Harry
Tahiliani
Zencon
Harry Tahiliani is a visionary entrepreneurial business builder with nearly two decades of successful business start-ups to his credit.In 1994, Mr. Tahiliani helped launch a breakthrough herbal health and nutrition company.
In addition to helping others lead a healthier life though its exceptional product line, the company
provided an excellent opportunity for like-minded entrepreneurs to establish their own home-based
businesses modeled on the success of the parent company.However, Mr. Tahiliani’s greatest passion has
always been technology. In the mid-1990s, one of the most in-demand high-tech consumer products was
affordable access to the World Wide Web. Mr. Tahiliani saw the opportunity to provide reliable Internet
service to consumers at affordable rates and in 1997 founded the Netgenie, a subscriber-based dial-up
Internet Service Provider.During the 1990's tech mania, investors poured millions of dollars into tech
companies based on little more that a promising idea.
Determined to succeed in the expanding ISP market but lacking the investment capital of many rival
startups, Harry Tahiliani started NETGENIE on a shoe string budget. His entrepreneurial skills helped
him quickly build a sizable subscriber base in North America, putting him in direct competition with
much larger and more well-funded tech giants in the ISP space. In 1998 NETGENIE was changed to IFREEDOM
and Mr. Tahiliani, along with just a handful of programmers had accomplished the seemingly impossible:
the company had attracted more than 350,000 customers across Canada and the USA in a little over a year,
starting with virtually nothing. With a small team and no outside capital, IFREEDOM was able to
successfully compete for market share with some of the largest dial up service providers of the time,
including AT&T Worldnet, Mindspring and EarthLink. After establishing a sustainable ISP business
model, Mr. Tahiliani sold IFREEDOM to a former competitor in 2000.With the Internet continuing to expand
exponentially, Mr. Tahiliani looked to the web for his next successful business venture.
In 2002, Harry Tahiliani founded the ZENCON TECHNOLOGIES, a collection of 27 carefully-targeted niche
DATING websites which included BlackPeopleMeet.com, SingleParentMeet.com and LoveAndSeek. ZENCON
steadily built up it’s web presence, with growing stream of visitors to its online portals. ZENCON
became so successful that by 2007, the combined traffic of its sites ranked ZENCON the #4 most visited
online dating site in the world. In fact, just one of ZENCON’s sites, BlackPeopleMeet.com, alone had
more visitors than Oprah.com and BET.com combined.In 2007, ZENCON was sold to American
Capital, an S&P 500 firm (NASDAQ ACAS). ZENCON’s name was changed to PeopleMedia.com, and was re-sold in 2009 to Match.com. See related
Press Release.