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we've done deep dive research studies on how can we help everyone to become more successful daters so what makes data
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successful So the faster that you can the faster you're going to find someone who's like yes this is the type of
00:00:12
person that I want to be with Justin McLoud the founder and CEO
00:00:17
of the fastest growing dating app hinge I built hinge because I wanted a girlfriend but we had to suffer through
00:00:23
a lot of failure to finally get to success why does the world need another dating app I think it just needs one
00:00:29
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
00:00:36
worst dating app user what would I have to do a lot of filtered photos with you and sunglasses are hanging out with a
00:00:42
lot of friends one-word answers to your prompts just like everyone and what about serial datas some of us have
00:00:48
models in our head that are exceedingly narrow they have to be over 6ot and need to work in this type of job and so you
00:00:54
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
00:01:01
AI the conversation around Ai and relationships has always been quite pessimistic sex robots and stuff yeah
00:01:06
that's certainly not going to be what a Hing is working on the bigger leap though is to move
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much closer to a Matchmaker model and setting up dates with a much higher likelihood of success it's happening
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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
00:01:25
in the dating culture yeah in order to get on a date people need to know this so
00:01:32
quick one this is really really fascinating to me on the back end of our YouTube channel it says that
00:01:38
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00:01:43
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00:01:55
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00:02:02
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
00:02:09
[Music]
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deal Justin what is your job title I'm
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the founder and CEO of hinge and to quantify what hinge is and the impact it
00:02:28
has on the world how many people use as a product its reach can you give me some color towards that uh well I I can say
00:02:35
that today we're setting up a date about every two seconds so every other second someone's going on a date because of
00:02:41
hinge um we've created millions of relationships and I'd say marriages at
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this point the scale is far beyond I think what I imagined when I when I started this thing I probably need to
00:02:54
understand you a little bit better because it's so abundantly clear from all the CEOs that I've interviewed that that there's often a series of catalyst
00:03:02
moments that send them on the path indirectly I mean it's like the first Domino that falls in their life that
00:03:08
brings them to be sat here today for us to be talking about it what are those first dominoes in your life that film I
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I don't think there are a number of them that probably like ended up defining my my life I was an only child um had a
00:03:23
entrepreneur father who had ran a small business and um and my mom worked for my
00:03:29
dad I sort of naturally as a kid good at math I was good at computer science uh I
00:03:36
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
00:03:43
piece because I I wanted I like was desperate to be cool as desperate to fit in and that actually became like a huge
00:03:50
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
00:03:57
you know it was I would say the overachieving part of me started to slip away and I kind of just doubled down on
00:04:04
the uh drinking and drugs and partying my freshman year at the end of my
00:04:09
freshman year I thought to myself like gosh you know like I haven't been to bed sober since school began like not one
00:04:16
single night and maybe I have a problem like maybe something's going on here so
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I I voluntarily went in to see this drug an alcohol counselor it's like very sweet woman named Jane and she listened to me
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empathetically and heard me out and she was like Justin you know I I think that you probably have a pretty serious
00:04:34
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
00:04:41
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
00:04:48
ignored that and went about the the partying um but I had some inkling at
00:04:53
that point that like probably something was not good you went to rehab eventually I did
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I had to spend my summer in rehab after my freshman year in order to even come back to school because I I would I'd
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still get in trouble a lot at like with campus safety or whatever getting caught drinking or uh and I'd been written up
00:05:14
so many times that I actually got referred back to that same drug and alcohol counselor for an assessment and she's like well I've already actually
00:05:19
assessed this kid he clearly has a problem so I had to spend my summer in rehab in order to even come back my
00:05:26
sophomore year so many people I've spoken to had an alcohol addiction at some point in their life speak about the
00:05:31
12 step program and the role that that played in them turning their lives around did you when did did you learn
00:05:37
about the 12 step program at alen did it help I did and I would occasionally go to meetings and they were
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like people from the town like no one no no one from like college was going to these I was literally the only college
00:05:49
student I did stop drinking the the and the day that I graduated from college
00:05:56
and um and 12-step programs was like a huge piece of of my recovery after that
00:06:02
time why that day I woke up that morning after being out at a party the
