Hinge CEO: The Truth About Dating Apps, Attraction And Finding Love In 2024!

We've done deep dive research studies on how can we help everyone to become more successful daters. So, what makes daters successful? So, the faster that you can the faster you're going to find someone who's like, yes, this is the type of person that I want to be with. Justin McLeod, the founder and CEO of the fastest growing dating app, Hinge. I built Hinge because I wanted a girlfriend, but we had to suffer through a lot of failure to finally get to success. Why does the world need another dating app? I think it just needs one really that works well. I'm going to be completely honest. Much of the reason why I never used dating apps is I had no success. So, if I wanted to be the world's worst dating app user, what would I have to do? A lot of filtered photos with you in sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of friends, one-word answers to your prompts, just like everyone. And what about serial daters? Some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow. They have to be over 6 ft and need to work in this type of job. And so, you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no because it doesn't fit your model. Give people more of a chance. AI, the conversation around AI and relationships has always been quite pessimistic. Sex robots and stuff. Yeah, that's certainly not going to be what Hinge is working on. The bigger leap though is to move much closer to a matchmaker model and setting up dates with a much higher likelihood of success. It's happening already. It used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date and now about 50 likes. Have you seen any changes in the dating culture? Yeah, in order to get on a date, people need to know this. So, Quick one. This is really, really fascinating to me. On the back end of our YouTube channel, it says that 69.9% of you that watch this channel frequently over the lifetime of this channel haven't yet hit the subscribe button. I just wanted to ask you a favor. It helps this channel so much if you choose to just subscribe. Helps us scale the guests, helps us scale the production, and it makes the show bigger. So, if I could ask you for one favor, if you've watched this show before and you've enjoyed it and you like this episode that you're currently watching, could you please hit the subscribe button? Thank you so much and I will repay that gesture by making sure that everything we do here gets better and better and better and better. That is a promise I'm willing to make you. Do we have a deal? Justin, what is your job title? And founder and CEO of Hinge. And to quantify what Hinge is and the impact it has on the world, how many people use it as a product, its reach, can you give me some color towards that? Uh, like I can say that today we're setting up a date about every 2 seconds. So, every other second someone's going on a date because of Hinge. Um, we've created millions of relationships and it's I'd say marriages at this point. The scale is far beyond I think what I imagined when I when I started this thing. I probably need to understand you a little bit better because it's so abundantly clear from all the CEOs that I've interviewed that there's often a series of catalyst moments that send them on the path indirectly. I mean, it's like the first domino that falls in their life that brings them to be sat here today for for us to be talking about it. What are those first dominoes in your life that fell? I I don't I think there are a number of them that probably like ended up defining my my life. I was an only child. Um, had a entrepreneur father who had a ran a small business. And um, and my mom worked for my dad. I was sort of naturally as a kid good at math. I was good at computer science. Uh, I would spend my summers at nerd camp uh, going and learning how to like code as a kid. And I will say addiction is the last piece cuz I I wanted I like was desperate to be cool, was desperate to fit in. And that actually became like a huge piece of it as well for me. In your first year of university, you went to see a drug and alcohol counselor. Is that correct? I did. So, when I went to college, you know, it was I would say the overachieving part of me started to slip away and I just kind of just doubled down on the uh, drinking and drugs and partying. My freshman year, at the end of my freshman year, I thought to myself like, gosh, you know, like I haven't been to bed sober since school began. Like not one single night. And maybe I have a problem. Like maybe something's going on here. So, I I voluntarily went in to see this drug and alcohol counselor. It's like very sweet woman named Jane. And she listened to me empathetically and heard me out and she was like, Justin, you know, I I think that you probably have a pretty serious problem with drugs and alcohol. I think that you should definitely keep coming back and seeing me and I think you should stop. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like that's that was like, what are you talking about? I'm like a 19-year-old kid. So, I just kind of ignored that and went about the the partying. Um, but I had some inkling at that point that like probably something was not good. You had to rehab eventually. I did. I had to spend my summer in rehab after my freshman year in order to even come back to school because I had I would I'd still get in trouble a lot at like with campus safety or whatever, getting caught drinking or uh, and I'd been written up so many times that I actually got referred back to that same drug and alcohol counselor for an assessment. She's like, well, I've already actually assessed this kid. He's clearly has a problem. So, I had to spend my summer in rehab in order to even come back my sophomore year. So many people I've spoken to had an alcohol addiction at some point in their life. Speak about the 12-step program and the role that that played in them turning their lives around. Did you When did did you learn about the 12-step program at all and did it help? I did and I would occasionally go to meetings and they were like people from the town. Like no one no no one from like college was going to these. I was literally only college student. I did stop drinking the the and the day that I graduated from college. And um, and 12-step programs was like a a huge piece of of my recovery after that time. Why that day? I woke up that morning after being out at a party the night before. Was graduating that day. I'd gotten a okay job in Washington D.C. where I was going to move in the in once school ended. But I just remember thinking to myself like that the steering wheel of my life was broken. That's kind of how I and I think that gets back to your sort of enslavement idea or that you just don't have control anymore. Like I envisioned my life going like this direction. Like I I wanted to have a big career. I wanted to go make an impact in the world. I wanted to have like deep friendships. I wanted all these things and yet every day it was like one more drink. Right? One more drug and tomorrow I'll like start putting my life together. And I've been telling myself that for years at that point. And I remember thinking to myself like, I don't know what the point of living is if if like without drinking. But I'm going to try to find out. And it was just like, how much longer am I going to allow this to continue to to go? Like I I I didn't get the job that I wanted, right? I wanted I wanted to go work at a you know, Goldman Sachs in banking, which is the and that's just like what the I was a mathematical economics major and that's what all like the top math econ majors went and did. And and I didn't I didn't get the job. I got some like, you know, decent job at some management consulting firm that no one's ever heard of in Washington D.C. And uh, I'd lost the girl, which we haven't talked about Kate yet, but my I had a girlfriend all through college and I'd like lost her. It's just It's just my life was like not headed in a good direction. It was so clear and I just viewed that as a moment to like change it. When did you meet Kate? I met Kate the basically like literally the day I got out of rehab. I like got out of rehab at 8:00 p.m. one night in Louisville, Kentucky. I drove all night back to school. And uh, and I woke up the next day and decided to celebrate getting out of rehab by going out and partying and drinking. And uh, Kate found me passed out in a stairwell, like on the landing of a stairwell. Uh, the first day of my sophomore year. It was her first day of school, first day of her freshman year. Later in that year, we had a class together. We started sitting together. We started getting to know each other and we just had this incredible like magnetic connection. When you reflect on meeting her and how you felt and all of those things. I mean, you now uh, working in the industry. When you look back, is there anything that is consistent with, you know, all the people that Hinge has brought together today that happened in that moment? Cuz, you know, you see on the movies they say you'll feel this thing in your belly and there'll be butterflies and there'll be crazy, you know, all this kind of stuff. What was your experience like? Did you have butterflies? Did you know she would they were the one? Um, I think I I'm not sure it was like the moment I saw Kate like I knew she was the one, but I think the our our like relationship really started to build as we got to know each other better. Um, so, it wasn't for me like one of those like instantaneous like this person is the person. It just grew really, really quickly as we got to know each other better. Whether that spark is a good thing or a bad thing, I think has been debated. I know you had Logan, our our relationship scientist on um, from Hinge and I think the spark can sort of like burn out and what you're looking for is really like a nice slow burn. Within 2 years you had broken up. Uh, we'd broken up like we were on and off you know, six or seven times I think during college. And then finally by the end of college we'd really like gone our separate ways. Once I gotten sober, um, I would think about reaching back out to her all the time. But I just wouldn't cuz I had enough sense to realize that like I had probably like messed up this girl's life enough and um, it just like wasn't healthy and so I would I remember being like a year two years sober, and I would like you know, dial her number on my phone, and I would just like stare at it, and then I would just like hit the end button, and I just didn't feel I just didn't feel like I was good for her, and I and I just needed to stay away. And when you ultimately end up reaching out to her when she's living in London and working in finance? Yeah, so I I 4 years in, I'm sober, I'm at business school, and I I finally I'm like, okay, I'm going to like write her a letter, like an apology letter, um and see if we can reconnect, and I I wrote her this letter, and she was living in she'd moved to London at that point. And she called me back the next day, and she was with someone at the time, and she's like, well, I'm going to be home for Christmas time, so maybe I can see you at Christmas time. And then she called me back the next day, and she's like, listen, I just if I see you, I don't know what's going to happen, and I just uh I have a stable life now, I have a partner, we just bought a flat, like I just