What is Stephan Paternot's Net Worth?
Stephan Paternot is a Swiss-American entrepreneur who has a net worth of $10 million. Stephan Paternot is best known as the co-founder of the Internet's first social network, theGlobe.com. The company went public in late 1998, posting the largest first-day gain of any IPO in history at the time, but saw its stock price collapse the following year in the dot-com bubble burst. Paternot's stake went from being worth over $100 million to practically nothing. It has since been absorbed into a larger company, and no longer makes any money.
Paternot later co-founded and became the CEO of the online crowdsourcing marketplace Slated. He also served as a member of Advisory Board at IC Compliance LLC, a member of the Advisors Board at LendingClub Corporation, on the Board of the Heineman Foundation, on the Board of the Heineman-Stiftung Foundation, and on the Board of the Independent Filmmaker Project IFP.org. He is also the founder of Actarus Funds which provides venture capital for emerging tech companies.
It should also be noted that Stephan Paternot's family is extremely wealthy. His great grand-father founded Nestle and his father is a private equity investor who also served as the CEO for many years for one of the largest temp agencies in Europe.
Early Life and Education
Stephan Paternot was born on March 21, 1974 in San Francisco, California. For his higher education, he attended Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
theGlobe.com
While attending Cornell University, Paternot and fellow student Todd Krizelman became fascinated by a primitive chatline on the university's computer network. Seeing business potential in the service, they raised around $15,000 and bought an Apple Internet Server. Paternot and Krizelman subsequently founded the programming company WebGenesis, which they used to program what would become the website theGloble.com. The first social network on the Internet, theGlobe.com went live on the first of April in 1995, attracting over 44,000 visits within a month. As the site's popularity grew and the Internet became an increasingly hot commodity, Paternot and Krizelman were able to secure $20 million in financing through Dancing Bear Investments in 1997. The next year, in November, the pair took theGlobe.com public, and made headlines when the company posted the largest first-day gain of any IPO in history up to that point, with a 606% increase over the initial share price. As a result, the company reached a market capitalization of over $840 million, making its founders worth around $100 million each. Afterward, theGlobe.com expanded into gaming, purchasing Computer Games magazine and some gaming sites.
Getty
With Paternot's sudden success came a great deal of scrutiny and derision. In 1999, he was filmed during a night on the town dancing on a table at a posh Manhattan night club with his girlfriend. Clad in vinyl pants, Paternot was recorded saying: "Got the girl. Got the money. Now I'm ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life." Consequently, he became a prominent symbol of the hedonism of dot-com millionaires, and was dubbed "the CEO in the plastic pants." Not long after that, theGlobe.com became a victim of changing trends in the economy, and saw its share price drop from a high of $97 to less than 10 cents. Amid the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Paternot and Krizelman were forced out of the company. Taken over by a former vice president of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, theGlobe.com eventually closed its flagship site, and in 2001 laid off half of its employees. Paternot went on to publish the book "A Very Public Offering: A Rebel's Story of Business Success, Excess, and Reckoning," which covers his biography and the rise and fall of theGlobe.com.
Slated
In 2011, Paternot co-founded the online crowdsourcing marketplace Slated, which is used primarily for film financing, sales, and packaging and development. He serves as CEO of the company.
Valley of the Boom
In 2019, Paternot was one of the subjects of the six-episode limited television series "Valley of the Boom," about the dot-com boom and the eventual bubble burst. In the series, Paternot was portrayed by Dakota Shapiro, while his business partner Krizelman was portrayed by Oliver Cooper.
Personal Life
During the peak of his fame in the late 1990s, Paternot dated model Jennifer Medley.
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