a boys’ club, with record rounds going to all-male startups. “There’s no reason, other than massive bias,” Maier says. Even if women got 20% of VC funding, it would still be “massive bias.” She draws some comparison to Election 2024. “Many people are sitting here thinking …how could it be this close? It comes down to racism and misogyny.”
As a mentor, Maier advises women entrepreneurs to have more confidence and believe in their chances of success – even if no one else does. “Usually, when they start companies, they really do know their market. They do know what they’re trying to do. They do know what the problem is they’re trying to solve.”
But from a tactical standpoint, especially when pitching, women still need to make their case more, she says, as disheartening as that is. “They have to put their qualifications up front in a deck, not in the fifth or sixth or eighth page, because otherwise, especially when you’re pitching to men, they’re going to wonder, ‘Who are you, that you think you can do this?'” she says. “It still goes on.”
What could change the funding landscape is simple, she adds. “We need a lot more richer women,” she says. “We need wealthy women to know that investing … is a reasonable thing to do with part of your portfolio, and you can have some impact.”
For her part, Maier is already steering herself in that direction. She remains at the helm of BabyQuip, which has raised more than $12 million, because she believes the startup is well-positioned at a time when millennials, who grew up renting everything from ball gowns through Rent The Runway and spare bedrooms via AirBNB, are open to the notion of renting baby gear when they travel. The company also relies on a network of over 2,000 independent providers – most of whom are women – to stock, rent, clean and deliver baby gear in various cities around the U.S. and a few other countries.
“I’m in it for the win,” Maier says. “I think BabyQuip is going to be big for me, so I’m motivated by that.”
And lastly … if a movie is ever made about the start of dating apps, “I’ve decided I want Aubrey Plaza to play me,” she says with a laugh, before turning serious. Throughout her career, especially working in tech, “there are times that I felt like I wasn’t taken as seriously …. it’s a litany of small microaggressions and being underestimated.”
But she’s happy with how it’s turned out. “I’m lucky,” she says. “It’s been good.” ◼️