Jeffrey Peterson

Jeffrey Peterson (born October 11, 1972 in Santa Barbara, California) is an American technology entrepreneur and California born millionaire who is considered the pioneer of Hispanic internet in the United States.

He was raised next door to the director of the University of California, Santa Barbara computer laboratory, who introduced him to computer programming at an early age in 1978.

During the mid-1980s, Peterson focused on the development of software for freely distributed bulletin board system and multi-user dungeon gaming applications.

He was known among his colleagues as an expert at implementing customized kernel-level multitasking solutions, who regularly pushed early hardware beyond traditional limits.

Peterson, already a seasoned assembly and C language developer in his early years, contributed heavily to the emerging F/OSS programming communities of the 1980s.

He has published numerous texts, including articles on multiprocessing, quasi-empirical methods, and artificial intelligence.

During the late 1980s, Peterson held the position of "traffic manager" on the sixteen-member executive committee at college radio station KCSB-FM that gave both Jim Rome and Sean Hannity their first radio broadcasting jobs.

In 1981, Peterson landed his first job, as a troubleshooter for a software company focused on Commodore computers.

In 1983, he worked as a product tester for vintage hardware manufacturer LOBO Systems.

Nonetheless, Peterson is credited at this age as a contributor on the inside cover of a best selling microcomputer software book in 1983.

Well acquainted with the college scene from his earlier programming years, Peterson worked as a disc jockey at UCSB college radio station KCSB-FM from 1986 to 1990.

Peterson dropped out of high school in 1988 at age 16, to pursue his career in investments.

He continued postliminary studies in the areas of law and history.

In 1989, Peterson started his first job at a Wall Street investment firm, Lehman Brothers, where he learned about the stock market.

He would later pass the industry exams, becoming a stockbroker at age nineteen.

After working for several Wall Street firms, he landed in the field of investment banking, where he gained experience in corporate finance.

He is best known as the founder of Quepasa, the first Latin American online community to go public and trade on a stock exchange in the early dot-com internet era of the late 1990s.

Peterson would go on to work with investment groups that financed hundreds of companies primarily through initial public offering transactions during the strong stock market conditions of the early 1990s.

In 1997, Peterson founded Quepasa.com, Inc. The website was the first major online community to focus on United States Hispanic Internet users.

A year later, he successfully persuaded Arizona sports mogul Jerry Colangelo to help raise in excess of $20 million of seed capital to launch the company.

Phoenix Suns star Jason Kidd signed on as an investor as well as the former Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway, investing $500,000.

Within months, Costa Rican President José María Figueres joined the Quepasa board of directors.

Peterson went on to sell a stake in the Spanish language website to Sony Pictures Entertainment and Telemundo LLC.

CNBC chief business commentator and former FDIC chairman L. William Seidman joined Quepasa's board of directors.

After meeting with Peterson during an online interview at the offices of the Miami Herald, seven-time GRAMMY award-winning Latina recording artist Gloria Estefan signed a contract to become Quepasa's official spokesperson and investor.

Quepasa billboards were a frequent sight in Hispanic cities across the United States, encouraging millions of Latinos to join "El Mundo Nuevo" (Spanish: The New World) online.

On June 24, 1999, Quepasa went public on the Nasdaq stock market.

Peterson was ridiculed about his early programming years in a satirical article published by TheStreet.com in 2004.

The article, which highlights Peterson's public biography as filled in a Quepasa proxy statement on April 23, 2004, was suspicious about believing that he was programming computers when he was ten years old.

In 2012, Quepasa changed its corporate name to MeetMe and continued trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under ticker symbol nasdaq: MEET.

MeetMe subsequently acquired the Skout, if(we), Tagged, and hi5 social networks and internet brands.

In 2017, Peterson's life story was featured in a book written by motivational speaker Brian Tracy about entrepreneurs.

Peterson spent much of his early childhood remotely connecting to the UCSB mainframe computers via terminal and modem.

Through early access to technology, Peterson learned to make his own Unix and VMS based software applications on the campus PDP-11 and DEC VAX computer systems.

In the early years of computing, the largely technical science of programming was a pastime overrun by the likes of college professors and engineers.

To fit in, Peterson reportedly maintained an identity for login on the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory PDP-10, where he was known by his peers as "Dr. Jeffrey Peterson", at the age of eleven.

As of mid 2018, renamed parent company the Meet Group had a market value of about U.S. $300 million.

Peterson grew up in Santa Barbara, California.

As a son of British mother and an American father, his paternal ancestors emigrated to Santa Barbara from Spain.

Peterson was educated at public schools in the Santa Barbara area.