00:06:09
night before was graduating that day I'd gotten a okay job in Washington DC where
00:06:15
I was going to move in the and once School ended but I just remember thinking to
00:06:21
myself like that the steering wheel in my life was broken that's kind of how I and I
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think that gets back to your sort of enslavement idea or that you just don't have have control anymore like I envisioned my life going like this
00:06:32
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
00:06:38
friendships I wanted all these things and yet every day it was like one more drink right one more drug and tomorrow
00:06:46
I'll like start putting my life together and I've been telling myself that for years at that point and I remember
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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
00:06:59
out 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
00:07:06
the job that I wanted right I wanted I wanted to go work at uh you know Goldman Sachs in banking which is the and that's
00:07:13
just like what the I was a mathematical economics major and that's what all like the top math econ Majors went and
00:07:19
did and and I didn't I didn't get the job I got some like you know decent job
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at some management consulting firm that no one's ever heard of in Washington DC and uh I'd lost the girl which we
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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 was just
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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
00:07:45
it when did you meet Kate I met Kate the basically like
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literally the day I got out of rehab I like got out of rehab at 8 p.m. one night in Louisville Kentucky I Drove All
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Night back to school and uh and I woke up the next day and decided to celebrate
00:08:03
getting out of rehab by going out and partying and drinking and uh Kate found me passed out in a stairwell like on the
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landing of a stairwell uh the first day of my sophomore year was her first day of school first day of her freshman year
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later in that year we had a class together we started sitting together we started get to know each other and we just had this incredible like magnetic
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connection when you reflect on meeting her and and how you felt and all of those things
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I mean you now are working in the industry when you look back is there
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anything that is consistent with you know all the people that hinge has brought together today that happened in
00:08:44
that moment because you know you see on the movies they say you'll feel this thing in your belly and there'll be butterflies and they'll be crazy you
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know all this kind of stuff what was your experience like did you have butterflies did you know she they were the
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one um I think I I'm not sure it was was like the moment I saw Kate like I knew
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she was the one but I think the our our like relationship really started to
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build as we got to know each other better and so it wasn't for me like one of those like instantaneous like this person is the person it just grew really
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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
00:09:20
debated I know you had Logan our our relationship scientist on um from hinge and I think the spark can sort of like
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burn out and what you're looking for is really like a nice SL burn within two years you had broken up oh we' broken up
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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
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really like gone our separate ways once I gotten sober um I would think about
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reaching back out to her all the time but I just wouldn't because I had enough sense to realize that like I had
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probably like messed up this girl's life enough and um it just like wasn't healthy and so I would I remember being
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like a year or two years sober and I would like you know dial her number on my phone and I would just like stare at
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it and then I would just like hit the end button and I just didn't
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feel I just didn't feel like I was good for her and I and I just need to stay away and when you ultimately end up
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reaching out to her when she's living in London and working in finance yeah so I I four years in I'm
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sober I'm at business school and I I
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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
00:10:38
and I I wrote her this letter and she was living in she' moved to London at that point and she called me back the next
00:10:46
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
00:10:52
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
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know what's going to happen happen and I
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just uh I have a stable life now I have a partner we just bought a flat like I
00:11:09
just can't and so I was just totally heartbroken because I really thought in the back of my mind like someday we I
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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
00:11:21
