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30 Million Names and Growing... Classmates.com

Techstination feature for Monday, June 3, 2002

30 million names and growing. Bloomberg Boot Camp, a report on today's technology. Classmates.com is a Web site that helps people re-connect... .for a price. You can sign up to be listed for free at Classmates.com, but if you want access to email addresses and detailed information about your old school mates... you have to pay 36 dollars a year. At the heart of the growth... says CEO Michael Schutzler, are all those people trying to find long lost boyfriends and girlfriends...

"And girlfriends... and then in the last two years we've moved rather dramatically over into military buddies and now, most recently, we have launched our workplace directory which allows people to re-connect with folks that they used to work with."

Schutzler says that is proving to be even more popular than finding old classmates. About two million people are now paying members of the site... which Schutzler says is profitable. And while the company is private... it doesn't rule out the possibility of going public...

"At the moment, there really isn't an IPO market so it's kind of difficult to go public at this time but we're always looking for new growth financing because we have lots of opportunities to expand into other areas, including internationally. So there's lots of great things for us to do over the next five to ten years."

And while Classmates has amassed a huge database of 30 million names with valuable demographic data...

"Just because we have a database doesn't we would actually sell the database if you will, or rent it."

Classmates.com CEO Michael Schutzler. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.