“Two hundred years ago, ” says Noel Biderman, “about 30 to 40 per cent of the income you earned was spent on food. Now we spend about 8 per cent.”
Food cost hasn’t been an issue in the Biderman home since the success of his company, Ashley Madison, which facilitates affairs between married/attached people. “I’m gonna spend 30 per cent, at least for a year, and see how it feels”, he told Thestar.com.
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“The year is rolling into another year, ” warns his wife, Amanda Biderman.
Noel spends most of his interviews being chastised by TV hosts Dr. Phil or Tyra Banks. Rarely is the company written about as a successful Canadian tech start-up. So part of his job, as founder and CEO, is going on television almost exclusively to debate the morality of his business, the report said.
“Because infidelity is a great villain, ” he says. “That’s what Dr. Phil wants. He needs a villain. I’m a great villain.”
Like the best of wrestling bad guys, he is. Noel, a walking encyclopedia of justifications for cheating, is so polished in his rhetoric — the most common of which is that he’s incapable and therefore inculpable of convincing anyone to have an affair, that he’s merely leading horses to water — it’s hard to separate his sales speech from his personality, the report said.
But if he’d have known how successful the company would be (they do about $120 million annually, with 200 employees around the world) he would have hired a slicker pitchman.
“I never would have put myself forward. I would have had the foresight to have a fake person in front of me.”
Sometimes Amanda accompanies him on television to play the disapproving but still supportive wife. “I’m in a monogamous relationship, ” she says. “If you’re happy and you’re in love with the person you chose to be with, it doesn’t matter if a good-looking guy walks by.” She’d be devastated if her husband (who says no one ever flirts with him) cheated on her, but she goes on television to promote other people cheating because it helps with publicity and her husband’s credibility, Thestar.com said.
“The predecessor was the personal ad in the newspaper. Every newspaper should have been all over this. Match.com should have been owned by the New York Times. They’ve missed that entire boat. Part of my success is that I don’t face true competition”, Noel said.
The other reason, so he believes, is the decline of monogamous marriages.
“Polyamory is going to keep rising. I would bet my business on it. They’ve still gotta pay bills and raise kids. But they found a better success paradigm. So why do we want to centralize marriage in the future around monogamy if we’re so bad at being married?” he said.
“I think I chose monogamy before I knew anything. I don’t even know if it’s the healthiest thing anymore for people. I think it causes strain.”
He has been considering retirement, the report said.
“Already I could call it a day and go sit on a beach, from a financial perspective. But the job isn’t done. We just launched in India. We’re into Turkey, the Muslim world, the Hindu world. When it’s around the globe, maybe then it’s mission done and then the legacy will write itself. Over time, maybe people will say, look what this reveals about us as a species. Or they’ll continue to call me what they call me.”