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
00:11:26
back you were at Harvard at the time yeah you're single you're sober which makes it hard
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to meet people I guess precisely I mean that's the thing is I is I um both it
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was very special with her and also I really had trouble meeting other other people like I really relied on drugs and
00:11:45
alcohol as a crutch and when I graduated I threw myself into work and then I but then I arrived at business school where
00:11:51
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
00:11:57
partying and I just just couldn't it was like just too hard for
00:12:02
me to be around any of that it was hard for me to meet new people I mean that's the case for so many of us today so many
00:12:09
people who much of the reason it feels like they continue to drink and do those things which they don't necessarily love
00:12:15
is because it's almost unavoidable if you want to it seems unavoidable if you want to socialize and be not be
00:12:22
perceived as a weirdo yeah and just the whole culture and the whole like that it was just all revolved around drinking so
00:12:27
it was just constantly saying no constantly saying no thanks I don't drink like is this at all correlated you
00:12:33
know you're in that situation where you you've given up drinking you bit heartbroken does this also explain why
00:12:40
you were so compelled to do something in the dating space there was a business plan like a
00:12:45
business school like business plan competition and so I was working on like a few ideas for
00:12:51
that and nothing really hit like I was trying to work on I had like various little silly ideas and I try to work on
00:12:58
them but it always just felt like homework and I just like wasn't getting much traction and it was kind of shortly
00:13:05
after everything had happened with Kate and she you know told me in so many words that like it was time to move on
00:13:12
and there was this last chance dance party happening at at Harvard where
00:13:19
people were going to like list all their crushes and then if two people like listed each other they would like let
00:13:25
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
00:13:32
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
00:13:38
pretty excited about this because 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
00:13:44
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
00:13:50
the um student body president this guy Brett and he was like Yeah we actually
00:13:55
decided to scrap that 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
00:14:02
like too hard like we just scrapped that whole thing I I I went to class I started sitting there I started thinking
00:14:08
and I was like I bet I could just like build this really quick on Facebook like I I I used
00:14:14
to code I like knew how these kind things worked and Facebook had recently opened up their API for canvas apps like
00:14:20
Farmville and things like that I was like you could just like go through and just check your friends that you liked and you could just build something like
00:14:25
this really quick on Facebook so I enlisted a friend um her name was Francis and we got together
00:14:31
and we built this thing um where people could like list their crushes on Facebook and would tell you if two
00:14:37
people matched and we launched it and it made a bunch of matches it was fun and
00:14:42
people had like a good time but then it was you know you find out if you have a
00:14:49
crush you either do or you don't and then everyone's done with it but the idea then started to to like percolate
00:14:56
in my mind like what if you could actually introduce people to their friends of friends because at the
00:15:01
time there was there were online dating sites but no one my age used them there's a lot of stigma around it
00:15:07
because it was like a long arduous process you did on desktop computers you answered like deep questions about
00:15:13
yourself you paid a lot of money usually to use them and the idea of like creating something like really simple
00:15:19
and easy that would just connect you to friends of friends suddenly just like popped in my mind and I don't know how
00:15:25
to describe it I just like I was so excited about this idea I was convinced this going to be the future of how people were going to date and I like
00:15:31
couldn't stop working on it and to set the scene though a little bit this is at a time which is hard to remember where there's like Okay Cupid match.com but
00:15:38
there's not like mobile dating apps right that's exactly right there were no nothing was mobile and nothing no one
00:15:43
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
00:15:49
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
00:15:56
a because I so many people asked me the question about how to know which idea to
00:16:01
pursue many entreprene types creatives have lots of ideas they have a Shelf full of them yeah um how do we know
00:16:10
which one is the one worth pursuing I I can only speak to my experience like I don't know what the
00:16:15
right what the right answer is but I will say that when I was I had other ideas that were interesting to me like
00:16:20
intellectually like yeah like this is a good idea um but it just didn't hit me
00:16:27
and 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
00:16:32
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
00:16:39
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
00:16:45
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
00:16:51
have to work on it but I think there was the the magic of me being open and like thinking about ideas and trying to work
00:16:56
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
00:17:02
just had to work on this so many people have the idea so many people feel infected by their belief in that idea
00:17:08
but then the vast majority will be incarcerated by fear and you know loads
00:17:16
of naysayers telling them you can't make an a dating app what the hell is that yeah you know which is exactly the
00:17:23
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
00:17:29
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
00:17:36
was a horrible idea I would later try to raise money and VCS would tell me it was a hor like everyone was like there was
00:17:41
very little positive feedback I was getting on the idea for Hing I just had this thesis that if you could make a a
00:17:48
dating service that was stigma-free if you could make something that was really fun and easy and lightweight then young
00:17:54
people would use it I we we i' always hear that the dating Market is full it's saturated this is what VC's would tell
00:18:01
me when I would J raise money like match.com owns this Market you'll never be able to beat them and I remember thinking to myself
00:18:08
like it's not how could you say a market is sat like I don't I almost know no one who uses dating services like it's not
00:18:15
saturated you just have to fix the problem why people don't use it and people don't use it because it it has
00:18:20
stigma to it so we can't remember that yeah this generation can't remember that there was a stigma around dating on the
00:18:27
internet in fact what's so funny is as you said the word stigma I said to myself what stigma and I thought and
00:18:33
then I thought back to my childhood and and I remember the what I thought of people that used match.com yeah lonely
00:18:40
weirdos totally and that was definitely that was that's how people that's how people thought about
00:18:46
it yeah in 2011 it was just not you know the iPhone would had just come out a few
00:18:51
years ago the App Store was relatively new yeah and people did not meet strangers on the internet to go date
00:18:57
that was just weird so when did it go from Facebook to an
00:19:03
app uh so we started working on it it was originally this yeah Facebook canvas
00:19:08
app and that was 201122 and um but it was really having
00:19:16
trouble getting people to adopt this thing I was not a good product designer not a good brander it was originally
00:19:22
called secret agent Cupid it would uh introduce you to friends of friends but
00:19:28
but it was really a complex user interface you would like answer questions about your friends there were
00:19:34
like little rankings like it was try to be really social and like show you which of your friends are most in demand it
00:19:39
had like all these different components to it it's like way over complicated people would come in and they like wouldn't understand like why I'm
00:19:44
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
00:19:49
of money from just like angels and friends and family like $100,000 or so
00:19:54
we're running out of money not making a lot of progress I made the call around Thanksgiving I got together with my team
00:20:01
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
00:20:07
more things are starting to come out on the app store around this time so let's redesign it for mobile and let's make it
00:20:12
just like dead simple we'll just you connect your Facebook account we'll show you a photo you know their age like one
00:20:19
or two lines about them and then you just say yes or no are you interested in this person we had literally like two
00:20:25
and a half months left of cash to like tear everything down rebuild it from scratch and then take our remaining
00:20:31
money and throw a giant launch party in Washington DC with your remaining money
00:20:36
yeah that's it literally took our last $25,000 and threw a giant open bar party in DC and you had to download the app to
00:20:44
get in we had submitted our app to the App Store with what we thought was like
00:20:49
plenty of time about two weeks um and App Store review times were typically like just a couple days at that
00:20:55
point and then a few days go by we don't hear anything back a week goes by we still haven't heard anything
00:21:01
back uh I start trying to reach out to like the head of the App Store but no one who they don't care I'm like some
00:21:06
random kid like with a app idea no one will return my calls it is now the night
00:21:12
before the launch party and we still have no we don't have actually have an app to launch so I like literally have
00:21:17
like my last $25,000 spent on this launch party with no app I remember
00:21:24
being literally like sitting we had a little co-working space and that night I was just like sitting on the floor like
00:21:31
covered up my head in the in my jacket and just crying on the floor thinking
00:21:37
like wow these last two years have been for like nothing I've worked so hard and I'm going to launch an app Tomorrow
00:21:43
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
00:21:49
um woke up the next morning and somehow miraculously uh the app had been approved in the App Store and so we had
00:21:56
the party that night 2 200 people came they all saw each other using the app the next day people
00:22:03
we made more matches than we' 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
00:22:10
in and that helped overcome I think you had to like jump start the stigma because we had a lot of like the very
00:22:15
like the cool people in the social scene in Washington DC coming and all downloading it in front of each other
00:22:22
and talking about it and so the fact that it was like really really dead simple and the fact that everyone saw
00:22:27
each other using it I think like started to like jump start and get over that stigma problem and then we had like 400
00:22:33
people log in the next day and we're like okay wow 400 people on their own came in I mean up until that point it was such a like literally a trickle of
00:22:40
users coming into our like little app like I would i' remember I would like sit there and like look at the logs and
00:22:46
people like a user would come in like oh okay like a there's a user using the app and then we like okay he just clicked
00:22:51
this button and like then he like passed and then and then he would leave and I like okay wait for the next user to come
00:22:57
in like sitting just like watching the logs so hundreds of people coming the next day few hundred more the next day
00:23:03
and then it just started to like build and build and build after that was it like a snowboard effect yeah it really was and and once
00:23:11
once we'd hit it with the with the product it started to spread through Word of Mouth then people in DC started
00:23:17
to tell their friends in New York and then we started to build up a weight list there and then people in New York told their friends in San Francisco and
00:23:23
they would like build a weit list up there and then we would start opening cities one at a time once we like we had enough liquidity and how would you
00:23:29
openin those cities was it the same we'd throw another launch party like literally my life was just like throwing launch parties in cities like we would
00:23:36
we would you know from Boston and San Francisco and um New York and La we were
00:23:42
just like I remember 2012 well and there was that was kind of the golden age of
00:23:49
apps in a way I remember because we worked a quite a lot on um on apps back
00:23:54
then and uh there wasn't many apps the apps store was was grow felt like it was
00:24:00
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
00:24:05
don't know if that's true or not but I just felt like that was kind of the app boom moment so things like a launch party I you know I can see how those
00:24:12
things would work then but I I question whether people listening to this right now that have got an app and aunch party
00:24:18
and like that's that's what's going to solve their problems probably not yeah so interesting and then Tinder around
00:24:24
that time starts to emerge bit bit further on right yeah right about that time so right around the time we threw
00:24:30
that launch party I think Tinder had launched just a couple months prior W out in La so almost the exact same time
00:24:36
we had a very similar model they took off hugely and we started to grow as
00:24:41
well in fact their growth helped our growth because it like the category was emerging and now people were like um
00:24:48
seeing Tinder and Tinder was a was an app that was all about location and ours
00:24:53
was all about friends of friends and that was really the the main difference but as a result people viewed
00:24:59
hinge as like the sort of like more serious intent dating app because it was
00:25:04
friends of friends people you meet at a house party or dinner or wedding whereas like the other one was a bit more of like a casual reputation and like
00:25:11
meeting at a club and as a result all of a sudden the VCS who were telling me there's no way
00:25:16
this Market's totally saturated now I was no longer begging for money I was like Turning Away there people are trying to send like like trying to raise
00:25:23
around at that point um we went from like you know begging for CS to like
00:25:29
raising almost a $20 million round where I was turning away money because I just couldn't take anymore so it really that
00:25:35
changed the game and was it a straight line up from there uh no definitely not so we had
00:25:44
some good success in 2013 2014 2015 growth started to level out um
00:25:50
Tinder had definitely gotten successful beat us at the game of like overcoming stigma like that it was cool use it was
00:25:58
was it was quick it was easy it was fun ours was just like a
00:26:05
tender copy that was friends of friends but we weren't we were like the growth just like wasn't there and um and more
00:26:13
importantly though around that time there was an article that came out in Vanity Fair called like the dawn of the
00:26:19
dating apocalypse and it was all about how dating apps had destroyed dating culture and romance and and hinge was
00:26:24
featured like pretty heavily in that article and I was remember thinking like gosh this is not what I like I built
00:26:31
this because I like wanted a girlfriend like this is just not what I what I wanted to build from like a values
00:26:38
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
00:26:44
head home for Thanksgiving and we sat at a little cafe in New York and I I just was telling her like gosh I I like I
00:26:51
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
00:26:57
CEO like what's stopping you I went home and I thought about that and you know
00:27:02
nothing was stop like what was stopping me we just raised a big round we had resources and so uh I decided to reboot
00:27:09
the company again so we first reboot 2012 uh this reboot let go of half the
00:27:15
company and then threw out the old code base and built something new from scratch that would be
00:27:21
about really helping people who wanted to find their person like a long-term relationship brand and totally change
00:27:30
the user interface and the profiles and the whole flow and design it for people who actually like really want to find
00:27:35
their person if you hadn't have had that interview with Deborah from
00:27:41
cafe.com before right yeah do you think you would have made that decision tell
00:27:47
me about that interview with Deborah from cafe.com and how it changed change
00:27:52
things for you so in 2014 someone reached out to me her name
00:27:57
was Deborah and she had downloaded hinge she lived in New York and the very first
00:28:04
person that she that like we suggested to her she liked and matched with and then fallen in love with and so she had
00:28:11
reached out and was like how did you like I want to learn more about you I want to learn about your company we were just you know we were getting popular in
00:28:18
New York but not hugely popular so we met up for an interview one day in Madison Square Park near my office and
00:28:26
um and I you know I didn't have like it was dumb luck like I don't know it's like the first person that happened to
00:28:31
show up on her app like we didn't we didn't it was just we were lucky but as
00:28:37
we chatted um you know kind of a standard interview at the very end of the interview we were getting up and
00:28:42
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
00:28:48
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
00:28:54
have to tell you a story and she tells me the story of of how actually she sort
00:29:00
of had this misconnection moment she wasn't with someone that she had met much younger and they had found each
00:29:06
other all these years later and realized they should have been together and she was like you know you don't have to make
00:29:12
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
