Robert Wuttke, Be2 CEO And Founder Interview
OPW INTERVIEW -- Dec 20 --
You’ll be hearing more about be2. They are a rising star in Europe and are launching in the USA. The company is founded and run by Robert Wuttke, PhD. He’s a regular attendee at the internet dating conferences in the USA and Europe. - Mark Brooks
What is your background and the founding story of be2?
I have a PhD in sociology and history. I did my studies in Germany and Italy and then spent a year at MIT
in Boston. I focused on sociology and have my first business experience
in the media industry with Bertelsmann AG and Lycos Europe. At that
time I became aware of the first internet dating products, which
fascinated me because online dating can bring together people who would
otherwise have had no chance to meet each other offline.
Congratulations on the round of funding you just received. What will you do with the 15 million Euro?
We
are going to focus on improving our service, which has always been our
priority. Then we’ll further expand our product into other countries.
But in particular we want to start penetrating the markets we’re in
now, serve those markets better and increasing our respective market
share.
Why do you think personality profiling works well for dating sites?
There
are different people with different needs on dating sites. One of the
needs is to find somebody for a long term relationship. Typically
people 25+ have put this focus much more up front. So for somebody, who
is looking for a long term relationship, it makes more sense to find
the compatible matches immediately instead of browsing through a
database and finding out later whether the person is a match or not.
In general, how do you think personality profiling on dating sites can be improved?
They
will get better not just by becoming more reliable in terms of
psychology but also through other things like the expression of
attitudes, preferences and interests with sophisticated algorithms,
rather than just simple questionnaires. There are a lot of things that
will be done over the next couple of years and I think we’re just
seeing the beginning of what is going to happen. What makes the be2
test very strong is that the number of questions is very elegantly
reduced. We don’t ask irrelevant questions and I think this is
something that users appreciate. We are going to improve the test even
more now.
I understand be2 has very aggressively
opened up in a number of countries, over 30 countries at this stage.
What are your lead countries at this stage?
We like the
Spanish speaking countries, but also are intrigued in what’s going on
in Europe overall and central Europe where we are less present at the
moment. But this is something that will also change over the next year
or so because we’re now going to use the funding to start penetrating
markets better. Right now you can say be2 does not have a single
location it would depend on in terms of revenues.
Are there any particular people that you would like to reach out to people in the next year or so?
I’m looking forward to continuing our dialogue with academics.
