"The Love VC: Why one investor is building a matchmaking empire"

From Pando Daily:

The co-founders of Zoosk, an online dating company, remember the exact moment they met Deepak Kamra. They were days away from signing a terms sheet with an investor, raising a $4 million Series B. Everything had been settled and the paperwork was getting drawn up.

Then, they got a call from Kamra. He had gone golfing with Saeed Amidi, founder of the Plug and Play Tech Center accelerator, and heard about Zoosk. Kamra was a matchmaking aficionado, and he had been looking for an online dating company to place his bets on. He wanted founders that would go the distance. “It’s easy to start an online dating site but it’s hard to build,” Kamra says.

Kamra can be very persuasive, and he managed to convince Zoosk co-founders Shayan Zadeh and Alex Mehr to drive up to Napa Valley overnight. The Canaan partners were having their annual retreat there, and Kamra wanted the Zoosk founders to pitch them collectively, so that Kamra could sign off on an investment before the other firm finalized their offerings.

“The fact that a VC is willing to move earth and sea to get a company he’s excited about matters,” Zoosk’s Zadeh says. “On the way back from Napa he called us and said, ‘Don’t sign anything. I’m going to send a term sheet.’”

Kamra has been an investor with Canaan for twenty years. He invested in Match.com in 1995. Since then he invested in India-based online marriage matchmaking site Bharat Matrimony and then in international online dating site Zoosk, earning him the nickname The Love VC. He’s invested in other areas too, like online advertising and enterprise software, but “The Love VC” just seemed to stick....MORE