00:29:17
out and like put yourself on the line and I was like listen lady like you know it's been almost eight
00:29:24
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
00:29:32
to the um launch party for hinge in London and I
00:29:38
thought okay like I'll just shoot her one last note and so I reached out to
00:29:43
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
00:29:49
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 now
00:29:57
another four years and uh she was like listen I don't live in London anymore I live in Switzerland
00:30:04
but um I'll be around this weekend and um happy to hop on the
00:30:10
phone so I like got that message I went to the
00:30:15
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
00:30:24
she's like hey I'm around if you want to chat I'm like great cuz I'm going through customs in Zurich right now and
00:30:29
she agreed to meet me at a little cafe and uh we sat down with each other and I
00:30:36
I think at that time i' you know part of me thought like I really want the girl back like this is
00:30:42
it and part of me thought like it's been eight years like I've changed so much as a person like I'm sober now I'm like
00:30:48
running this company like she's with someone else now and by the way was literally like a month away from
00:30:54
getting married at that point she was she had a fil she had a fiance yeah and and to be married in a month like uh so
00:31:02
like on the verge of getting married so I thought we'd see each other and kind of just
00:31:08
like laugh it off and glad we saw each other and and you know I just I honestly didn't know it was going to happen it's
00:31:14
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
00:31:20
sat down at this little cafe and um and it was just like uh I think we
00:31:28
both felt like an incredible amount of that connection that we'd always had and we sat and we we talked for like seven
00:31:35
or eight straight hours in this Cafe never even got up to get a coffee and at
00:31:40
the end of that conversation she's like I think I'm calling off the wedding and
00:31:46
um and so uh about a week later she moved out
00:31:51
of zerk and moved from um back into back to New York into my like 300t apartment
00:31:57
in the West Village and and my and this is a long way of
00:32:04
getting back to your question which is like how does this relate to hinge and would I have done the reboot because
00:32:09
here I am and I've like gotten the person like this is the person that I've always want like wanted
00:32:15
like I finally got her back and it was totally amazing
00:32:20
for like a month or two or three months maybe Max and then the honeymoon period
00:32:26
ended and were two people living in this little tiny apartment together in New York who haven't seen each other in
00:32:32
eight years and we've got to like start figuring each other out and it wasn't
00:32:37
perfect and the part of me like I would have if I were just dating this person I
00:32:43
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
00:32:50
perfect like I imagined it was going to be but she' called off this life she'd like you know she'd left a her person
00:32:56
she'd left um her whole existence over there so I couldn't just like break up of
00:33:02
there and that's when I think the real work of the relationship started and like real intimacy and vulnerability and like
00:33:10
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
00:33:20
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
00:33:26
to like get through people and once you find your person then it's then it's kind of happily ever after after that
00:33:32
and realizing that like how many people you know we all must just skate right
00:33:38
past because we don't because we're not vulnerable because they're not vulnerable and we fail to like make that
00:33:45
connection and so I wanted to like rebuild an app if it were really for relationships um you just it would be a
00:33:53
very different kind of app you would have to like have people slow down you would have to have people be more more vulnerable you'd have to people share
00:33:58
about themselves and put themselves on the line a bit more in order to form that initial connection and so that was
00:34:03
the foundation and sort of like the design principles for what we wanted to
00:34:09
build with a new hinge fairy tale endings are made for movies because
00:34:15
there's a lot of work that happens when the credits after the credits roll totally yeah we were just getting
00:34:21
started I had no idea and you also when you talk about this new vision for hinge
00:34:26
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 they're more
00:34:32
vulnerable tends to be the case that your ideal scenario for how humans behave isn't actually how they want to
00:34:38
behave right especially these days because we're all we all believe things should be like quick and easy MH and
00:34:46
it's not quick and easy you get you get out what you put in and so we were
00:34:51
always fighting this balance of like what people are willing to do and what they should do you know and and we were
00:34:56
trying to to like we could of course build an app that's just like makes it like what people think
00:35:03
that they want was like quick and easy and fun but you have to slow people down
00:35:08
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
00:35:17
vulnerable as much as at least they can tolerate and because the more that they
00:35:22
are the more effective their experience is the better chance that they have of finding their person how is that received when you come up with this new
00:35:28
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 is that
00:35:33
received by people uh I think in theory it was it was celebrated right in theory
00:35:41
I think people were 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
00:35:47
food and more like you know a nice nutritious meal when it comes to dating you know it was it was still hard to
00:35:54
really get people like they like it in theory but and they're like wait I have to fill out like three prompts like wait I don't just swipe on people I have to
00:36:00
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
00:36:06
