Tinder

“But then there was the Tinder experience where, you know, it was a disaster. I got fired after six months and I, you know, it just didn't, I didn't fit there.”

“So, so we started in Japan and like as a test market, and it's essentially exactly what we just discussed. It is if you verified with an orb, you get a little batch that You know, signals to other people that you are in fact a human.”

“If we're really trying to match up humans, like, call it Tinder T.O., one of the best sources of information to do that is their ChatGPT histories.”

“So we did we did exactly 10, 10 projects. The first nine of which you probably haven't heard of. And the 10th project was a re-skinning of the ninth project. The ninth project was a mobile coupons company. It was basically going into a location-based zone that…”

“And then, 20 14 comes around and the Sochi Olympics hit. And it becomes the headline at the Sochi Olympics, the winter Olympics about all the athletes hooking up with each other in the athletes village using Tinder versus like who's winning gold medals. And it…”

“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.”

“Gen Z, 18 to 24, is the primary user of Tinder, Hinge, and our other apps.”

“Tinder's kind of lost the plot on like actually getting people together for the longterm. Haven't they? It seems like it's just like a casual dating app, but I'm not a great brand at this point.”

“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…”

“I hired an engineer who worked at Tinder once, and he said that one of the tricks that they had was for the, for, like, the bots and the really, like, Toxic users. They wouldn't ban them. They would put them in a shadow pool. So they were kind of on their own …”

“If someone came and told me when I was building Tinder, hey, you got to build a business that is going to transform the world, a billion dollar business. I don't even know if I would have built Tinder, because I didn't have the foresight to say that this would…”

“Out of the three companies that I started prior to Tinder, two of them made me some money.”

“I sort of thought, and the board thought it would be a good idea for me to focus more on product and technology, which is where my passion was. That ended up being a very bad idea for the business. The, we brought in a new CEO that didn't work out, so I came b…”

“I remember in the early days at eight p.m., Tinder would just stop working for everyone because we had so many users flooding the system and we just, we couldn't rebuild the system fast enough to sustain the scale.”

“We had about, by the time it left, we had about 400 people at Tinder.”

“Culture is very much a product of wins and losses. Culture is not like this thing, you know, we put some fancy words on the board, and we all strive to do those things. Culture is a product of experience.”

“I used to think that if someone's not performing, and if I fire them, or I hold them accountable, that I'm being mean, and I'm hurting them. It took me a while to see that, no, no, no, I'm actually being mean by not holding them accountable because love is als…”

“You know, we actually, we had a rule against saying that Tinder is a hookup app, a dating app, a marriage app, an anything app. Like, we did not want to define it because we saw ourselves as this very effective tool of making an introduction.”

“I don't think a decline in marriage, a decline in in sex, I don't think is a byproduct of a product like Tinder. I actually think maybe Tinder is is helping You know, adjust the trend, prevent it from going down even worse.”

“All these other products, their marketing message Somewhat now, but especially when they're starting, was we are Tinder, but we have this one little feature. Yeah. I'm like, that's not really a company. I mean, like, that's, where's the vision in that? Where i…”

“So, we're removing an element of a barrier. We're not taking away the challenge, the hardship in romance. That would be a horrible idea. Because people grow through those challenges.”

“I mean, we've created over fifty billion matches, probably more marriages than any platform in history, more hookups, more friendships.”

“Pickup lines never worked on Tinder. They were just laughed at. What did work is, if I was looking at your profile, and I noticed something in a photo, I noticed something about you, and I asked you a question about that, and I showed you that I actually care …”

“Like, for me, I, like, we had, I mean, we had people who started a Tinder as an intern, and within a few months ended up running an entire team.”

“We definitely wouldn't have built Tinder if we were remote, that's for sure.”

“Six years by the time we IPL was I think.”

“If I had the choice of rocket ship over six years, or maybe something that's a little more balanced over 12 years. I probably would pick a little more balanced over 12 years because, you know, it's not for the faint of heart when something, building any compan…”

“I had a moment where someone asked me if I could fix a printer. Like, I think they thought I was the IT person. I actually ended up fixing the printer. And then they found out I was the CEO and literally everyone was fucking with him.”

“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…”

“All of Tinder's inbound came from the word Tinder.”

“They thought of themselves as a dating app, but it's a loneliness solution problem. The answer is a Google search.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

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

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

“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…”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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've started four companies since Tinder.”

“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.”

“It's like people download apps to make or save money. Examples of that might be like, you know, WhatsApp where, you know, free texting. And then the other reason is to find a mate. So maybe like Tinder or Snapchat, find love. And the third is to unplug from re…”

“The way that you would start a new dating app is you find a niche, you find a, an, a specific group of people, and then maybe there's some special mechanism, but the group of people matters more than the mechanism. Right? Any dating app you're on, like Raya is…”

“Right now we have a problem where, like, marriage is on the decline because Tinder has made sex too accessible, right?”

“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.”

“After leaving Tinder, she founded another dating app, Bumble, which has grown to fifty million users and two hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“Okay, the famous Tinder swipe, that wasn't actually in the very first versions of Tinder, but the novel mechanism that required users to both like each other was there. People tapped a green heart for yes and a red X for no.”

“Within two years of launching, it was processing a billion swipes per day”

“What I learned from my time at Tinder was the minute you encourage someone to use a piece of technology, You are inherently responsible.”

“Not a winner-take-all market. There's tons of dating apps. I mean, who's the winner that took all? Tinder? No. Bumble? No. Batch? EHarmony? No. OkCupid? No.”