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.