Monster.com founder planning to step down to launch venture
Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor, who helped pioneer job searching on the Internet, is leaving the company to launch a new venture, Monster Worldwide said yesterday.
The new venture will be partly funded by Monster and is not in the recruiting business, Monster said in a statement that offered few additional details. Taylor, 44, was unavailable for comment.
In 1994, Taylor founded Monster Board, an online bulletin board designed to help people find jobs. Over time, many consumers came to regard a Monster.com Web search as a better way to hunt for jobs than scanning newspaper help-wanted ads, and Monster has emerged as a dominant player in the online job-search business.
''Jeff Taylor will long be remembered for recognizing the potential of the Internet to transform the way people find jobs and companies find talent," Monster chief executive Andrew McKelvey said in a statement.
In recent years, Taylor's title has been ''chief monster."
James Janesky, an analyst with Ryan Beck & Co., an investment banking and brokerage firm in Florham Park, N.J., said he does not expect Taylor's August departure to impact Monster's financial performance.
In 1995, Taylor's business, which has its roots in Massachusetts and an office in Maynard, was purchased by TMP Worldwide Inc. TMP later changed its name to Monster Worldwide, which has its headquarters in New York. In 2004, Monster reported net income of $73.1 million on revenues of $845.5 million.
In a video interview on the Monster.com website, Taylor recalled the origins of Monster in the mid-1990s.
According to a partial transcript of that interview, Taylor said: ''I woke up at 4:30 a.m. from a dream that I built a bulletin board system where people could look for jobs. In the dark, I wrote down on a pad next to my bed, 'The Monster Board.' Realizing that in the morning I wouldn't be able to read what I had written, I got out of bed, went to a coffee shop, and at five in the morning designed a lot of the concepts and the interface we're still using today."
Taylor said during that interview that a key decision was to call the business ''Monster," because the name has such instant recall with job seekers.
Another key decision was to advertise during the 1999 Super Bowl. That memorable ad showed children saying such things as: ''When I grow up . . . I want to be a yes-man" and ''When I grow up, I want to claw my way up to middle management."
In its statement, Monster said plans call for Taylor to serve as an outside adviser to the company after his departure.
Monster shares fell 18 cents to $28.29 in Nasdaq trading.
Chris Reidy can be reached at reidy@globe.com. Material from Globe wire services was used in this report. 
