BENJAMIN COHEN

http://www.jewish.co.uk/

Country of Residence: UK

Networth: $2.1 million

Benjamin Cohen, 28, is a founder of JewishNet.co.uk, with kosher recipes and a cyber rabbi, but his real money-maker is a search engine for porn sites.

Benjamin founded JewishNet.co.uk while off school with ME. Although JewishNet was valued at £5m at one point, he eventually sold it to another Jewish portal, TotallyJewish.com, for £300,000 in shares. Not a great bit of business, as it turned out. “When I came to sell them, they were worth £70,000 and I could only sell £40 worth.”

What we built back in 2000 was crazy, and too early. So Jewish, the company that took over my rudimentary JewishNet website, raised £850,000 in cash and services in a private placing. In 1998, at the age of sixteen, Cohen started the Jewishnet.co.uk website, an early social networking community which later became soJewish.com, with GBP£150, and floated it on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) ten months later.

In 2001, Cohen was involved with a search engine for internet pornography (hunt4porn.com) which formed part of his CyberBritain.com internet portal. Cohen was reported as stating that CyberBritain company revenues were £12,000 per month at this time. The company filed a Companies House return showing a total yearly profit of £165 up to 31 March 2001.

Check out this incredible interview of Benjamin with Deborah Ross from the Independent: