Mr. Chris I. Whitten
Born 1970's.
Chris is the creator of this website, WikiTree, as well as WikiAnswers and other websites.
He grew up in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, with his mother Donna and brother Ted. His father Ted and step-mother Vicki were in the nearby town of Ashby.
In 1989 he graduated from Fitchburg High School and started at Lyndon State College in the beautiful Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. After two years in the small business program there he transferred to New York University to study economics. He graduated from NYU in 1993.
After college he stayed in New York City and worked as the managing editor of a mail order book catalog called Laissez Faire Books. Before Amazon.com this was the only source for many unusual books on libertarian philosophy and free-market economics. In 1994, he started experimenting with the Internet to sell books for Laissez Faire. The e-mail update list he created there was one of the first of its kind.
In 1995 Chris left his job to create a libertarian community and networking site called Free-Market.Net: The Freedom Network. This site has been called "the mother of all libertarian websites" for its early work in promoting usage of the Internet among free-marketeers of all stripes.
In 1997 he created a non-profit organization in Chicago called The Henry Hazlitt Foundation to be a home for FMN and its newer sister sites including libertarian.org, ifeminists.com and Bureaucrash. The foundation grew to employ five people full-time and more than a dozen people part-time.
In 2000 Chris met Megan McClellan who was finishing her math degree at the University of Chicago.
In 2001 Chris retired from his non-profit work to be more entrepreneurial again. And to pay off his student loans.
In 2002 Chris created FAQ Farm, which later became WikiAnswers. It is a collaborative question and answer site where users can ask a question about anything and other users help answer them. The Q&As become permanent resources so that the same question never has to be asked twice.
In 2004 Chris moved back from Chicago to New York City. Megan was offered a job on Wall Street. The next year, in 2005, Megan was offered a job in London and they took that opportunity to see Europe.
In 2006 Chris and Megan returned from England. They bought a home in Croton-on-Hudson in northern Westchester County, NY.
Late that year Chris sold his WikiAnswers business to Answers.com. During 2007 he worked with Answers.com to integrate the site into their company and take advantage of the new economies of scale.
In both 2007 and 2008 WikiAnswers was the fastest growing site among the largest US websites. It is now a top 50 website and gets over three million visitors per day.
In 2008 Chris began work on this site, WikiTree.
[Note: The memories (1), photos (192) and family tree for Chris are not public.]
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