can't. And so I was just totally heartbroken, cuz I really thought in the back of my mind like someday we'd I just felt like we were like meant to be together, and I thought like one day we're we're going to end up back together, and I think in that moment I realized like, wow, I've really messed this up, like there's no there's no going back. You were at Harvard at the time. Yeah. You're single. Mhm. You're sober. Which makes it hard to meet people, I guess. Precisely. I mean, that's the thing is I is I um both it was very special with her, and also I really had trouble meeting other other people. Like I really relied on drugs and alcohol as a crutch, and then when I graduated, I threw myself into work, and then I but then I arrive at business school, where I think by the way we're there to like study business, but it's like a huge party atmosphere, and like everyone connects around drinking and and partying, and I just couldn't it was like just too hard for me to be around any of that. Also hard for me to meet new people. I mean, that's the case for so many of us today. So many people who much of the reason it feels like they continue to drink and do those things which they don't necessarily love is because it's almost unavoidable if you want to it seems unavoidable if you want to socialize and be not be perceived as a weirdo. Yeah, and just the whole culture and the whole like the it was just all revolved around drinking. So it's it was just constantly saying no, constantly saying, no, thanks, I don't drink, like Is this at all correlated? You know, you're in that situation where you're you've given up drinking, you're a bit heartbroken. Does this also explain why you were so compelled to do something in the dating space? There was a business plan like a business school like business plan competition, and so I was working on like a few ideas for that. And nothing really hit. Like I was trying to work on I had like various little silly ideas, and I tried to work on them, but it always just felt like homework, and I just like wasn't getting much traction. And this was kind of shortly after everything had happened with Kate, and she'd, you know, told me in so many words that like it was time to move on. And there was this last chance dance party happening at at Harvard, where people were going to like list all their crushes, and then if two people like listed each other, they would like let you know right before the dance. So this was like a moment of like, okay, like we're heading towards the end of school. I think it was around Valentine's Day, and so this is like your last chance your second year. If there's anyone that you had a crush on, this is like your moment to find out. I was actually like pretty excited about this, cuz like I again I was like so awkward. Like I didn't know how to like connect with people or meet new people. I just like I didn't know how to do that without the crutch of of alcohol and drugs, and I was walking to class one day with the with the um student body president, this guy Brett, and he was like, yeah, we actually decided to scrap the whole thing. It was just too complicated. Like a thousand people all listing each other. Like how are we going to manage all the you know, like too hard. Like we just scrapped that whole thing. I I I went to class, I started sitting there, I started thinking, and I was like, I bet I could just like build this really quick on Facebook. Like I I I used to code. I like knew how these kind of things got worked, and Facebook had recently opened up their API for canvas apps like FarmVille and things like that. I was like, you could just like go through and just check your friends that you liked, and you can just build something like this really quick on Facebook. So I enlisted a friend, um her her name is Francis, and we got together, and we built this thing, um where people could like list their crushes on Facebook, and it would tell you if two people matched, and we launched it, and it made a bunch of matches, and it was fun, and people had like a good time, but then it was you know, you find out if you have a crush, you either do or you don't, and then everyone's done with it. But the idea then started to to like percolate in my mind like, what if you could actually introduce people to their friends of friends? Because at the time there was there were online dating sites, but no one my age used them. There was a lot of stigma around it, cuz it was like a long arduous process you did on desktop computers, you answered like deep questions about yourself, you paid a lot of money usually to use them. And the idea of like creating something like really simple and easy that would just connect you to friends of friends suddenly just like popped in my mind, and I don't know how to describe it. I just like I was so excited about this idea. I was just convinced this is going to be the future of how people were going to date, and I like couldn't stop working on it. And to set the scene there a little bit, this is a time which is hard to remember where there's like OKCupid and match.com, but there's not like mobile dating apps. Right. That's exactly right. There were no nothing was mobile, and nothing no one really used it, or if you used it, you didn't really talk about it. Like people my age just like didn't use or talk about online dating services. That was just not a thing. The term dating app was not even a term yet. Do you think that's it? Cuz I so many people ask me the question about how to know which idea to pursue. Many entrepreneur types, creatives have lots of ideas. They have a shelf full of them. Yeah. Um how do we know which one is the one worth pursuing? I I can only speak to my experience. Like I don't know what the right what the right answer is, but I will say that when I was I had other ideas that were interesting to me like intellectually. Like, yeah, like this is a good idea, um but it just didn't hit me in my heart, and I would I would like try to work on it, but like I said, it felt like it felt like doing homework. Like, okay, I'll like force myself to work on this, but it just wasn't I don't know. And then when the idea for Hinge hit me, I don't I just don't know how to describe it except to say like it it was like it like infected me, and this this this service this app was like going to come out of me no no matter what, and it's like I like was almost possessed to have to work on it. But I think there was a the the magic of me being open and like thinking about ideas and trying to work on ideas, and then I was like open, and then when the right idea hit, it almost didn't even feel like a choice. Like I just had to work on this. So many people have the idea, so many people feel infected by their belief in that idea, but then the vast majority will be incarcerated by fear and you know, loads of naysayers telling them, you can't make an a dating app. What the hell is that? Yeah. Which is exactly the feedback that I got, by the way. Like I entered it in the business plan competition. We were, you know, we didn't place at all. We were told like this is a horrible idea. I wrote a paper on it for our class. They told me it was a horrible idea. I um I had friends telling me it was a horrible idea. I would later try to raise money, and VCs would tell me it was a horrible like everyone was like there was very little positive feedback I was getting on the idea for Hinge. I just had this thesis that if you could make a a dating service that was stigma-free, if you could make something that was really fun and easy and lightweight, then young people would use it. I would I would I'd always hear that the dating market is full, it's saturated. This is what VCs would tell me when I would try to raise money. They'd be like, match.com owns this market, you'll never be able to beat them. And I remember thinking to myself like, it's not how could you say a market is saturated? Like I don't I almost know no one who uses dating services. Like it's not saturated. You just have to fix the problem why people don't use it, and people don't use it because it it has stigma to it. We we can't remember that. Yeah. This this generation can't remember that there was a stigma around dating on the internet. In fact, what's so funny is as you said the word stigma, I said to myself, what stigma? And I thought and then I thought back to my childhood, and and I remember the what I thought of people that used match.com. Yeah. Lonely weirdos. Totally. And that was definitely that was that's how people that's how people thought about it in 2011. It was just not you know, the iPhone had just come out a few years ago. The App Store was relatively new. Yeah, and people did not meet strangers on the internet to go date. That was just weird. So when did it go from Facebook to an app? Uh so we started working on it. It was originally this yeah, Facebook canvas app, and that was 2011 to 2012, and um but it was really having trouble getting people to adopt this thing. I was not a good product designer, not a good brand. It was originally called Secret Agent Cupid. It would uh introduce you to friends of friends, but it was really a complex user interface. You'd like answer questions about your friends. There were like little rankings. Like it was try to be really social and like show you which of your friends are most in demand. It had like all these different components to it. It was like way overcomplicated. People would come in, and they like wouldn't understand like, why am I answering questions about my friends? Like, what's this? I'm here to date. Around the end of 2012, I'd raised a little bit of money from just like angels and friends and family, like $100,000 or so. We're running out of money, not making a lot of progress. I made the call around Thanksgiving. I got together with my team and I was like, we just need to start over from scratch. Let's throw this whole thing out. Mobile is the future. That's more things are trying to come out on the App Store around this time. So, let's redesign it for mobile and let's make it just like a dead simple. We'll just you connect your Facebook account, we'll show you a photo, you know, their age, like one or two lines about them, and then you just say yes or no, are you interested in this person? We had literally like 2 and 1/2 months left of cash to like tear everything down, rebuild it from scratch, and then take our remaining money and throw a giant launch party in Washington D.C. With your remaining money? Yeah, that's it. Literally took our last $25,000 and threw a giant open bar party in D.C. And you had to download the app to get in. We had submitted our app to the App Store with what we thought was like plenty of time, about 2 weeks. Um, and App Store review times were typically like just a couple days at that point. And then a few days go by, we don't hear anything back. A week goes by, we still haven't heard anything back. Uh, I started trying to reach out to like the head of the App Store, but no one who they don't care I'm like some random kid like with a app idea. No one would return my calls. It is now the night before the launch party and we still have no we don't have actually have an app to launch. So, I like literally have like my last $25,000 spent on this launch party with no app. I remember being literally like sitting we had a little co-working space and that night I was just like sitting on the floor like covered up my head in the in my jacket and just crying on the floor thinking like, wow, these last 2 years have been for like nothing. I've worked so hard and I'm going to launch an app tomorrow there's no App Store like there's 2,000 people are coming and there's no app. And then I went home that night and um, woke up the next morning and somehow miraculously uh, the app had been approved in the App Store. And so, we had the party that night. 