How did the site come about?

It's a bit of a long story … I had retired from being an actuary about five or so years ago, with the intent that I wasn't going to retire retire, but I was going to find another area to go into and focus on—something to do with the Internet. I played around with a few different site ideas, none of which are really important, and none of which made the final cut. My daughter knew that I was testing ideas, and one day two years ago she called me and said, "I have a great idea for a Web site—an online dating site for geeks."

And how did she come up with that?

I'm not sure, but it's funny how, when you see the right thing, it just hits you as, "Yeah, that makes sense." And that's what happened. I started working on it, and the more I got into it, the more I realized, "Hey, there is something here." When people found out, I got a lot of good e-mails, saying, "Hey, that's a great idea; thanks for the site." And then I started to get e-mails that said, "Hey, I met somebody."

How long has the site been around?

I started working on it about two years ago. It's gone through different phases—I took it about as far as I could on my own, which was about five months into it. To have a really professional site, you have to have a professional site designer. So I took it to American Eagle in Park Ridge, Ill., and they improved upon the mess that I had created. I just don't have any artistic qualities. Fixing the design was the first thing. We started to make it into a really effective-working site, to something that I'm very proud of today. It really does a good job of matching. There's where I took my actuarial expertise and made it into something that I think is quite unique.

You've probably heard of match.com, eHarmony, etc. They were developed for average kinds of people and they ask average kinds of questions, such as "What do you like to do on your first date?" which is fine, but I felt like gk2gk.com, which was my first site, would want to ask questions, such as 'What kind of games do you like to play?' 'What computer systems are you into?'

Of course, not every geek does every one of these things, but I would find six or seven different areas in which every geek would have at least one of those things in common—fiction, the kinds of movies they like, those sorts of things. Then I asked people to rank the three most important criteria for a match. Not just the categories I mentioned, but things like ethnicity, age, location, etc. I developed a way of scoring it, based on what geeks in general feel are the most important criteria, and finally, for the individual I put an additional weighting in for their matches based on their own most important criteria. So it really does a good job of scoring and trying to put the most likely matches for our particular audience. It took a little bit of a numerical analysis and a little bit of playing around with the data to determine how to develop the scoring.

How long did it take you?

I just finished that about two months ago, and I started working on it about four or five months before that, so it took a while. It's not as complex a calculation as you might get for a mortality table, but it does take a numerical thought process to accomplish that.

And the other area where actuarial skills come into play is determining how long the people stay as members, which is kind of like the persistency tables that actuaries do for life and health insurance.

Where did you work before you retired?

I started out in 1961 at CNA—it was Continental Assurance at that time and after about five years, I went to Combined Insurance, which now is AON Corporation. I became the chief actuarial officer there. In 1988 I left and started my own consulting firm, which I ran until the year 2000.

Why did you decide to become an actuary?

I kind of fell into it. It was the summer of 1961, and a friend of my brother's worked at Continental Assurance Co. in the actuarial department and they were hiring people for the summer. They hired me, I took the first exam that following November, and I passed it! I just happened to have the right skills for the work I was doing. I think, as an actuary, you either have the right skills or you don't. If you do, it can be a wonderful field, and it was. I have to tell you I enjoyed every moment of my career fully. I never thought, "Oh man, I dread going to work today." I like to solve problems, and actuarial work is basically doing that.

And the site solves another problem.

Right. It was another challenge. Here's one example: How do you take care of a guy looking for another guy? You don't want to show him matches of girls, which we made the mistake of doing at first. We had to figure out how to solve those sorts of things.

Are you involved with the site day-to-day now?

I'm fully involved with the site. Other than the technical design and the programming, I do almost every other duty on the site to this day.

How much of your time does it take?

It doesn't take a lot of time, maybe an hour or two a day. Some days it takes virtually no time, and some days I take off. Every profile that somebody enters I have to read to make sure that it's not offensive, or phony. So that's what really takes the time.

It's probably really interesting, too.

It is. Some of the profiles are pretty funny. In fact, I've been thinking of doing a collection of the funniest ones and writing a book about profiles of geeks. I think it would be an interesting book.

How many people would you say are on the site?

We have about 20,000 profiles. Match.com claims to have 6 million profiles. Frankly, I'm not sure I believe them, but maybe 6 million people have looked at the site somewhere along the way.

Aside from a possible book, what else is on the horizon for you?

The next site, which is already up, is for seniors, actually persons over age 50. It's called Senior 2 Senior at sr2sr.com, so that keeps me busy. It has the same qualities, but the questions are different, like, 'Where do you like to go on vacation?' 'What kind of sports to you like to play?' We tailored it for the senior market. That's up now and we're starting to publicize that.

I also have two more sites currently in mind. Once those are up and I'm collecting enough in fees, I'm going to use some of those funds (these all are pay sites—in order to send messages you have to pay) to do a site for disabled people. That will be a free site. My overall strategy is to have different sites for what I call hard-to-place people. I've got other ideas like smokers, different ethnicities, perhaps–things for people that don't fit the mainstream of match.com again. It keeps me occupied; it's fun. I'm not yet recouping my investment dollars, but that's ok. The other good thing about being an actuary is it's pretty well-paid, which allowed me to retire at age 60 and do this.

Do you have any employees currently, or is it a one-man show?

My daughter helps me out with some things. She writes the advice column. You might be interested to know that my wife is an actuary. She's retired also.

Dating is very difficult from all perspectives, even making the first phone call, or asking somebody out in the first place and then knowing how to act on the date. It just seemed like a good thing to help people. I get lots of nice letters from people who say, "Thanks for putting up the site; I've met somebody." There has been at least one actual marriage that I know of and two others who have said they are going to get married. That's nice. It's the kind of thing where you say, "Hey, what I did resulted in several marriages."