| Website | conru.com |
| Birthplace | Indiana |
| Birthdate | 2/3/68 |
| Stanford, Ph.D. | 1997 |
| Engineering/Design | |
| U. of Minnesota, MSME | 1991 |
| Mechanical Engineering | |
| Rose Hulman IT, BS | 1990 |
| Engineering / Economics |
As an early Internet entrepreneur, Andrew Conru is the inventor of online shopping carts, centralized ad banner serving, online dating/matchmaking, web visitor tracking and real-time site personalization software. Over the last 15 years, he started and ran almost 20 different Internet companies including the Friend Finder Network http://ffn.com (world’s largest personals network with more than 260 million members and $300M/year revenue), Dine.com (online restaurant reviews), and others including one of the first social networking sites, 3rd-party personal info verification service, free etests and ecard sites, online game sites, roommate and school alumni locators, spam-free email services, business networking sites, photo review sites, free homepage sites and remote customer service. These companies have employed over 1,500 people.
He also started the first Internet website development company (Internet Media Services - 1993), the first company to centralize Internet advertising (Focalink Communications/AdKnowledge - 1995, sold to Engage and CMGi in 2000), the first online personals site (WebPersonals.com - 1994), and the first commercial website personalization software company (W3, Inc - 1995). He enjoys finding new ways to use emerging technologies to solve real-world problems.
Currently, he lives in Seattle and Palo Alto and is working on a number of software-related projects. He is also active in local charity groups, angel investing, and business consulting.
| Company | Date | Round | Size | Participants |
| Compute | 2/05 | Grant | $5M | 1 |