2,500 people came. They all saw each other using the app. The next day people we made more matches than we'd made in the entire history of the app up until that point. And they had to download it to get in. They had to download it to get in. And that helped overcome I think you had to like jump-start the stigma cuz we had a lot of like the very like the cool people in the social scene in Washington D.C. coming and all downloading it in front of each other and talking about it. And so, the fact that it was like really really dead simple and the fact that everyone saw each other using it, I think like started to like jump-start and get over that stigma problem. And then we had like 400 people log in the next day and we're like, okay, wow, if you 400 people on their own came in. I mean, up until that point it was such a like literally a trickle of users coming into our like little app. Like I would I'd I remember I would like sit there and like look at the logs and people like a user would come in and like, oh, okay, like a there's a user using the app. And then we're like, okay, then he just clicked this button and like then he like passed and then and then he would leave and I'm like, okay, wait for the next user to come in like sitting just like watching the logs. So, hundreds of people coming the next day, few hundred more the next day, and then it just started to like build and build and build after that. Was it like a snowball effect? Yeah, it really was. And and once once we'd hit it with the with the product, it started to spread through word of mouth. Then people in D.C. started to tell their friends in New York and then we started to build up a waitlist there and then people in New York told their friends in San Francisco and they would like build the waitlist up there. And then we would start opening cities one at a time once we felt like we had enough liquidity. And how would you open those cities? Was it the same We'd throw another launch party. Like no, literally my life was just like throwing launch parties in cities like we would we would, you know, from Boston and San Francisco and um, New York and L.A. We were just like I remember 2012 well and there was that was kind of the golden age of apps in a way. I remember cuz we worked a lot quite a lot on um, on apps back then and uh, there wasn't many apps. The App Store was was grow felt like it was growing very quickly. I was, you know, people were discovering lots of new apps all the time. Feel like people are discovering less apps at the moment. I don't know if that's true or not, but it just felt like that was kind of the app boom moment. So, things like a launch party I can you know, I can see how those things would work then, but I I question whether people listening to this right now that have got an app and they've got $25,000 for a launch party and like that's that's what solves all their problems. Probably not. Yeah. So interesting. And then Tinder around that time starts to emerge a bit bit foot further on, right? Yeah, right about that time. So, right around the time we threw that launch party, I think Tinder had launched just a couple months prior out in L.A. So, almost the exact same time. We had a very similar model. They took off hugely and we started to grow as well. In fact, their growth helped our growth because it would like the category was emerging and now people were like um, seeing Tinder and Tinder was a was an app that was all about location and ours was all about friends of friends. And that was really the the main difference. But, as a result, people viewed Hinge as like this sort of like more serious intent dating app because it was friends of friends, people you meet at a house party or dinner or wedding, whereas like the other one was a little bit more of like a casual reputation and like meeting at a club. And as a result, all of a sudden the VCs who were telling me there's no way this market's totally saturated, now I was no longer begging for money. I was like turning away. There were people were trying to send like like trying to raise around at that point. Um, we went from like you know, begging for scraps to like raising almost a $20 million round where I was turning away money because I just couldn't take anymore. So, it really that changed the game. And was it a straight line up from there? Huh. Uh, no, definitely not. So, we had some good success in 2013, 2014. 2015 growth started to level out. Um, Tinder had definitely gotten successful. Beat us at the game of like overcoming stigma. Like that it was cool to use. It was cool it was it was quick. It was easy. It was fun. Ours was just like a Tinder copy that was friends of friends, but we weren't we were like the growth just like wasn't there and um, and more importantly though, around that time there was an article that came out in Vanity Fair called like the dawn of the dating apocalypse. It was all about how dating apps had destroyed dating culture and romance and and Hinge was featured like pretty heavily in that article. I always remember just thinking like, gosh, this is not what I like I built this because I like wanted a girlfriend. Like this is not what I what I wanted to build from a like a values perspective. I I remember going out with my my head of marketing at that time, her name was Katie, and I was I was about to head home for Thanksgiving and we sat at a little cafe in New York and I I was just telling her like, gosh, I I like I wish I could just start over from scratch. Like this is not the company I want to build. This is not what I want to do. And she's like, well, I mean, you're the CEO. Like what's stopping you? I went home and I thought about that and, you know, nothing was stop like what was stopping me? We just raised a big round. We had resources. And so, uh, I decided to reboot the company again. So, we first reboot 2012. Uh, this reboot let go of half the company and then threw out the old code base and built something new from scratch that would be about really helping people who wanted to find their person with like a long-term relationship brand and totally changed the user interface and the profiles and the whole flow and design it for people who actually like really want to find their person. If you hadn't have had that interview with Deborah from cafe.com Mhm. before, right? Yeah. Do you think you would have made that decision? Tell me about that interview with Deborah from cafe.com and how changed changed things for you. So, in 2014, someone reached out to me, her name was Deborah, and she had downloaded Hinge. She lived in New York. And the very first person that she that like we suggested to her, she liked and matched with and then fallen in love with. And so, she'd reached out and was like, how did you like I want to learn more about you, want to learn about your company. We were just, you know, we were getting popular in New York, but not hugely popular. So, we met up for an interview one day in Madison Square Park near my office and um, and I you know, I didn't have my I like it was dumb luck. Like I don't know the like the first person that happened to show up on her app. Like we didn't we didn't it was just we were lucky. But, as we chatted, um, you know, kind of a standard interview, at the very end of the interview, we were getting up and she's like, you know, one last question, have you ever been in love? And I was like, well, once a long time ago, but I, you know, I just didn't realize it until it was too late. And Deborah turns off the tape recorder and she's like, listen, I have to tell you a story. And she tells me the story of of how actually she sort of had this misconnection moment. She wasn't with someone that she had met much younger and they had found each other all these years later and realized they should have been together. And she was like, you know, you don't have to make the same mistake I did. Like you can still be with the one. You just have to do something dramatic. You have to just go over there and like pour your heart out and like put yourself on the line. And I was like, listen, lady, like you know, it's been almost 8 years since I've even seen her. It's it's kind of over. There's there's no way. That said, I was about to head over to the um, launch party for Hinge in London and I thought, okay, like I'll just shoot her one last note. And so, I reached out to her and I said, hey, I'm going to be in London. Would love 15 minutes just say hi and goodbye. It's just weird to think that we're never going to see each other again. And she wrote back and she was like, uh for the first time, so and and now another 4 years. And uh she was like, "Listen, I don't live in London anymore. I live in Switzerland, but um I'll be around this weekend and um happy to hop on the phone." So, I like got that message. I went to the airport. I got the I got a ticket to Switzerland. I got on a plane to Zurich. And um and she reached out the next day. She's like, "Hey, I'm around if you want to chat." And I'm like, "Great, cuz I'm going through customs in Zurich right now." And she agreed to meet me at a little cafe. And uh we sat down with each other. And I I think at that time I you know, part of me thought like I really want the girl back. Like this is it. And part of me thought like it's been 8 years. Like I've changed so much as a person. Like I'm sober now. I'm like running this company. Like she's with someone else now. And by the way, it was literally like a month away from getting married at that point. She was She had a fiance. She had a fiance, yeah. And and to be married in a month. Like uh so like on the verge of getting married. So, I thought we'd see each other and kind of just like laugh it off and glad we saw each other and and you know, I just did I honestly didn't know what was going to happen. It was like it felt but there was this hope in me that like, "Wow, maybe she really is the one. Maybe we'll like realize it." And we sat down at this little cafe and um and it was just like uh I think we both felt like an incredible amount of that connection that we'd always had. And we sat and we we talked for like 7 or 8 straight hours in this cafe. Never even got up to get a coffee. And at the end of that conversation she's like, "I think I'm calling off the wedding." And um And so uh about a week later she moved out of Zurich and moved from um back into back to New York into my like 300-sq-ft apartment in the West Village. And and my and this is a long way of getting back to your question, which is like how does this relate to Hinge and would I have done the reboot? Because here I am and I've like gotten the person. Like this is the person that I've always want like wanted. Like I finally got her back. And it was totally amazing for like a month or 2 or 3 months maybe max. And then the honeymoon period ended and we're two people living in this little tiny apartment together in New York who haven't seen each other in 8 years. And we've got to like start figuring each other out. And it wasn't perfect. And the part of me like I would have if I were just dating this person, I would have run, right? I would have like cut it off and been like, "Okay, like not the right person. Like it's not it's not perfect like I imagined it was going to be." But she'd called off this life. She like cut She you know, she'd left a her person. She'd left um her whole existence over there. So, I couldn't just like break up with her. And that's when I think the real work of the relationship started and like real intimacy and vulnerability and like love started to form. And I realized like I would have just passed over this person. And I think it just totally changed my my mentality of how a dating app should be designed. Because I think up until that point I thought you know, it's a it's a numbers game. You just got to like get through enough people and once you find your person, then it's then it's kind of happily ever after after that. And realizing that like how many people, you know, we all must just skate right past because we don't because we're not vulnerable, because they're not vulnerable and we failed to like make that connection. And so I wanted to like rebuild an app if it were really for a relationships, um you just it would be a very different kind of app. You would have to like have people slow down. You would have to have people be more vulnerable. You'd have to people share about themselves and put themselves on the line a bit more in order to form that initial connection. And so that was the foundation and sort of like the design principles for what we wanted to build with the new Hinge. Fairy tale endings are made for movies because there's a lot of work that happens when the credits after the credits roll. Totally. Yeah, we were just getting started. I had no idea. And you also when you talk about this new vision for Hinge, it's quite idealistic. You know, this idea of just being able to create an app where people slow down and they give more information and then more vulnerable. It tends to be the case that your ideal scenario for how humans behave isn't actually how they want to behave. Right. Especially these days because we're all we all believe things should be like quick and easy. And it's not quick and easy. You get you get out what you put in. And so we were always fighting this balance of like what people are willing to do and what they should do. You know, and and we were trying to to like we could of course build an app that's just like makes it like what people think that they want, which is like quick and easy and fun. But you have to slow people down, get them to put in a little bit more effort. And it's a real it's a real balance of of like getting people to be vulnerable as much as at least they can tolerate. And because the more that they are, the more effective their experience is, the better chance that they have of finding their person. How was that received when you come up with this new vision for Hinge, which is going to be slower, much more meaningful, and much more deeper, and really based on forming long-term connections? How was that received by people? Uh I think in theory it was celebrated, right? In theory I think people are like, "Yes, the world needs this kind of this kind of new thing. Like we definitely want something that's like a little bit less like fast food and more like you know, a nice nutritious meal when it comes to dating." You know, it was it was still hard to really get people like they like it in theory, but then they're like, "Wait, I have to fill out like three prompts? Like wait, I don't just swipe on people. I have to like like something about them? Um wait, if I like someone, they're just going to see it? Like you're just going to tell them? I have to add a comment and like say something about them?" So, it was like a lot to get people's head around who are used to something that was quite different. But it was effective. And that's what mattered the most. And you know, the that was a it was such a huge mindset and shift for us to stop thinking about user engagement and user retention and all these like classic metrics that you know, VCs look for when they look at like social media apps. And to just think, are we getting people out on more good dates or not? And that's going to be our North Star metric and we'll grow through word of mouth because people are actually going to go on good dates and they're going to tell their friends about it. And so that was our North Star. And so we didn't worry so much about like all those engagement metrics and you know, we didn't there weren't as many matches and there wasn't as much whatever engagement on the app. It was actually way more efficient and effective at getting people out on good dates. And so we launched this new thing. Our user numbers actually started to decline initially from the old version of the app. And what about money? Yeah, and so right about that time we're starting to we've burned through all that cash in order to build this new app and we're starting to run out. And so I went out to start fundraising again and telling the story of like, "Look at these like we were way more effective now. People love the product." But on the other hand, we used to have I don't know at the time 400, 500,000 users and now we're down to like 100,000, 150,000 users. And that's a pretty tough story to tell to venture capitalists. And But you're shrinking. Yeah, we're shrinking. But But we're going to grow because look at how amazing these and no one like really bought that story. And I was flying around everywhere talking to every VC. And I could talk to you know, at that point Hinge has gotten popular enough that any VC would like take my meeting and talk to me. But it was just I probably had 50 or 60 VC meetings and like not a single not a single yes. But at right on that time we also started talking to um Match Group. They saw they could see what I saw. They saw, "Wow, this is actually something that's different. It's differentiated and it has real promise." And so when we were down to like once again like days of cash, while like a week or two left of cash, we negotiated a a deal for like an initial investment from them. That would set the stage for them to eventually acquire the company. And between 2016 and 2019 when they acquired the company, what was growth like? Uh it was slow at first. 2016, 2017 we were kind of still figuring out the it was a completely new model. And so we were figuring out how to really make that new model work. And we were like you know, um tuning it. And around 2018 we felt like, "Okay, we've really started to like now people are really starting to love this app. It's starting to really grow through word of mouth." And and then we started to like pour on marketing money and at that point it was showing like how much that could accelerate the growth. And that's when Match Group invested. Hinge Labs. Mhm. What is Hinge Labs? I don't believe any other dating apps have something like Hinge Labs. Yeah, and it's all part of this idea that we want to build like we're just focus on user effectiveness. And does this actually get people out on good dates? And a huge piece of the you know, a dating app is is relatively unique. It's not just a piece of technology. It's you know, what what it's the people that are on there and how they're behaving and the technology. Like that's your experience as a user. It's not just like we it no matter how good we get at product and product design or whatever. Like we have to control for the behaviors of other people and making sure that we have the right people on who are behaving the right way. You know, we can only guide them so much with um you know, UX. We also have to like kind of coach people and guide people and teach people how to become better daters. And so, Hinge X or I'm sorry, Hinge Labs was developed to sort of study daters who are successful, study daters who are not successful, figure out what are the patterns, what do we see, and how can we help level up everyone to become better and more successful daters. And so, Hinge Labs really does, you know, deep dive research studies on just what is what makes daters successful, um and and gives us the fuel to be able to um build better product or build user guides, things like that. So, what makes daters successful? Makes dating successful? Yeah, like, you know, I've got friends that seem to be successful at dating and friends that are just those prolific serial daters that go on 100 dates a year and never seem to make any progress. Yeah. And also, are there like categories of daters that you talk about? You must have got like categories like the serial dater that's never going to be successful. They're just doing it for the fun of it. Yeah. like one-hit wonder. We We definitely have different profiles, but we Anytime we try to like just put people into discrete categories, it never works cuz people are complex and they have different Everyone's story is kind of unique. And so, it's hard to put people just like into buckets. Um and there are I think some general principles that I've learned and we've learned through Hinge Labs. And, you know, again, you had Logan here relatively recently. And if if people are interested, they should definitely go listen to her podcast because with you because it's like a master class in how to become successful in dating. Yeah. But, I would say like the more that you are willing to be honest and vulnerable and real, like the quicker you can find those connections and the higher quality connections that you're going to get. I think that's the kind of upshot and the way that we really try to design Hinge to help people maximize their success on that front. Why does that matter at a human level, being honest and vulnerable? Uh I think two reasons. One is that you get to an accurate assessment more quickly of someone, right? Like, if you're trying to be pretend to be someone you're not or you're just trying to be cool or get a lot of likes or whatever, people aren't seeing the real you. And they're going to eventually see the real you. So, the faster that you can just put like be clear about who you are and what you're looking for and what you want and what's not perfect about you, then I think the faster you're going to find someone who's like, "Yes, this is the type of person that I want to be with." And you're going to avoid all those people that were attracted to the kind of veneer that you'd put up, but then they get to know the real you and then that's not And then I'd say the second piece is that it gives people like hooks to grab onto. Like, there's just nothing to talk about with someone who's perfect and and invulnerable and invincible. Like, what do you like what do you have to say? Like, we connect over the the cracks of and the little imperfections. And that's how we connect and relate to one another. And so, you'll form a much better and deeper and quicker bond with someone when you open up like that versus try to impress. Okay, what about this then? So, if I wanted to be the world's worst dater, if I wanted to be the world's worst um most unsuccessful Hinge user or dating app user more generally, what would I have to do? Uh So, I've got your first point, which is about be really inauthentic. Pretend I'm perfect and use fake photos or you just portray myself in a way that's not authentic. of like filtered photos with you in sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of