The Exchanges

Q Can I drill down on number two, which is like the efficiency and the lean focus? When does a focus on efficiency and leanness impact growth negatively?

A I'm asked this question a lot in a lot of different ways. You know, we just did our earnings on Thursday, so I've been doing a lot of investor calls, and this, like, comes up in every investor call, like, hey, could you spend more money and do more things? And the reality is actually no. Um, I, I, I think what Silicon Valley showed in the last 10 years or so is the idea that just adding more headcount to do more stuff actually is not the right thing because you end up spending a lot of money on a lot of stuff that doesn't work and probably shouldn't be getting as many resources as it needs to. You can, we're going to launch a bunch of new stuff this year, but a lot of it's going to be done through partnerships with one or two people working on those things. We'll learn our way into them. If they work, we'll put more resources behind them, but we don't need to be having teams of five, six, seven people Launching these different products that we're working on is just not necessary. Second thing that I think Silicon Valley showed and has learned is that there's insane inefficiency in each individual that you have working for you because there's very bad management. And, you know, management does not mean micromanagement. There's a big difference, but being able to have really strong accountability is really critical, and I don't think we have it in the tech world. Today.

AI assessment note: “hey, could you spend more money and do more things? And the reality is actually no”

Q The heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What unmade decision weighs on you most, George?

A I make decisions all the time. Like that's my entire job, right? And I do that at home all the time too. So I actually don't have a lot of decisions I've not made. Because guess what? If you don't make a decision, that's still making a decision. One of my, um, team members said, yeah, sometimes, like, I'll ask you three questions, and you'll answer only two, and, and I've learned that that means that you're, like, thinking about something, and I'm like, yeah, but I also realize that you need an answer, and when I don't give you that answer, that's basically telling you no. Most I made decisions are no's, and so I don't really have that many that I can, like, speak to.

AI assessment note: “I actually don't have a lot of decisions I've not made.”

Q How do you guide them without micromanaging them?

A You ask tough questions. You raise the hypotheticals of what could happen if the decision that they want to make happens and get them to understand what the problem might end up being. Because ultimately you as the founder and the CEO know the full picture and they don't. What you can bring to the table is they want to do X. They don't understand how that X impacts Y and Z over here that they're not thinking about. Only you can do that. But that does not mean you tell them, Hey, you are wrong. And this is the answer. I think that's like a really big kind of factor, at least in, in my view. Uh, and, and that's a pretty big learning kind of experience. Secondly, uh, that I think is really crucial to kind of how I would do things different now is you've got to know what you're not good at. And get the right people around you. That's different from, oh man, I'm really bad at this, and so I need to change this. The idea that a grown adult is going to change everything about themselves is very low probability. Like, it's probably not going to happen. Um, you can pick, like, one thing you really want to change, and I'm going to work on this really hard. But man, in a series A company where cash is running out, and your product market fit might not quite be there, and your team is causing problems, and your investors are yelling at you, like, Trying to change everything about yourself …

AI assessment note: “You ask tough questions. You raise the hypotheticals of what could happen”

Q Why would you worry about failing and doing that?

A Well, I, um, you know, kids are really important to me. So, like, I'm a very unusual gay guy in that sense. Like, I always knew I wanted children. Um, frankly, coming out was partly difficult because I'm like, wow, what's that gonna mean to my ability to have kids? Because when I was going through this whole coming out process, like, surrogacy was not a thing yet. Gay men having children was not that common at all. Um, and so having kids was a very big deal to me, and you know, what my husband and I agreed on is, if we're past 45, we're not gonna have more children, because we just felt like, you're too old. And, and, and, you know, after having two kids, and given how much we, time we spent on our children, and how important they are to us, like, you know, I, like, I'm probably the only Russell 3000 CEO that, like, regularly shows up at school, um, is that, like, almost every dinner with my children, like, six to seven pm is, like, massively sacred, and yes, sometimes I'm not there, but, like, 90% of the time I'm there, um, and so they're really critical to me. Uh, I don't know if I could do that with two more kids, because kids are a lot of work, and, and I just don't know if I have more in me to be able to give as much time to my Two kids that I already have, two more children that I would want to have, and be as good at the job I do. I don't know if there's enough of me for…

AI assessment note: “I don't know if there's enough of me for that.”

