Scott Kurnit

American businessman (born 1954)

Scott P. Kurnit (born March 25, 1954) is an American entrepreneur and angel investor in media and technology.²

From Wikipedia’s article on Scott Kurnit (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Mar 25, 1954.¹

Companies

About.comFounder⁸
People Inc.Founder⁹

Career

Occupation: entrepreneur.⁵

Date not recordedFounded People Inc.³
Date not recordedFounded About.com⁴

Early career

After graduating from Hampshire College with a BA in Communications, Kurnit became a Program Director at WGBY-TV (WGBH) He was the youngest program director in the PBS system and served as program director for QUBE, the world's first fully interactive cable television system.

Showtime

He started the first pay-per-view cable network and co-led the team that implemented the first use of national caller ID. Subsequently, he was president of Showtime Event Television

Prodigy and MCI

Kurnit led the team that put the first web browser into an online service at the Prodigy network. Following Prodigy, Kurnit joined MCI to oversee MCI's attempts to grow its business in the Internet market.

About.com

Kurnit founded About.com and was CEO during its growth to a public market value of $1.5 billion.

About.com was acquired by PRIMEDIA in 2001, and later sold again to the New York Times Company in 2005. Kurnit left the CEO position in 2001 after the sale to Primedia. In 2002 a class action suit was brought against About.com, Primedia, (About's former owner) Kurnit and others. The court dismissed all claims against Kurnit from the suit in August 2007.

Keep Holdings

Kurnit founded AdKeeper.com in early 2010. He was the chairman & CEO of Keep Holdings.com, the parent company of Keep.com (which allowed keeping, discussion and sharing of favorite products), TheSwizzle.com (a product for managing commercial offers in user email boxes), and AdKeeper.com (a means by which users could save online advertisements for viewing at a time of their choosing).

Investor and advisor

Kurnit is either an investor or board member of Mashlogic, Brightcove, Goodmail, Dotomi, and OpenSky.