friends, one-word answers to your prompts, you know, just like everyone or no one or wait for likes to come to you. I think like that that's the kind of mentality they're trying to get people out of. We want to We want people to like fill out deeper Like, that's so much of our work is like helping people select better photos that show more of their personality, help people answer prompts, which are these short questions designed to get you into a conversation, and answer them thoughtfully uh to uh be really thoughtful with your likes because the more thoughtful you are with your likes, the better our algorithm gets cuz we actually understand who you like and who you don't like. So, don't just like you know. No, because then we can't we can't learn your taste, right? And we're not going to get closer and closer to the type of person that you like. Okay, interesting. And what about these um these serial daters? Cuz I've got some friends that are like those serial daters, literally 100 dates a year. And I'll sit with them and we'll chat and they'll tell me, "Oh, yeah, I've been on like three dates this week, etc." For those people, I'd love to be able to give offer them some advice. Thinking of one one of my friends in particular, who I know was is going to watch this. Yeah. I mean, I was one of those people, right? I mean, I was a person who um uh you know, constantly was I wouldn't necessarily just go on a whole lot of first dates, but I would go on a whole I'd had a whole lot of two- to six-week relationships. And um and then as soon as I would find something quote-unquote wrong or I wouldn't feel good in the relationship, then I was like, "Well, this doesn't work. Like, this is wrong." Cuz I think I had such a I such a fantasy about what a good relationship looked like. I like my model was totally broken. And I think for so many of us, we're like we're trying to fit like a model in our head with the real with the reality that we're trying to like match this reality to like some model in our head about what a good relationship is or should look like. And I think my model was like you know, it stays sexy and fun every single time we're together. Um we don't fight. There's never any You know, there's like I I think I just had this like very happily ever after moment in my mind. And so, I skipped over and passed over so much because it just didn't fit this like model I had in my head. And I think some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow. They have to be like over 6 ft and they need to work in this type of job and they need to be like this. And so, you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no because it doesn't fit your model. And I think the biggest thing is for us to um like change the model in our head that we're that like of like what we're trying to look for and like widen that aperture a bit and give people more of a chance and like see things through a bit more. People have to um people this high height thing you mentioned, the 6 ft thing, seems to be a lot of conversation because I think the vast majority of people the the vast majority of women, I imagine, would want someone that's more than 6 ft. Is that correct? Uh no, I don't I don't know if that's actually true. But, people like someone taller than them. Taller than them, okay. Yeah. Um 6 ft seems to just one example. I mean, I don't know about the height, but I think it's just the point is like we have very specific and narrow models. And I think a lot of people who end up in successful relationships say, Mhm. "This isn't uh you know, if I were making a shopping list and like you know, writing down all my like little features that I'm looking for in a partner, like this person didn't necessarily that like I would have I would have missed this person." There's a website, isn't there? I can't remember the name of it, but you go on there and you say what you're looking for in a partner and it shows you your statistical probability of finding that person. Okay. Yeah, I don't know about that, but yeah, I think if people saw that It's horrifying. Yeah, it'd be pretty horrifying like how you're cutting out 98% of people based on your criteria. The salary, the height, the way um the race you put on there. And then it shows you it goes like you have a 0.0% chance of finding this person. right. Um and you obviously want them to be single as well as another criteria. Um which I find interesting. One of the things people say about dating apps and like dating app companies and founders and CEOs is they want people to stay single because then you've got more customers. Mhm. And surely, if every if you have this metric where people are becoming um they're getting married, you're losing customers. Yeah. So, our belief on that, which has always been um we we like our motto our our tagline is designed to be deleted. And that came from, by the way, we were working with a branding agency and they were like, "What's Hinge's stick? You know, like what makes you different? Like, you're Tinder, but what?" And I was like, "I don't There's no gimmick. Like, there's no like, 'Oh, we're Tinder, but like X or Tinder, but Y.'" Like, every single part of the app is like designed to be different and like designed to help get people out on great dates. And that's kind of where this like designed to be deleted, which by the way was like there's so much debate internally about that cuz it's so it sounds so technical like design like in your own tagline like designed to be like that and it's people won't understand it. But, we kind of went with it because it's the only thing that really represented what makes Hinge um really different. And what does that mean? And it means that do we get people out on great dates or not? And that's what's driven every design decision and why Hinge looks different than all the other apps is like that optimization function. And so, in terms of a business model, the belief is that like we will grow through word of mouth, which is the most effective and efficient and cost-effective way to grow if we just create more great dates and more relationships. And the thesis is like as long as there are single people in the world, which I'm pretty sure there are plenty of single people left in the world, that they'll want to use Hinge, which feels more like a utility that's truly effective versus like perhaps what something that feels like a little bit more like a game. Since the company started, have you seen any changes in the dating environment, the dating landscape, dating culture? Yeah. Yeah, Gen Z, for lack of a better term, has different dating patterns. I think in some sense, like when I started Hinge, people were There was a lot of stigma around dating apps because um uh people just didn't use them at all. Then I feel like everyone started to use them and it became sort of the default way to meet people. And I think this is why we've actually like Hinge's growth has accelerated so much even recently. Is that there actually is a desire to move away from the sort of like quick hit, superficial Swipe, swipe, swipe. Yeah, yeah, and moving to something that's People are willing to share more about themselves and be more like I think like Gen Z's generally willing to like, you know, it's like the Tik Tok instead of the Instagram kind of feel of being vulnerable, putting yourself out there. You don't have to look so polished and so perfect. And that's actually great for for uh dating cuz that's exactly the kind of ethos that we actually need for people to be successful. And Hinge, as I was reading, is got these sort of five first principles. What is the um current company mission statement? Well, so the we want to foster intimate connection to create a less lonely world. And a lot of social We'll call them like social networks. They started social networks. We're also I think had a similar mission. Like you wanted to get you connected to the people who matter most to you. And they've all kind of like like they all became social media companies instead because it turns out that like brands and influencers and outrageous people are just more interesting than your friends. And it's easier to get you to spend more time in app and more time looking at ads if we like show you much more sensational content than than like you know, real um like creating real moments of connection with the people who matter most to you. And that's what I wanted to drive home like really clearly in our mission is that like Hinge at its core, even if we were expanding new business lines or do something in the future, like we are a company about intimate connection, about one-to-one deep connections between people and we don't ever want to deviate from that as our core cuz it's really what the world needs right now. First principle two, radical trust. So you've got designed to be deleted. Number two is radical trust. Yeah. Which means? So radical trust is our commitment to And so these cultural principles that you're reading off came from this book um called How We Do Things. And so when I when we rebooted the company in 2015, beginning of 2016 we um at that point I didn't think about company culture. Kind of thought oh, it was just like it's just we're a bunch of people in a room trying to solve problems. Like that's And we were only 30 people. So culture just kind of emerges naturally among that group of people. It really rotates around the founder. But I didn't think consciously about it. When we did that reboot, we we let go of half the company. We took the remaining half and we went and did an offsite and we did a a breakdown and a really had like some really honest at times tearful conversations about like what had gone wrong. What did we do right? What What didn't we do right? What do we wish we had done better? Um and a a lot of them were of course like product decisions. Like oh, we focused too much on the competition and copying the competition and not focusing enough on our customer. But a lot of it was like how we operated as a company. And coming out of that, we actually started a like open source Google Doc that listed our kind of what we believed and how we think sh- things should should get done around Hinge. And originally it was just like a long doc of just all kinds of principles. It was me just trying to like put my management algorithm like down and on piece of paper so that everyone was very clear about how I made decisions and how we should all make decisions and how we should prioritize and what we should do. So then eventually as Hinge got a little bit bigger and we started to you know, have more than 100 employees that model didn't make as much sense anymore and we put it in this book called How We Do Things, which was at that point just a list of all our lesson It's really about It's a story of our lessons learned. It's like we did it all the wrong ways and that led us to learn to do it the right way. And so that's where just to give the context on where these principles came from. So designed to be deleted was like we used to focus on the competition and focusing on like what features our competitors had. When we did the reboot, we just focused on you know, making our one metric getting people out on great dates and I like prohibited people from looking at the competition. I didn't want any of their apps on my phone. Like I just just focus on novel innovation in service of our customer. Radical trust was about a lot of the decision-making was like