My career started in 1987 with a degree in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn New York (now a part of NYU). I am an entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience who has been the founder of several different startup companies across a variety of industries yielding me a diverse business and technical background. The industries I have been involved with include: telecommunications, transportation, and the Internet. I have worked domestically and internationally for NEC, US West, American Airlines, Ryder Truck, Santa Fe Rail Roads, and Ansett Airlines. My general Internet application experience includes Social Networking and Media, Education, Legal, Dating and many other e-commerce applications.

In general, my career has been blessed with experience in business planning, analysis, operations research, sales, marketing, branding, finances, human resources, real estate, acquisitions, mergers, due diligence, Internet security facility maintenance/construction, and of course all hardware and software technical aspects of the companies I have worked for/with and have owned.

I have been successfully involved in the Internet and on-line businesses since the late 80s. An early business entry on the Internet actually started as a social hobby that turned into a defining milestone in my career. This hobby propelled me to becoming the CEO and a founder of an Internet site and Social Network known as MatchMaker.com. The site was profitable and self funded (no venture capital) until February 1999. Over the course of MatchMaker.com's history, I was the founding President and CEO, the first full-time employee and largest single common shareholder. Under my leadership, media metrics rated us as the 2nd stickiest site on the Internet, and was growing at a rate of 8% or greater per month, making it the largest online dating site at that time. In 1995 when I decided to make Matchmaker.com my full time job, I was the only employee. By 1999, I had created a fully functional corporation with 28 full time employees and 11 remote part time employees, generating over $7 million in annual revenue. By the time we sold to Lycos in July 2000, Matchmaker.com employed 124 people in 8 separate departments. I had developed experience and expertise in a variety of fields in order to grow this company over this very short timeline.

In the very early days of the mainstream Internet (‘90-‘97), MatchMaker.com had over 4 million users with up to 230 million page views per month. This explosive growth generated millions of dollars per annum. Unlike Internet companies of today, we accomplished our substantial growth with revenues solely generated by the company and not infused or borrowed capital. Our rapidly growing network was in competition with today’s well-known companies such as; Match.com, AOL and Yahoo Personals. Even with this robust group of market competitors, we became the number one singles and dating network on the Internet. While my company was growing, the “Internet Bubble” crash of 2000 took place. In spite of that crash, our company continued to garner serious financial respect and was sold to Lycos for 45 million US dollars in cash.

After Lycos acquired Matchmaker, I sought out another business to start; my search led me to Expert Witness and Litigation Support industry. According to UBS, the expert witness business in the United States is a $7 to $10 billion dollar per year industry space. The industry is over 230 years old and is currently growing at over 20% per year. The revenue for the non-litigation business-advisory industry space is significantly larger. My experience with the Internet led me to believe that many applications on the Internet like travel, stocks, jobs, auctions, content searching, etc. - all involve some sort of a “matchmaking” component; The Expert Witness business also requires a “matchmaking” component for matching legal professionals and experts of all fields. When an attorney needs an expert to assist him/her in litigation, the attorney must perform a search to find and engage someone in the appropriate field whose knowledge and experience will aid his/her case. As a result, this business space intrigued me to build my own experts’ network.

Today, I own, ExpertWitness.com. I have successfully developed this network with significant traffic and global reach. The ExpertWitness.com brand has had an expert witness site associated with it since 1996. I have personally self-funded the further building and incubation of this product. I have organically expanded this site by 5 times in the last six years.

This experience and creditability has given me the opportunity to be an Internet Business and Technology Expert Witness on several occasions in cases involving Social Networking, Real Estate, Oil and Gas, Aerospace, Securities, Family Assets/Business Disputes, Security Issues, Patents and Intellectual Property. I have been engaged as both a plaintiff and defense expert for such companies as Cisco, MCI, CompUSA, Fujitsu, Yahoo, eHarmony, Match.com, Twitter and Google. I have been admitted as an expert in the above to many State/Federal courts and jurisdictions around the country for both civil and criminal litigation.

More detail at:

http://www.expertwitness.com/prof/patrick/1