JEFFREY S. PETERSON is a technology entrepreneur, engineer and author who was the original founder of Quepasa/MeetMe Corporation, a Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange company (Nasdaq: MEET, NYSE Euronext: QPSA), the first nationally branded, publicly traded online community for bilingual English and Spanish speaking Hispanics in United States history, founded in 1998 and sold ten years later to venture capitalist Richard L. Scott (before he became Governor of Florida, then Senator). The company was eventually sold to the corporate parent company of eHarmony in March, 2020.
Under Peterson’s leadership commencing at the dawn of the .COM “internet boom” of the late 1990’s, and in business for twenty years thereafter, Quepasa amid rapid growth became one of the top-20 social networks in American history, covered by most major media and Wall Street analysts, achieving a base of over 40 million active users (total combined membership of all sites over 100 million users) and a peak stock market capitalization in excess of $500 million USD.