Fran Maier

Fran Maier is an American entrepreneur and business executive. She is best known as the co-founder of companies including Match.com, TrustARC, and BabyQuip.

Fran Maier was born as Fran Allocca and grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, graduating from Santa Fe High in 1980. She then graduated with a degree in public policy from Stanford University, where she also earned her MBA in 1989. Early in her career, she worked in marketing for companies including Clorox and American Automobile Association.

In 1995, Maier co-founded Match.com, where she was also their founding marketing director and soon became the company's first general manager while it was still known as Electric Classifieds. Early in her tenure, she described her work as evangelizing online dating as a whole industry rather than just the company, in order to develop a market for dating sites. Following the sale of Match.com in 1998, Maier then worked with several other start-ups, including Women.com and Bluelight.com.

In 2001, she joined as executive director of Truste, a nonprofit Internet privacy organization. During her work with the company, now named TrustARC, Maier transitioned the company from a non-profit industry association to a venture-backed company, raising its first round of capital from Accel Partner. Following her tenure, Maier became a mentor to new start-ups in Silicon Valley, starting in 2013 after providing a keynote speech before that year's Women 2.0 conference. Through her advisory business, she has focused on primarily female company founders in the technology industry.

In 2016, Maier became the co-founder and CEO of BabyQuip (originally Babierge), which rents baby and toddler gear through a peer-to-peer online network. One of the focuses of the company is matching parents to baby equipment while traveling.

Fran Maier is a mother of two.