Q Got you. So just so I understand, you don't think that infrastructure models, basically you open AI to Anthropics, will subsume the application layer?

A Long term, I don't think you're gonna need an Asana with AI. You're gonna just have an AI, like, TBD, how you engage with it, that's going to tell every, many other AIs what to do, right? So you can have a lot of agents that are specific, and there's going to be one agent that's kind of telling all the other agents what to do, and you're going to be talking to that one agent. But it's going to take a while to get there. So my initial perspective was, oh, like, we'll be able to get to like that one agent quickly and like, and let's go work on that. But actually, I think you're going to need these like smaller agents first that are more narrow in their nature before we can go to the one big agent. So as an example of kind of how to think about this from Grindr perspective, we're going to have more success building a feature like that summarizes your Chat history with somebody and gives you a really nice kind of summary, like you've talked to this guy for six months and here are all the things you learned about him that are helpful for you to have as a summary versus, you know, a bot that is able to talk to a person for you, right? It's going to take a lot more time to get the latter done versus the former. And, and there's a lot of benefit to kind of launching these smaller features that will be benefiting users with AI. Um, while we work on kind of the more transformative AI fea…

AI assessment note: “Long term, I don't think you're gonna need an Asana with AI.”

Q Can I ask a weird one? What have you done in your Grindr tenure that you wish you had not done?

A When I came in, I didn't fully appreciate how different building trust with people who were already there would be versus ones that I had hired. So this was like a big aha moment for me. I mean, Hey, because I never had any trust issues. Like I've had plenty of issues and people have lots of things to say about Georgia differently, but like, My employees trusting George was never an issue. But then I realized, obviously, because if you're a founder of a company, no one's going to join that company unless they trust you. So then, like, implicit part of their, like, decision-making process to come to work for a company that's led by a founder is that they trust the founder. And I didn't appreciate how difficult and different, let's say different more than difficult, it would be to build trust with employees who are already present and there. Uh, and so I wish I had done more in explaining to them what my approach to, um, to things would be. Uh, and I started to do that, you know, about a few months in, but I didn't do as much of that in, in the very beginning. Now, some of this was driven by just kind of the time I showed up in, I showed up in October and we're going public in November. So there was like a really big focus. Hey, we've got to get the, uh, the dispatch process completed and go public. We also didn't have a lot of other people on the team. Like it was me, um, chief …

AI assessment note: “I wish I had done more in explaining to them what my approach”

Q The heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What unmade decision weighs on you most, George?

A I make decisions all the time. Like that's my entire job, right? And I do that at home all the time too. So I actually don't have a lot of decisions I've not made. Because guess what? If you don't make a decision, that's still making a decision. One of my, um, team members said, yeah, sometimes, like, I'll ask you three questions, and you'll answer only two, and, and I've learned that that means that you're, like, thinking about something, and I'm like, yeah, but I also realize that you need an answer, and when I don't give you that answer, that's basically telling you no. Most I made decisions are no's, and so I don't really have that many that I can, like, speak to.

AI assessment note: “I actually don't have a lot of decisions I've not made.”

Q Is it possible to be a really good CEO, a really good father, and a really good husband?

A I try to be a really good husband, my husband tries to be really good to me, but we definitely are focused on each other a lot less today, because so much of our energy goes to our children. But that's, again, a choice that we made, right? Like part of us being a couple is that we wanted to be really good parents, and we wanted kids, and frankly, I would exclude a lot of people as potential partners because they didn't want to have children. Like, it was a very early conversation topic on any date I ever went on, because if you didn't want to have kids, we might have everything else going for us, but it wasn't going to go nowhere. Um, So you definitely give up a lot, uh, if you want to be a really good dad. Um, and, uh, and, uh, I probably am not as good of a husband today as I was before we had children.

AI assessment note: “I probably am not as good of a husband today as I was before”

Q Can I drill down on number two, which is like the efficiency and the lean focus? When does a focus on efficiency and leanness impact growth negatively?

