Andrew Conru “wears two hats,” as he likes to call them—one as a programmer and the other as a businessman. Admittedly, 10 years ago, he would have liked to build search engines instead of writing software. Thankfully, he invested his time developing his software-writing skills and brought to fruition a social networking empire that started with FriendFinder.

Now merged under Various, Inc., the 27 sites in the FriendFinder network is just the tip of the iceberg for this entrepreneur turned executive. With a virtual presence that’s comparable to MySpace.com and the increasingly popular YouTube.com, one can only marvel at what the power of ideas (and a lot of perspiration) can do.

SexHerald: All of your degrees (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Ph.D.) are on engineering and economics, mechanical engineering, and mechanical engineering design, respectively. You’ve founded online companies, most notably FriendFinder.com and its affiliates, which are all Web-based companies. What made you interested in building online businesses, or virtual empires, as opposed to corporeal companies, like say a mail delivery business?

Andrew Conru: The key thing is the immediate satisfaction of being able to put up a webpage so people can use it. The other part was that just as the companies that were starting up back in Stanford, I didn’t have a lot of capital. I had to do something using only my talents, which was the ability to put up a webpage. And, that’s how the early stage started. And then we found out we were pretty good at doing it.

SH: You mentioned you had to rely on your talents. What do you think your talents are?

Conru: I’ve been programming since I was 11. It’s been 28 years now I’ve been writing software. I was always coming up with something, and that was part of the key thing you needed to build a website—the ability to write software. While I do have engineering degrees, most of my work has actually been used in computers to solve engineering problems.

SH: Most of the websites you built are based on networking. Why did you choose to build such sites?

Conru: I was always excited about making a site which the user of the site contributed to the content of the site. My first site that I created was Dine.com, which is a restaurant review site. It was the first site on the Internet which people were able to post reviews about something and it would aggravate them so that I could figure out where the best restaurants were in my area. That was apparently a moment of clarity when I realized I’m not going to be the one writing content all day long, because, as you know as a writer, it takes a lot of time and effort. I said, ‘It’s much better to harness the power of people coming to my website to build something interesting.’

SH: When FriendFinder.com launched in 1996, it exploded onto the scene and expanded in a relatively short amount of time. Then AdultFriendFinder.com followed closely on its heels. Was that a natural progression? It sort of mimics human courtship rituals: Strangers meet, get to know each other, then have sex. Was that done intentionally?

Conru: FriendFinder, which was my second dating site—the first one was in ’93—when I first started FriendFinder, we were just going to make it almost all types of relationships that were considered more mainstream relationships. But we found early on that people were uploading more risqué profiles and instead of deleting them I said, ‘Well we’ll just create another copy of the site and call it AdultFriendFinder.’ That happened pretty quickly; within a few months, that site was as big as FriendFinder was.

SH: What do you think attributed to your sites’ success as opposed to others, like Friendster.com, that gained in popularity but couldn’t quite match the momentum you’ve reached?

Conru: First, I’ll say there are a lot of social networking mainstream sites that have been successfully built, like MySpace for example. There is a part where, say, 10 percent of the population that really loves new things and will try new things but will get bored with it. They go, ‘Okay’ and go somewhere else. But what makes a site stay alive, and makes it grow legs so to speak, is to have better content, better people and better services for its users throughout its life span. On our sites, we change 40 things a week. So we have 40 different products going live every week, which keeps the sites fresh. We also have great people involved with the company and affiliates.

In general, companies that do well provide optimal service to their users. If you provide a good service, your members will respond to it. There’s another thing that happens when a website reaches critical mass. One of the things that enabled us to pay out our affiliates a lot more than any other competitors is that we have 10 times as many members and a very vibrant community beyond simply the dating part.

SH: You do retain a lot of members but on the cultural-specific sites, like IndianFriendFinder.com or JewishFriendFinder.com, people are looking for long-term companions. Once they find their partner(s), wouldn’t that be bad for business?

Conru: There’s always an influx of new single people in the world. There’s always going to be new people to help find someone special in their life. And that’s kind of our top-level mission for the company.

We have about 20 different verticals that cater to a target audience. We always have new verticals that we’re working on. We have a pretty good base but there’s always more interesting ones that we might do in the future.

SH: Such as?

Conru: For example, we just rolled out a site called iCams, which is a webcam social networking site; basically, a social networking site with live webcam video. On that site, people meet each other through webcams; also, they share blogs and posts and the key part is that they have live webcams as a way to meet each other.

SH: How many people are on your staff?

Conru: We have about 100 developers; a little over 300 altogether doing customer service, billing, marketing. And we have over 50 programmers.

SH: How do you manage your staff?

Conru: Well, we sure don’t get a lot of sleep. We have really great managers who organize products and projects. We have a great team.

SH: If you had all the time in the world, what would you be doing?