very top-down and um and I think people felt disempowered. They felt a lot of whiplash and radical trust was about how do you push decision-making down to the front lines? And how do you empower people with the information that they need? So have a lot of transparency from the top down about like where we are as a business, what our needs are, what our problems are so that people on the front lines can go solve it. Love the leap. Love the leap is this idea that small incremental optimizations can be can be great, but real uh the the things that matter require like a level of um a much bigger innovation leaps and we have to not be afraid of failure because when you make those much bigger innovation leaps, a lot of them like won't of course land or you have to I think even more importantly trudge through a whole lot of failure to finally get to success. I think there's a culture of like that comes from people especially who have worked in tech companies and much larger tech companies of like oh, you just test and iterate. Like you test this thing and then if it works, great. And then if it doesn't, then you just like move on and try the next thing. I think the difference between that and then the way that like often a founder and entrepreneur will think is like I believe in this thesis and I'm going to get there no matter what and if I had like I mean think about how many iterations of Hinge I had to eventually get to the successful Hinge. If I just been like oh, I'm thinking about building a dating app. I'll throw something out there and see if people use it. Oh gosh, they're not really using it. I guess a dating app's not a good idea. I'll go like build a you know, whatever uh a car hailing app. You have to like trudge through that. So that's Love the Leap is like you have to suffer through a lot of failure to make like the big innovation leaps. Do you see a variance in even your team members, but other people you work with, they're biased towards failure? They're at different failure appetites. Yeah, and it gets harder and harder as you get bigger and and bigger and you're fighting against like larger cultural inertia. Like and this is very human by the way to like not make mistakes and not um look bad. And that's why by the way this whole book is written as like here's all the mistakes that we made and how we did it all wrong just to give people the permission know like we're all works in progress. We're all trying to learn. Um so you are overcoming like a much larger cur- cultural inertia to get people to take risks and and make mistakes. How do you do that? Uh you exhibit failure from the top. Like you admit I think when you've when like when you've made mistakes like when I've made mistakes or even talking about you know, my development plan or things that I'm working on. I just think it is like you almost all of these cultural attributes have to be modeled from the very top. Super interesting. Cuz most people are just incentivized to just do their job. So when you bring along a a new idea or a new innovation you know, incentive structures mean oh, listen, I'm not getting paid to take that [ __ ] risk and then maybe be made to look stupid. Yeah. So I'm not doing that. Yeah, I think that's right. And that's why I think we're and we're continuing to evolve these principles and and and refine them. In fact, we're going through a process right now. It's kind of ironic cuz we're we're walking through these and I'm about to release a new version of these to the company and there has been a bit of a refinement and we're actually kind of changing this one and combining it with the first one to call it Love the Problem because so much of about what we're really trying to get across through this is that you have to go like really deep and develop a deep thesis on a problem and that's what you do I think at this stage of a company. You don't take like wild leaps based on the intuition of a founder anymore. You like do deep research on a problem. You get conviction around it and then you're not afraid to like fail again and again trying to solve that problem because you are convinced that it's a real problem and you understand a lot about it and you're making a very informed decision You're taking a very thoughtful approach to solving it. Number four was and it currently is in my iPad here, guided by principles. And that one's definitely staying and that's one of the biggest um uh my own personal journey and I would say like this journey and it just it it's sort of what I talked about when I talked about how this got created in the first place is that if you keep making the same mistakes over and over again and you're not having an honest self-assessment about where you are and how things are working, you won't get better. And so both of my own personal journey and this has happened through you know, recovery through alcohol and addiction and getting better and better as an entrepreneur is like I was always self-reflecting and thinking about like okay, like seeking feedback. Like what didn't go well there? What did go well there? How can I do that better next time? And it became like I said, too arduous for me to even to track all these things in my mind. So I started putting them in that Google Doc so that everyone at the company could hold me accountable to this like management algorithm I was developing. And what I wanted us is to do as a company is always make decisions based on principles. Like what's the underlying reason? Like if I'm making a decision, no one should ever think well, that's just cuz Justin likes it that way or that's just because some other leader at the company, that's just what they want. So let's just do it their way. We want people to think like to understand like how am I making these decisions? What's underneath that? What principles do I believe in that made me to choose this over that? Because if you make that really explicit and clear, then you gain trust, people understand like why you're making the decisions, and two, they can start making decisions on their own without you needing to be in the room, and start developing their own principles for how they make decisions. And so so many of our meetings start off with like, well, here are the principles that we sort of aligned on as we started to make, you know, think about this body of work. And it just aligns everyone on the um What's the What are What are What was the like the core set of assumptions and beliefs and values that we have before we get into the details of the work. And that kind of counteracts the whole CEO because I said so, you know, vibe, which might get, I guess, um might get compliance, but it probably won't deliver upon whatever someone calls leadership. Yeah, it's not scalable. And maybe some CEOs always know the right thing to do, but I don't always know the right thing to do. I I think my job, once we got past 20 or 30 people, which by the way, I didn't know the right thing to do even when we were that small, but I thought I did. Um but as we got much bigger, like I can't be close enough to the to the information to like make really great decisions. And so my job primarily is is building and fostering the culture that makes good decisions. I've been thinking a lot about company culture, and I threw this at Brian Chesky when he was here. This idea of how you create company culture. Like how do you decide? I think some people think, especially post-pandemic, which caused all of these companies and businesses to start thinking about what their company culture was way. You'd see CEOs and managers almost like brainstorming a principle-less culture. And it was more like how What days do you want people to come in? Mondays and Wednesdays? Should we say Tuesdays two days a week, one day a week? Should we, you know, um And that just doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel like it's based on anything. So I said to Brian, I said, one of the things I'm thinking about is maybe culture is already there, and you just kind of have to reverse engineer it from the problem you're trying to solve in the world. Which means, for example, if we want to be the best dating app in the world, then there's a set of behaviors we're going to have to exhibit to get there, which is going to require a set of values. And then with those values, we're going to use those values to create systems, processes, and hire the people that we need. And so you can almost reverse engineer your mission as a company um backwards to figure out what your culture is. You said something about like you're just describing the culture that already exists. And I think that's kind of true, especially if you do it early enough where it's not out of control yet. Um when it's like relatively close around the founder, you've only got like 30 or 40 or 50 people, then you definitely have some sort of culture. And at that point though, I think you want to start defining defining it so that everyone's clear on what it is, cuz it will start you'll start losing as it starts expanding and people start It's a game of telephone, right? And it will like it will get lost over time. So you want to get really clear on like what it is. I think it's the the best of what is as well, right? Cuz I think you're you're trying to like articulate when we're at our best, this is how we're acting. And when we're at our worst, this is how we're acting. Cuz both are always happening within a company, like and you don't want to you want to constantly prune away the stuff that's not that's sort of not great, and start having more on people replicate what is great. So it's that It's more like a pruning process, and not just like a here's our culture, like describe it and and put it out the door. But you On the other hand, you can't just like throw it up on a wall and invent it from scratch. Like once an organization is big, you can't just say like, our culture suddenly is going to be X, Y, and Z. It'll be so inauthentic to what's actually going on on the ground that no one would ever follow it. I almost think about like parenting in a way. Like you can tell a kid a rule or tell a kid like a but you always have to be watching and like giving those little guidances like here and there. You always have to be giving those little nudges when you see when you see people acting with in accordance with the culture and praising it or not in accordance with the culture and giving them constructive feedback. Cuz it's such It's this living, breathing thing. Like defining it is just like one one step, but a very important step. And as the company grows and scales, I was thinking about this idea of um the best of what is. Is it possible that the best of what is when there's 10 of you, and you're potentially sleeping under a table like the stereotype goes, is not going to be the right culture for when there is like 200 of you? Yeah, totally. And you know, the the book you're reading from right now is when we were, you know, 50 to 100 people. And and now we're 300 and something people, and and we're evolving them, and we're actually changing some of them because I've learned things over time that like no longer work at a company this big. I'll give you an example. One is that idea of radical trust, which we just talked about, which actually kind of pained me to talk about because that's not I've learned that's like not right for a company this big anymore. You want to push decision-making down somewhat, but if