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
00:36:11
are used to something that was quite different but it was effective and that's What mattered the most and you
00:36:18
know the that was a it was such a huge mindset and shift for us to stop
00:36:24
thinking about user engagement and user retention and all these like classic metrics that you know VCS look for when
00:36:30
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
00:36:36
going to be our Northstar 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
00:36:41
friends about it and so that was our Northstar and so we didn't worry so much about like all those engagement metrics
00:36:48
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
00:36:54
actually way more efficient and effective of getting people out on good dates and so we launched this new thing
00:37:00
our user numbers actually started to decline initially from the old version of the app what about money yeah and so
00:37:07
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
00:37:14
start fundraising again and telling the story of like look at these like we we're way more effective now people love
00:37:20
the product but on the other hand we used to have I don't know at the time 400
00:37:26
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
00:37:33
capitalists and but you're shrinking yeah we're shrinking but but we're gonna grow because look at how amazing these
00:37:40
and no one like really bought that story and I was flying around everywhere talking to every VC and I could talk to
00:37:48
you know at that point Hing 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
00:37:55
meetings and like not a single not a single yes but at right on that time we
00:38:00
also started talking to um match group they saw they could see what I saw they
00:38:08
saw wow this is actually something that's different it's differentiated and it has real
00:38:13
promise and so when we were down to like once again like days of cash probably like a week or two left of cash we
00:38:20
negotiated a deal for like an initial investment from them that would set the stage for them to eventually acquire the
00:38:28
and between 2016 and 2019 when they acquired the company what was growth
00:38:33
like uh it was slow at first 2016 2017 we were kind of still figuring out the
00:38:39
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
00:38:45
know um tuning it and around 2018 we felt like okay we've really started to
00:38:51
like now people are really starting to love this app it's starting to really grow through word of mouth and and and then we started to
00:38:58
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
00:39:06
what is hinge Labs I don't believe any other dating apps have something like hinge laabs yeah and it's all part of
00:39:12
this idea that we want to build like we're just focused on user Effectiveness
00:39:17
and does this actually get people out on good dates and a huge piece of the you
00:39:23
know a dating app is is relatively unique it's not just a piece of technology it's you know what what it's
00:39:31
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 no matter how good we
00:39:38
get at product and product design or whatever like we have to control for the behaviors of other people and making
00:39:43
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
00:39:49
you know ux we also have to like kind of Coach people and guide people and teach people how to become better daters and
00:39:55
so Hing X or sorry Hing Labs was developed to sort of study daters who
00:40:00
are successful study daters who are not successful figure out what are the patterns what do we see and how can we
00:40:07
help level up everyone to become better and more successful daters and so Hing
00:40:13
Labs really does you know deep dive research studies on just what is what
00:40:19
makes data successful um and and gives us the fuel to be able to um build
00:40:26
better product or build user guides things like that so what makes data
00:40:32
successful makes dating successful yeah like you know I've Got Friends that seem to be successful at dating and friends
00:40:38
that are just those prolific serial datas that go on 100 dates a year and never seem to make any progress yeah and
00:40:44
also are there like categories of datas that you talk about you must have got like categories like the serial data
00:40:50
that's never going to be successful they're just doing it for the fun of it and they're like one hit wonder we we definitely have different profiles but
00:40:57
we anytime we try to like just put people into discreet categories it never works because people are complex and they have different everyone's story is
00:41:03
kind of unique and so it's hard to put people just like into buckets um and there I think some
00:41:10
general principles that I've learned and we've learned through hinge labs and you
00:41:16
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
00:41:23
like a master class and how to become successful in dating yeah but I would say like the more that you are willing
00:41:29
to be honest and vulnerable and real like the quicker you can find those
00:41:35
connections and the higher Quality Connections that you're going to get I think that's the kind of upshot
00:41:41
and the way that we really try to design hinge to help people maximize their success on that
00:41:47
front why does that matter at a human level being honest and vulnerable uh I think two reasons one is
00:41:57
that you get to an accurate assessment more quickly of someone right like if you're trying to be pretend to be
00:42:03
someone you're not or just trying to be cool or get a lot of likes or whatever people aren't seeing the real you and
00:42:09
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
00:42:16
you're looking for and what you want and what's not perfect about you then I
00:42:22
think the faster you're going to find someone who's like yes this is the type of person that I want to be and you're going to avoid all those people that
00:42:27
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
00:42:33
and then I'd say the second piece is that it gives people like hooks to grab on to like there's just nothing to talk
00:42:38
