Joey Levin, Online Dating Guru

Levin was a junior investment banker at Credit Suisse First Boston when Barry Diller brought him over to IAC/Interactive Corp. in 2003; 12 years later, he succeeded the billionaire media mogul as CEO. Today he’s solving the riddle facing almost every tech chief executive: How do you compete with Amazon.com, Facebook, and Google? The answer: Don’t. Levin built a digital powerhouse by finding white space the tech giants have mostly ignored. When he saw four years ago that Facebook was steering clear of online dating, he doubled down on IAC’s Match Group, with $1.5 billion of sales, marketing, and advertising spending to make its Match and Tinder apps dominant. Match Group shares are up 60% this year, and profits are expected to top $500 million for the first time. Now he’s spinning off the company so the market can more easily value smaller IAC businesses, such as video platform Vimeo. He might do the same for Angi Homeservices Inc., the home improvement booking engine he created by merging IAC’s HomeAdvisor.com with Angie’s List.

IAC continues to find overlooked areas. In July, Levin invested $250 million in Turo Inc., which lets people rent out their cars when they’re not driving them. He needs to keep prospecting: Facebook introduced its own dating service in the U.S. in September, and earlier this year, Google forced Angi to pay more to get referrals. Edited excerpts from Levin’s conversation with Bloomberg’s Erik Schatzker.