you do it too much, especially in a larger organization, you start getting like a lot of silos and everyone just doing micro-optimizations. And there's there's you actually want to be there needs to be much more of a conversation. And actually watch the the the Brian interview when he talks about pulling decision-making in. And that actually is, I think, more in line with where you have to be if you want to stay innovative and still think like a startup even at a big scale. So there's things that I took for granted, because when we were 100 people, that was happening already, but I didn't see it because I just had I knew everyone's name. We were all in the same room, and so there was a lot of CEO and executive team influence on the team that that was kind of hidden cuz it just happened naturally. So we thought we were pushing decision-making down. However, I was I was in conversation with junior developers and junior engineers and junior designers all the time giving them like little nuggets of feed like I was like I was involved, just not officially. And I think as we got much bigger, we realized like, oh gosh, you can't just like push decision-making down and like hope for the best. You have to like pull it people in and coordinate. And there are people at the top that have a view across what's going on across the whole company that need to actually be making decisions. We can't just like push it down. Just to be super clear on that for someone who is, you know, in their first month of business, um pulling decision-making in in that regard is empowering people to make decisions, but those decisions coming again through the central lens of the company's mission. When you're really small, it's it's it's happening already, right? If you're If you're a team of 10 people or 12 people, like you're all aware of what each other are doing, you're talking, and you're being conscious about if I'm the marketing person and the and the product person over here working on this product feature, I I'll think like, oh, I should probably market that product feature. Like I There's just this like understanding of what's going on. So you are making You're like set kind of a hive mind. You just take that for granted. And as you get much bigger, you can either make you know, I think the extremes are you you just have like a founder who makes all the decisions. Everything just gets brought into them. Which I think makes a lot of people feel disempowered. And the other hand, you push decision-making completely down, and you say, you all just handle it. I'll just articulate the high-level vision and strategy, and you But then you usually don't make great sort of uh interdisciplinary or major cohesive leaps that are that feel cohesive. Everything starts like So it's this balance of having just like a constant conversation, opportunity for feedback. I still Ultimately, the decision-makers are the people who are close to the work. However, we are like pulling it in and articulating strategy and and generating conversation. I'm in the room with more junior people a lot now than I Frankly, more now than I used to be, so that we can continually um bring people along on what the strategy is, what are the big leaps we're making, and what are all the little ways that we keep this cohesive. It's interesting because in the age of the internet, um and the age of dating apps and all these other tools and technologies, even though we have better internet connections, the stats continue to show that we're getting lonelier and lonelier. Yeah. Which is a word you used central to your mission, the word loneliness. 52% of Americans report to feeling lonely, and 57% of Americans report to eating their meals alone, etc. So something's clearly failing, isn't it? Something's clearly not working in this pursuit of connection and social connection and social media, etc. Yeah, and I think So loneliness has been a problem that I think has been creeping up on us for a while, but it's really started to accelerate in the last few years. And if you look at you know, I've seen charts that show like time spent together in real life with friends and time spent consuming media consuming like digital media on apps. And it's like over the last like 20 years, the one is almost completely displaced the other. We used to spend hours a day with friends in real life on average, um and make like having genuine connections, seeing and being seen. And now, people are virtually almost always consuming some form of digital media or they're working. So even when you're at the gym, you're probably like listening to, you know, a uh like whatever, like a music or a podcast, or you are with that, Justin. Nothing wrong with that. Listen, that get rid of my cuz we're not designed to be deleted every day. you're because because you're conscious I mean, so in I'm not saying all media consumption is bad. I'm saying that like when you are But when you're pulled in all day and it's completely displaced, like you're no longer talking with friends because you're just like doomscrolling on social media platform X, Y, or Z, you've you've really we've really lost something, and I think it's that, I think, more than anything has led to this like crisis level acceleration in in loneliness. I'm so interested in the disparity between men and women in dating. We've had lots of conversations over the years on this podcast about this, but even in your app, you see a big disparity between like the bottom 50% of men or the bottom group of men on dating apps and like the top one or two percent of men on dating apps. I'm going to be completely honest. Much of the reason why I never used dating apps is I had no success. Mhm. I would get like no good matches. I was a 18, 19, 20-year-old kid that had nothing, was super scruffy, had no money. I had no chance on these apps. And I had this best friend called Logan Mhm. who looks like he comes out of like a Calvin Klein ad. We were both broke. Yeah, yeah. But he could go on those apps and he would he would clean up. And I look over at him and I think, "Jesus Christ, like what's left for me?" I genuinely believe, and people might find this quite shocking, in my life, I've been on five dates. Mhm. In my entire life. My strategy is I go all in. So, the minute my current girlfriend said she wanted to go on a date with me, I pulled up an Excel document and it was a three-day like itinerary. I just I just went all in. I've only been on five dates in my life. But I but I emphasize with men that really struggle with dating apps and have become disillusioned. In fact, when we had, I think it was Whitney Wolfe Herd on from Bumble, um I was really surprised because those men showed up in the comment section Mhm. and they felt like they've been forgotten about. So, uh it's a big I mean, it's a big focus for us and we I mean, part of this is like larger cultural forces that I think are at work, but um part of it are things that we can really address, I think, within dating apps. And some people are just good at dating apps and some people, I think, are quite datable, but they're just not good at dating apps. And I think I think the question is like how do we help really make it a much more focused quality over quantity experience. How do we help the people that are struggling? And this is where I actually think a lot of the promise of of what's being unlocked through AI and generative AI is going to like really help us coach people who aren't finding success and help them find better success and create matches that are much more like quality over quantity. I mean, that when we rebooted Hinge, we wanted to make it more quality over quantity. And we went from a world where people used to like it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date, and then the new Hinge it took about 50 likes. So, we made a big leap back then in terms of helping people get on on good dates. I think now with AI, I think there's like a whole other leap of focus in terms of learning about you, learning about who's out there, helping match people up in a in like a really nice one-to-one way, and you don't feel like you're in this like very crowded room where you know, some every all the attractions, you know, are all the attention's going to just a certain group of people. And so, I think there is a like I think the future's getting brighter for us to be able to solve that problem. What are the what is that disparity? I read, and this might not be accurate, um 2021 study by Hinge found that the top 1% of men on the app receive more than 16% of all of the likes, while the top 1% of women receive just over 11%. This indicates a significant disparity in the level of attention men and women receive on dating apps. And similar things from Bumble, um a 2022 study by Bumble found that men send an average of 13 messages per day on the app, while women only send roughly three messages per day. This suggests that men are putting in significantly more effort to initiate conversations on dating apps. And then more broadly from that, we've had people on this podcast like Scott Galloway that talks about how the very top 10 10% or the top group of men having all the sex and basically there's this kind of like disillusion, disenfranchised group at the bottom of men who are having no sex and are aren't finding relationships, are not having intimate connection. And it's that group of men that he says are the most dangerous of all cuz they're like lonely, broke, disillusioned young men. Mhm. We still have work to do to there's like a major opportunity to help those people that are struggling to find their person by helping them zero in better on the person that they like and and the person who will like them back, helping them put their best foot forward and make sure that they are not shooting themselves in the foot by like choosing the wrong photos or like not putting getting one-word answers on prompts or any of those types of things. So, that I think is the the key is like so like a a big effort at at Hinge right now internally, we're calling it flatten the power curve, but it's it's it's essentially that. It's like how do you help the people who aren't getting to success? How do you level them up to get to success? And then how do you focus the people so that um there's not that kind of like power curve behavior on in society and on dating apps. We think we can actually correct what's going on and more largely in society through dating apps. And so I'm clear, we do that by coaching people to be better at dating apps, basically like picking better pictures, understanding better ways to reply. We do that by helping them match with people that are more suitable to them and that are more likely to Yeah, and I think giving like better, more warm introductions so that people have a people have more focus and more of a chance. And you also limit like what's going on in terms of um people sending too many likes or matching too much and getting them to focus on the people that they actually really want so that you don't over-engage the rest of the user base. Is there a challenge in getting people to go from the app to the real world? Cuz I would I would always be super scared of that. Yeah, I mean, there's uh that's the whole point of our app and that's very much what we're like pushing people towards. Um but yeah, I mean, the whole the whole funnel is a challenge in terms of getting, you know, getting people to sign up, getting people