Jeffrey Tinsley

Jeffrey Tinsley appreciates his life as a father of 3n. He has worked hard as a successful entrepreneur with broad experience with starting a company, raising capital, scaling efficiently, acquiring companies and selling businesses.

He started from simple beginnings in the San Fernando Valley, born in Van Nuys and raised by a single mother of Mexican descent in Chatsworth, CA. His mother taught him about hard work, dedication, and entrepreneurship by example, and watched her struggle to pay the bills, but she made it.

After graduating high school in Granada Hills, CA, and while attending community college, he started his first company at 17 years old, a little company representing home improvement contractors to help them grow their small businesses. In 1994 the Internet slowly came about, and he got excited about the possibilities of the new medium.

Out of his mother’s house he started offering website development services, meeting companies during the day to preach the need for a website, which wasn’t easy at the time, and teaching himself to write the necessary code and building the websites at night. He didn’t sleep much.

One of his clients was a company called GreatDomains.com. After their initial two-year contract was up, Jeff saw an opportunity with the domain brokerage marketplace, considering the similarities to the real estate brokerage, which he learned from his mom. He offered to take over the two-man, part-time business as CEO, rebuild the website and work on the business full time.

Through some smart decisions, tenacity and luck, the company became the leading secondary domain name marketplace. As Mary Meeker said, it was the eBay for domain names. Though the dot-com market had crashed, GreatDomains was fortunate to be acquired by VeriSign for $100 Million.

Following the acquisition, Jeff discovered a site called HighSchoolAlumni.com, a company that competed with Classmates.com to help reconnect old high school friends. Along with previous investors in GreatDomains, Jeff acquired HighSchoolAlumni in 2002 and rebranded the business as Reunion.com. This was two years before Facebook existed. Reunion.com eventually became MyLife.com, and looked to broaden its mission to connect people for valuable reasons, though it was challenging to compete against Facebook.

For the MyLife business Jeffrey won Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award, along with many other accolades, by providing valuable services and employing up to 130 people.

Jeffrey has been a positive contributing member to the community, also involved in many private Internet companies including VelvetRope.com, SupportGroups.com, RealMe, WishList.com and others as a founder, investor and advisor.