STEVE-PANKHURST

Steve Pankhurst developed the www.friendsreunited.co.uk when his pregnant wife Julie expressed a desire to get back in touch with long lost chums.

A lot of other dotcoms were retail sites taken on to the web, whereas this was the perfect internet idea – it just wouldn’t work without the net. We launched the site in 2000 and things were already going a little pear-shaped with the dotcoms.

“We’ve had a number of offers over the past few months and we’re currently reviewing our options. That could be carrying on as normal, bringing in a management team or selling”.
None of us are “managers” and it’s turned into this multi-million pound business. We’re realising that there are so many potential things you could do to the site and we’ve reached a watershed. So it started off with one quote to the press, and by the end of the week, I’d heard on the radio that we’d sold it for £35m!

“It’s a natural progression for us,” said Steve Pankhurst, a computer software engineer who runs the site from his north London semi. “And for people like me, it’s more interesting. To be honest, I’m not so bothered about the people I knew at school.