to like create profiles, getting people to like move from a match to conversation and conversation to date. You mentioned AI, big topic of conversation this year, of course. Um generative AI and how that might be able to help people find their person. I mean, the conversation around AI and relationships and dating has always been quite pessimistic because people are thinking about sex robots and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that's not the that's certainly not going to be what Hinge is working on. How how can you use AI to You mentioned it briefly there, but I want to make sure I'm clear. How specifically? You can give me feedback. Kind of like Whoop does. They have that they've released their AI feature. one level of it is like just thinking like how do you make the the dating app experience better? How do you help people build better profiles? How do you help coach people through the conversation process and help them move them off to a date? So, you can certainly like coach people, be like, "Hey, you should choose these types of photos or whatever." Like all that is possible with AI. What I think like the bigger leap though is to move much closer to what feels like a matchmaker model. And that I think starts to solve some of the problems that that what you were just talking about where it's less like you're just sitting there evaluating and that that whole idea of like creating a profile, matching, trying to chat, trying to move it off to a date. Like when you work with a matchmaker, you just have an interview and they learn who you are. They go out and interview other people and they say, "Hey, we think you all should meet. We'll set up the date. And then after the date, I'm going to follow up to see how it went and provide some feedback." Interesting. we can get closer and closer to that model where we're like going almost straight to setting up dates that are with a much higher likelihood of success than sort of leaving it on the user to create a personal advertisement for themself and, you know, do all the work to sort of find through people that are going to like them, that are going to that will like them back, etc. The word company, by definition, means group of people. Um you talk about hiring in your principles quite often and just generally in this book. Principle number five here is people with heart. Hire people who embody the core values. I I I've come to learn, longer I've been in business, that hiring is really central to everything. Um culture being the thing that binds those group of people together, but what have you learned about hiring and what would your message be to maybe your younger self that is 2012, when you were relaunching the new Hinge? What would you say to that guy that you know now about hiring? We made a whole lot of hiring mistakes in the beginning and um and it was still it we sort of did it like we did the principles, which is we looked at, "Okay, who are the people who have succeeded at Hinge? What are their attributes? Who are the people who have not succeeded at Hinge and like what are their attributes?" And then we started to just create attributes for like who like who succeeds and who doesn't. And then we started to design an interview, which we call the culture interview, which still everyone goes through at Hinge, which is essentially like assesses for those attributes. And um that led to a dramatic increase in success, making sure that we, you know, when people came, they didn't quit or weren't fired within their first year. And um now we have extraordinarily low attrition at Hinge, especially voluntary attrition. Um and I think it's because we focus so much on making sure we get people in who have those values. And then once you have people in who have those values and they're all around other people who have those values, it's like a place they want to stay because it feels it they feel so aligned with the people that they work with. And if there was if you had to get rid of every value but keep one, when it comes to hiring a Hinge person, which one would you keep? Our three core values are authenticity, and courage, and empathy. That's like and it and they are a bit of a trifecta because one without another is like is very imbalanced, I think. So, um you want people to be authentic. You don't want them to like be so authentic and so blunt that they like are rude and mean to people, right? There's that the level of empathy. But I think like those two values especially that like authenticity, showing up, being who you are, saying what's on your mind, and that level of empathy is ultimately what builds trust. And I think trust like within an organization is really the lifeblood of the organization. And those two values I think build more trust than anything else. They're like the two ingredients of a great relationship. 10 years from now we sit here and we have another conversation and we talk about what Hinge is, the impact it's had on the world. What do you tell me? I think the the next-level impact that we can have in terms of shaping dating culture and coaching and teaching people to become not just better daters, but like we become it's better better people, really. And coaching people how to like have more harmonious relationships, form better relationships. Like I think there's so much opportunity to guide people on that process. And and so the idea that 10 years from now we like really shaped dating culture in a way that just made everyone more successful. That I think is like the vision for where where we're headed. As you know, Whoop are sponsors of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company. And last month I had the chance to sit down with Kristen Holmes. She's the VP of performance at Whoop and I learned so much from our conversation about circadian rhythms and things like sleep. Study show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that you accrue, that your decision-making ability will drop by up to 10%. And when you're chronically underslept, you'll only be a fraction of the person, the fraction of the boss, partner, friend, manager that you can be. That's why I'm obsessed with Whoop, which not just tracks, but coaches you on how to get better at sleep so you can bring your best to everything that you choose to do. If you're not convinced, you can try Whoop for 30 days completely risk-free with zero commitment just by going to join.whoop.com/ceo. That's join.whoop.com/ceo. And let me know how you get on. If you don't like it, there's no commitment. Join.whoop.com/ceo. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for. And the question that's been left for you is if you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to your 10-year-old self, what would it be? Ah. Well, what comes to mind if I could have impressed on myself that like uh you are I mean impressed on myself that idea of intrinsic worth. If I could have like let myself know that I was worthy no matter what, regardless of like who dumped me or who ostracized me. Um that's what I wish. In some sense I wish I could have understood and then on the other sense it's like shaped my entire life and is the reason that I have Hinge and the reason that I have Kate. So I think maybe the advice I would give is just buckle up. Because it's going to be a really wild ride and it it uh it um you know, does have a way of working out in the end. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure. You've built a really incredible company and you've built a different business. And that's that's so evident in the product that is Hinge. In a market where there's a lot of people doing the same obvious thing, going for the low-hanging fruit. It was so clear to me from a very long distance that at some point someone was being guided by first principles. Mhm. Because you went an an obvious route which has turned in your favor as society has evolved and we've got sick of surface-level things and people are dissatisfied with not actually the promise of these apps not being realized which was you told me you were going to help me find love. Yeah. And I'm still using and swiping on this app three or four years later and feeling despair, maybe even feeling worse than I did when I started. But Hinge took a different route and when you describe Hinge to someone, you say it's an app that cares more about meaning, that cares more about fostering deep connections, and that as you say in your own words, slows things down a little bit so you can take the time to find a much more um real, authentic, potentially successful bond than the rest of the dating market. And that's why Hinge has always been I think has always represented the future. Because at the end of the day people are coming on these apps to find love. And it's clear to me, this whole designed to be deleted thing, that and from everybody that I've met at Hinge, that that is a promise you are genuinely trying to deliver upon. Yeah, I mean it's totally true. And that idea of first principles is exactly right. I think you have to just like rethink from the ground up like how would I build this and stop thinking like oh, other apps do this, we'll do this with this twist. And that I think is what initially you don't find success through that path cuz everyone's like well, this is different, this is weird. There's no blueprint. Right. And um but over time that like the the compound interest that comes from actually building an effective product that grows through word of mouth is is you just And now today Hinge is, you know, the fastest-growing major dating app, we're the number one app in the UK and Australia and and quickly growing in in Europe to become like a top dating app in in Europe. So it's it pays off eventually. You have to be very patient. I see that in Great Ormond Street, you know, I see it sort in the Whoop founder. These unobvious decisions that they made because they're so guided by their first principles, usually based on the founder's personal experience. And that's what I see in Hinge. So thank you for creating an app that I consider to be a really great one and a really important one. And being someone who's driven to end loneliness ultimately and bring people together cuz it's never been more important than it is now. Thank you, Justin. Thank you. Quick one from one of our sponsors. A lot of you have asked me the question about Huel over the years about where Huel fits into your life. Is it the most healthy choice one can make when they're thinking about what their nutrition. And here's what I would say to all of those people. I think in an ideal world, I would be able to sit down and cook and prepare all of my meals. I think that would be my ideal option. But it because of the nature of my life, because I'm moving around often, what used to happen before Huel was I'd end up making bad choices. I'd end up snacking, I'd have junk food options on the go because I was busy and my nutrition would come second to whatever my professional priority was. What Huel allows you to do is to have a healthier option on the go that is convenient, that contains a lot of the nutrients that you need to have a complete diet. And that's exactly where it fits in my life. They've now expanded the range. If you haven't yet checked out the Huel RTD, I highly recommend you do. Go to your local Tesco, Boots, or Sainsbury's or online and you can grab and try one there. Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it.