And the Money Comes Rolling In

When he does engage in conversation, Frind can be disarmingly frank, delivering vitriolic quips with a self-assured cheerfulness that feels almost mean. Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), he says, is "a complete joke," Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) is "a cult," and Match is "dying." Says Mark Brooks, a marketing consultant who has advised Frind since 2006, "I've never known anybody so competitive. He always says exactly what he thinks."

With friends and family, Frind expresses affection through playful pranks. Frind will spend hours hiding in the three-bedroom apartment he and Kanciar share, furtively flipping light switches, tapping on doors, and ducking into rooms to play on his girlfriend's fear of ghosts. Another memorable valentine involved the secret consumption of a massive quantity of hot peppers. Though his mouth was on fire, Frind calmly planted a kiss on Kanciar's lips and feigned ignorance as she went scrambling for water.

Kanciar, a freelance Web designer who also helps out around Plenty of Fish, is a lanky blonde with an easy smile and a hearty laugh, which she uses liberally to try to get Frind to open up. When I ask him to talk about what he does with the 23 hours a day in which he doesn't work, Frind struggles to answer and then looks helplessly at Kanciar. She offers a few suggestions -- video games, ski trips, walks -- and then tries to focus his energies. "We're trying to convince Max that we're interesting," she says sweetly.

That's not easy for Frind, who seems most comfortable with the world at arm's length. "He never raises his voice," Kanciar says later. "And he doesn't like conflict." Frind prefers to remain a silent observer of others who then constructs arguments and counterarguments about their motivations. He seems perpetually lost in thought, constantly thinking about and studying the world around him. "He's always watching his environment to apply it to the site," says Kanciar. "Once in a while, from the middle of nowhere, he'll say, 'Why is that girl doing that?' or 'Why is that guy posing like that?' He'll check people out in restaurants and watch how they interact. In a way, he's thinking about the company all the time."

Frind spent his formative years on a grain farm in the northern hinterlands of British Columbia -- "the bush" in local parlance. His hometown, Hudson's Hope, is a cold, isolated place not far from the starting point of the Alaska Highway. Frind's parents, German farmers who emigrated just before his fourth birthday, bought a 1,200-acre plot 10 miles from town and initially lived in a trailer without electricity, phones, or running water. The family's closest neighbors were a mile and a half away, and, apart from a younger brother, Frind had few friends. "His problem was English," says his father, Eduard Frind. "If you don't have English, you can't do anything." Frind eventually adjusted, but his was a lonely childhood. He rarely visits Hudson's Hope these days. When his parents want to see him, they make the 14-hour drive southward.

After graduating from a technical school in 1999 with a two-year degree in computer programming, Frind got a job at an online shopping mall. Then, the dot-com bubble burst, and he spent the next two years bouncing from failed start-up to failing start-up. For most of 2002, he was unemployed. "Every six months, I got a new job," Frind says. "It'd start with 30 people, and then five months later, there'd be five. It was brutal." When he did have work, it felt like torture. His fellow engineers seemed to be writing deliberately inscrutable code in order to protect their jobs. "It would literally take me four or five hours," he says -- an eternity in Markus Frind time -- "just to make heads or tails of their code, when normally you're supposed to spend, like, two minutes doing that."

But cleaning up other people's messes taught Frind how to quickly simplify complex code. In his spare time, he started working on a piece of software that was designed to find prime numbers in arithmetic progression. The topic, a perennial challenge in mathematics because it requires lots of computing power, had been discussed in one of his classes, and Frind thought it would be a fun way to learn how to sharpen his skills. He finished the hobby project in 2002, and, two years later, his program discovered a string of 23 prime numbers, the longest ever. (Frind's record has since been surpassed, but not before it was cited by UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner Terence Tao.) "It was just a way of teaching myself something," Frind says. "I was learning how to make the computer as fast as possible."

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