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 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. In 2012, Quepasa changed its corporate name to MeetMe and continued trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market under ticker symbol . MeetMe subsequently acquired the Skout, if(we), Tagged, and hi5 social networks and internet brands. As of mid 2018, renamed parent company the Meet Group had a market value of about U.S. $300 million. Early life and education 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. 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. 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. 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. 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