Tinder

“When I was in college, a friend and I had an idea for what is basically Tinder now, but this was pre-iPhone, and we and try to get a start off the ground where we had a prototype working on a Windows CE phone.”

“And I think you'll see new companies emerge. Is it going to happen this year? Is it going to happen next year? It's going to happen soon. It hasn't happened since Snapchat, right? They're the Snapchat, Tinder are the last big consumer companies to emerge. Thos…”

“I went in and recruited Sean Radd into IAC and gave him his first business plan, which turned into something completely different. It wasn't Tinder. He took it and very much made it his own, but it was something I got involved with the day-to-day of in the fir…”

“So part of what's the goal of swipe ventures is, is to think about what that next shift is and to make sure that we are either acquiring the next great platform that could disrupt us or that we're building it or, you know, we're making an investment in what we…”

“You not only got me my first girlfriend, but also originated my first deal through an SPV through her father, so thank you for that.”

“And I just realized if I knew that she liked me and she knew that I liked her, it would sort of take all the fear away, but there was no safe way to capture that data point.”

“Every single day, there are more than twenty-six million matches made on Tinder.”

“And then I would say on a five-year horizon, it would be to continuously make Tinder even more simple. And I know that that sounds crazy because Tinder is already very simple, but I think as technology gets better, as the ways we interact with, as AI and AR co…”

“And I think a lot of my investment thesis is formed out of what I've experienced building Tinder and kind of reflecting on what values got us here. And to me, I gravitate towards founders and teams that are number one, Humble. They have a healthy degree of hum…”

“The lesson has been that actually those digital technologies have actually made proximity more valuable. If you think about like where, where a lot of that value to people has come from, it's from companies like Lyft, like Postmates, a Craigslist, Amazon Prime…”

“When asked to lead the revenue team, they were ranked number 17 in the App Store. Within a year, under Jeff's leadership, Tinder became the number one top-grossing app in the world.”

“In less than three years, Tinder created over eleven billion dollars in market value, and with Brian's creation of Tinder Gold, Superlike, and Boost, the platform has seen over two hundred million downloads, and created millions of matches.”

“One of the interesting stories around Tinder was just Radical simplicity. It brought the online dating pretender. You had to fill out all these forms and menus, and you had to talk about future goals and whether you like long walks on the beach. And I remember…”

“If you had asked every single venture capitalist at the If dating was an interesting space, nobody would have raised their hand.”

“Tinder hadn't evolved in quite a long time on the consumer front. They'd done a lot on the business model front. But they had not, you know, you being a big subscriber, but on the consumer feature side, not a ton.”

“It's over 10% of all marriages come from Tinder, which is different than its reputation, and I've seen it.”

“What it did was it actually said, Hey, you've got nothing left to lose. Go run as fast as you can. And who gives a whatever about what you do next? Like it's okay. You've got this because your greatest fear of being completely Villainized or laughed at or abus…”

“They have been working on this new AI feature that allows users to very quickly surface the best photos from their camera roll, all using AI in a privacy-safe way.”

“We always believed in this, you know, Tinder, we always believe we have one shot. There isn't a second chance with users. We have one shot to impress them, and if so, so we have to make that one shot count. And we would not take that shot until we're very read…”

“Once, once the core team left, I think that promise that mission. Was maybe replaced with. A desire for retention and desire for revenue. And I think that, that this, the sort of intention of why we created that company, what we were trying to achieve got lost…”

“I've started four companies since Tinder.”

“At some point, we also said, hey, let's create an app to help you make friends. And we very quickly learned that no one wants to open an app to make friends. Like that's a very desperate, weird experience.”

“Founders are better when their company is not them because it's not about you.”

“In the beginning, in the early days, we thought localization meant that the language of the app had to adapt to the language of the user, but localization is much more than that. Because particularly around social human connection and relationships, there are …”

“We actually had a rule. You were not allowed to say dating at Tinder. You were not allowed to call Tinder a dating app. You're not allowed to say marriage because we weren't about that.”

“In India, it was Not really like there was a system of dating and marriage that was very much curated by your parents decide. And I think that was a moment in time where we were like, Hey, we could adapt the product to that, but actually no, we're not going to…”

“When I was there, when the team was there, we had a rule that every year we had to redesign the entire product because we didn't want people to get bored and stagnant, and we didn't want to become complacent as a team.”

“Retention and the number of connections isn't as important as the quality of connections.”

“So we told her, we're like, look, we'll, we'll pay for the party. We'll throw the party. But in exchange under one condition you have to do it at another location. So we shuttled all the students to another location where we had a bigger venue and we can invit…”

“And by the way, we have fucking phenomenal retention. You know, we had retentive powers beyond social media platforms.”

“And I think in total we texted 500 people. Over the course of a few days We had, I think it was like, 700 signups.”

“There was one point where the entire executive team, unbeknownst to me, went to the board and basically said, if Sean doesn't come back in the CEO role, we're all quitting.”

“What we call the double opt-in was the revolutionary thought behind Tinder, because every system of connection prior to that was riddled with this emotional angst and barriers to connection.”

“So we created this product called moments. Which was sort of Instagram stories before Instagram stories. You could share a moment, like something you're doing in the real world, and it was an expiring, 24 hour moment, and people could reply to it, and your mat…”

“So we did take money along the way and our investors wanted us to do that because I think they realized that. That if we alleviated some of that pressure, then we can go even harder.”

“And then we said, well, could we apply Tinder's mechanism to business connections? And then we quickly learned, well, no one wants to swipe and match and make new business connections.”

“Our perspective on paid features was the only reason we would charge you Is if charging you for that feature made the ecosystem better, meaning if we gave that capability to free to everyone, it would actually dilute the quality of the ecosystem.”

“I would argue that Tinder do bad product marketing on their different packages. I have seen them, and I don't really get what I'm getting for each of them, and so I'm like, ah, I'll go to Bumble. That, so, so the way that you described it, I go on and I'm like…”

“We don't need to be at anywhere near Tinder's pay penetration to hit our, say, three-year financial targets.”

“And they've dramatically under invested in the user experience which is, I think why they're suffering so much. And it's not just Tinder. It's also Bumble, but basically happened. I think with those products is they had a hit, right? Like I had a thing that wo…”

“If there's 50 men on Tinder and 50 women on Tinder, 46 of the women will show all of their attention exclusively to just four men. Leaving 46 men to fight over four women.”