A I'm asked this question a lot in a lot of different ways. You know, we just did our earnings on Thursday, so I've been doing a lot of investor calls, and this, like, comes up in every investor call, like, hey, could you spend more money and do more things? And the reality is actually no. Um, I, I, I think what Silicon Valley showed in the last 10 years or so is the idea that just adding more headcount to do more stuff actually is not the right thing because you end up spending a lot of money on a lot of stuff that doesn't work and probably shouldn't be getting as many resources as it needs to. You can, we're going to launch a bunch of new stuff this year, but a lot of it's going to be done through partnerships with one or two people working on those things. We'll learn our way into them. If they work, we'll put more resources behind them, but we don't need to be having teams of five, six, seven people Launching these different products that we're working on is just not necessary. Second thing that I think Silicon Valley showed and has learned is that there's insane inefficiency in each individual that you have working for you because there's very bad management. And, you know, management does not mean micromanagement. There's a big difference, but being able to have really strong accountability is really critical, and I don't think we have it in the tech world. Today.

AI assessment note: “And the reality is actually no.”

Q Can I ask a weird one? What did you think you were good at that you turned out to be bad at, and how did that show itself?

A There are a lot of things I'm really bad at. I don't know if I ever thought I was necessarily good at them, but I didn't know I was really bad at them. Um, and, and then there were a lot of things that I thought was not very good at that I actually am really good at. Like, I thought that I was not very good at recruiting engineers. I was terrified of recruiting engineers. The first kind of, after I started my company, First engineer outside the CTO that I went to recruit, like, I was literally scared to death. I have a huge fear of snakes, and this was like the second most thing I was scared of. Like, how am I going to talk to this guy about engineer problems? I know nothing about engineering. Turns out I'm actually pretty amazing at recruiting engineers, and engineers really like transparency, and I'm super transparent, and so having very transparent discussions and being very honest, like, I don't know this, and this is why I need you to come and help me here. It really works with them. They actually appreciate that. Instead of it coming off salesy, they actually, like, like, oh, here's a business guy who, like, is willing to say, I don't know X or Y. Um, and, and that was a huge learning, because I had, like, you know, I was a business person working in the tech world, and you can't be successful in that unless you're very good with engineers, but it was challenging for me t…

AI assessment note: “there were a lot of things that I thought was not very good at that I actually am really good at”

Q That is insane. And an hour a day? Do they, do they not work?

A I actually, when I first heard it, I'm like, what do you mean like a week? Right? Um, but yeah, it's a remarkable thing. And then as far as how I became CEO of Grindr, so Grindr has a very Unique kind of founding story and how it got to where it is today, and I assume we'll talk about that, but there's an ownership group that owned Grindr as of 20 20, and they had a temporary management in place, knew they wanted to take the company public and wanted a long term CEO. They really wanted a product driven person who had built a company from scratch and who had run a public company and who was ideally in the community, which kind of leaves you a very few set of choices. Um, they found me and, um, made a really strong pitch. I was like, man, I've built three companies. I never thought I'd run anybody else's company, but, um, the argument was really strong that, uh, this was a really amazing business and kind of once in a lifetime chance to do something really special. And when do you get to run a business with, you know, 40 plus percent, even a merchant. And I saw a huge opportunity to take this community that we have and build a lot more stuff for them, um, and become more of a super app product for, for the user base. Um, and that got me really excited. And so I took the job.

AI assessment note: “And then as far as how I became CEO of Grindr”

Q That is insane. And an hour a day? Do they, do they not work?

A I actually, when I first heard it, I'm like, what do you mean like a week? Right? Um, but yeah, it's a remarkable thing. And then as far as how I became CEO of Grindr, so Grindr has a very Unique kind of founding story and how it got to where it is today, and I assume we'll talk about that, but there's an ownership group that owned Grindr as of 20 20, and they had a temporary management in place, knew they wanted to take the company public and wanted a long term CEO. They really wanted a product driven person who had built a company from scratch and who had run a public company and who was ideally in the community, which kind of leaves you a very few set of choices. Um, they found me and, um, made a really strong pitch. I was like, man, I've built three companies. I never thought I'd run anybody else's company, but, um, the argument was really strong that, uh, this was a really amazing business and kind of once in a lifetime chance to do something really special. And when do you get to run a business with, you know, 40 plus percent, even a merchant. And I saw a huge opportunity to take this community that we have and build a lot more stuff for them, um, and become more of a super app product for, for the user base. Um, and that got me really excited. And so I took the job.

AI assessment note: “And then as far as how I became CEO of Grindr”