Brandon Wade has built a controversial online dating empire based around the concept that it's perfectly OK for people — men, mostly — to pay women for dates and relationships. Wade even believes in bribing women to go out with you.
He's best known as the founder of SeekingArrangement.com, the web site for "generous" men who are OK with paying for dates, and the women who are happy to accept the money.
He's also a master of PR and word-of-mouth marketing. Just look at his media clips: From The New York Times to Playboy, editors can't resist his unapologetic mix of sex and money.
Skip to see Wade's life in pictures >
Last September Wade started yet another dating site in his empire, which now numbers five major sites. Carrot Dating is a mobile app that literally requires men to offer bribes to women for dates, with gifts ranging from chocolate to jewelry. Wade believes it's a humorous way to kick off a relationship.
When Business Insider talked to Wade, he told us how he got into paid dating in the first place, and how he met his wife, after years of being too shy to even talk to women. He also gave us some personal pictures from his early life to illustrate his story.
This is Brandon Wade today, in a launch photo for his newest mobile app, Carrot Dating.
At MIT in the 1990s, "I was very much a nerd," he told Business Insider.
"In the very beginning I was a very lonely, shy and perhaps socially inept child who grew up being really lonely. That was really me. I was very much a nerd. My mother saw me in a great deal of pain, so she told me to focus on my goal: To study very hard, because if I was successful later on in life and I had the financial means, and I could be generous, then dating would be easier for me. I followed that advice! It worked out well!"
"I got accepted to MIT. I studied physics. Eventually I graduated with that degree as well as an MBA from the Sloan school of management. That was in 1993, the MBA was in 1995."
See the rest of the story at Business Insider