Conru: That would depend on what time it was. If it was 10 years ago, I’d build search engines. As far as what more I’d develop today if I had more developers—to summarize, we have over 1,000 projects that are prioritized in our development queue. The only thing that holds them back is having enough developers to make it happen. That’s why we have an ongoing and growing development department, because we have so many ideas in queue.

SH: Newspapers, like the New York Times, have commented about the adult entertainment industry being at the forefront of technology. Being a technologist, how important do you think the adult industry is in disseminating new technology and making it popular?

Conru: I think in the early days, in the mid-90s—video on demand, for example—the adult industry was more innovative relative to the rest of the Internet than it is perhaps today. Today, you have lots of innovation coming from all parts of the Internet. I think mainstream is kind of caught up with the innovative part of the Internet. So, adult websites are just one component of innovation on the Internet. There are a lot of mainstream companies that are highly innovative now.

SH: When you say “highly innovative,” what do you think is the next big thing? Right now, companies are debating whether to make their devices compatible with HD or Blu-ray. What do you think will win?

Conru: Things happen in spurts when it comes to innovation. When the telephone came on it was extremely revolutionary, even more revolutionary than even the Internet was. However, it’s now 100 years later, aside from cell phones, there hasn’t really been that many groundbreaking fundamental changes of how we use the phone. Likewise on the Internet, yes we’ve had a really great run for the last 10 years of some really huge innovations; however, I think going forward is going to be much more incremental or evolutionary. We’re not going to see huge like, ‘We’ve never thought of this idea.’ They’re just going to be refinements of interesting things we have today.

SH: Would you call yourself a Mac user or a PC user?

Conru: For a long time, I was a Linux user. I can safely say I’m a Linux user at heart. I have a PC on my desk but on all the Web servers we use a software called Linux, which is UNIX. I come from the university side so I was always working with UNIX computers as opposed to PCs.

SH: What is your average day like after you get up in the morning? You go hiking…

Conru: The last three years, my habit’s been I get up fairly late, like 9ish or so. I check the emails and stats in the morning. Then I go walk the dog—I have a Labrador. We go on the trails around the house—that takes about a half hour to an hour. Then check the sites a little bit more, do some emails and IMs till about noon. Then I go into the office until about 6 o’clock. And then at night, about 9ish or so, I’ll write some software until maybe about 1 o’clock. Then I’ll go to bed.

SH: You don’t watch any TV?

Conru: Oh, I’ll have a TV on here and there. I should say that’s a heavy day. A lot of times, I might watch 24 or something before I head off.

SH: Do you ever TiVo it?

Conru: Oh, yeah. TiVo saves my day.

SH: On your personal website, it says you enjoy movies and hiking with your dog, as you already mentioned, and road trips. But there’s no mention of a significant other. Are you currently seeing anyone or perhaps married?

Conru:Well, I recently got out of a relationship and I’m in the process of using my sites in meeting a lot of people.

SH: Based on your firsthand experience of using your own sites, do you find them effective?

Conru: Oh, yeah. I wouldn’t be running a company that I didn’t believe in myself. I’ve met a lot of wonderful people on the site. I am kept busy while I’m not doing development and I’m out meeting people. It’s definitely been a good experience for me.

Being a member of a site definitely gives me an advantage over other companies in that I uniquely understand—at least, I have firsthand knowledge of the good and bad.

SH: On your website, it also says you grew up on a small farm in Indiana where you learned the value of hard work and patience. What was it like growing up on a farm?

Conru: It’s where my work ethic came out. My parents were both hardworking workers and at the same time they were working on this smaller farm. If you want something done, you gotta get up and do it. That was kind of the attitude that entered into the company and in everything that I do.

SH: So, did you get up when the rooster crowed?

Conru: My mother got up before the rooster, so that’s how we got up. We call it the ‘crack of dawn.’ My parents are early risers. As you can tell by my history now, I have a hard time going back home.

SH: You did your undergraduate work in Indiana, your Master’s in Minnesota and your Ph.D in California. Any particular reason you chose those states?

Conru: Being in the Midwest was convenient. But after a year of freezing my butt in Minnesota, the sunny weather in California really beckoned.

SH: And that’s where you stayed.

Conru: Yeah, California is like flypaper—once you come out here, you get stuck and you can’t leave.

SH: What great things can we expect from you in the future?

Conru: There are so many opportunities. You’re talking to somebody who has ideas all the time. I hope as long as I can breathe and have a group of people to work on interesting projects… we try to release a new site every few months. We’re always in the assembly line process of coming out with new interesting ideas that map… provide services for other people. Wait and see; we have plenty of things in the pipeline.

SH: Do you think you’ll ever run out of ideas?

Conru: When I run out of ideas, I’ll either die or retire. Hopefully, not on the same day; hopefully, pigs will fly in those days, too. I think entrepreneurism is in my DNA. If and when I ever stop doing day-to-day activities and copyright FriendFinder, I know I’ll probably be more involved with VCs and mentoring other people who are in the same process.