Stephan Paternot is an IT entrepreneur, known as a co-founder of theGlobe.com, the internet’s first social network, during the late nineties dot-com bubble. He is currently the CEO of Slated, an online crowdsourcing marketplace for film financing, sales, packaging and development.
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.
Stephan Paternot Biography
In 1994, while a junior at Cornell University, Paternot co-founded the first Internet social network site, theglobe.com. The company’s IPO made history when it posted the largest first day gain of any IPO with a 606% increase in price. Early in his tenure, Paternot became known in popular media as “the CEO in the plastic pants” after he was filmed in a nightclub saying “Got the girl. Got the money. Now I’m ready to live a disgusting, frivolous life.” theGlobe.com’s stock price collapsed in 1999 as a result of the dot-com bubble and in 2001 Paternot published A Very Public Offering: A Rebel’s Story of Business Success, Excess, and Reckoning which covered his biography and the history of theGlobe.com
In 2011, Paternot co-founded Slated, a crowdfunding and development website for film projects.
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.