about with someone who's perfect and inv and invulnerable and Invincible like what do you like what do you have to say
00:42:44
like we connect over the the cracks of and the little imperfections and that's how we connect and relate to one another
00:42:51
and so you'll form a much better and deeper and quicker bond with someone when you open up like that versus try to
00:42:59
impress okay what about this then so if I wanted to be the world's worst data if I wanted to be the world's worst
00:43:07
um most unsuccessful hinge user or dating app user more generally what would I have to
00:43:12
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
00:43:19
just portray myself in a way yeah a lot of like filtered photos with you and sunglasses or hanging out with a lot of
00:43:25
friends one-word answers to your prompts you know just like everyone or no one or
00:43:31
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
00:43:36
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 Shore more their personality
00:43:43
help people answer prompts which are these short questions designed to get you into a conversation
00:43:50
and answer them thoughtfully uh to uh be really thoughtful with your
00:43:55
life because the more thoughtful you are with your likes the better our algorithm gets because we actually understand who you like and who you don't like so don't
00:44:02
just like you know no because then we can't we can't learn your taste right
00:44:07
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 datas because I've
00:44:15
got some friends that are like those serial datas literally 100 dates a year and I'll sit with them and we'll chat
00:44:21
and they'll tell me oh yeah I want three dates this week etc for those people I'd love to be able to get offer them advice
00:44:26
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
00:44:32
those people right I mean I was a person who um uh you know constantly was I wouldn't
00:44:40
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
00:44:46
relationships and um and then as soon as I would find something quote unquote
00:44:53
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
00:44:59
think I had such a I had such a fantasy about what a good
00:45:05
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
00:45:10
fit like a model in our head with the real with the reality that we're trying
00:45:16
to like match this reality to like some model in our head about what a good relationship is or should look like and
00:45:21
I think my model was like you know it stays sexy fun every single time we're
00:45:27
together um we don't fight there's never any you know there's like I I think I
00:45:32
just had this like very happily ever after moment in my mind and so I skipped
00:45:38
over and passed over so much because it just didn't fit this like model on had of my head and I think some of us have
00:45:44
models in our head that are exceedingly narrow they have to be like over six foot and they need to work in this type
00:45:50
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
00:45:56
doesn't fit your model and I think the biggest thing is for us to um like change the model in our head
00:46:05
that we that like of like what we're trying to look for and like widen that aperture a bit and give people more of a
00:46:12
chance and like see things through a bit more people have to um this he height
00:46:19
thing you mentioned the six-foot thing seems to be a lot of conversation because I think the vast majority
00:46:25
majority of people the vast majority of women I imagine would want someone that's more
00:46:32
than six foot is that correct uh no I don't I don't know if that's actually true but people like
00:46:37
someone taller than them tter than them okay yeah um that's just one example I mean I
00:46:43
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
00:46:49
lot of people who end up in successful relationships say this isn't you know if I were making
00:46:56
a shopping list and like you know writing down all my like little features that I'm looking for in a partner like
00:47:01
this person didn't necessarily that like I would have I would have missed this person there's a
00:47:07
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
00:47:13
probability of finding that person okay yeah I don't know about that but yeah I think if people saw that it's horrifying
00:47:19
yeah be pretty horrifying like how you're cutting out 98% of people um based on your criteria the salary the
00:47:26
height the weight um the race you put on there and then it shows you it goes like you have a 0.0% chance of finding this
00:47:33
person right um and you obviously you want them to be single as well as another criteria um which I find interesting one of the things people say
00:47:40
about dating apps and like dating app companies and Founders and CEOs is they want people to stay single because then
00:47:45
you've got more customers and surely if every if you have this metric where people are becoming um are getting
00:47:52
married you're losing customers yeah so our belief on that
00:47:58
which has always been um we like our motto our our tagline is designed to be
00:48:03
deleted and that came from by the way we were working with a branding agency and
00:48:10
they were like what's hinges stick you know like what makes you different like you're Tinder but what and I was like I
00:48:17
don't there's no gimmick like there's no like oh we're Tinder but like X or
00:48:23
Tinder but y like every single part part of the app is like designed to be
00:48:28
different and like designed to help get people out on great dates and that's kind of where this like
00:48:34
designed to be deleted which by the way was like there's so much debate internally about that because it's so it sounds so technical like design like in
00:48:40
your own tagline like designed to be like and it people won't understand it but we kind of went with it because it's
00:48:46
the only thing that really represented what makes hinge um really different
00:48:51
what do that mean and it means that do we get people out on great dates or not and that's what's Driven every design
00:48:57
decision and why hinge looks different than all the other apps is like that optimization function and so in terms of
00:49:06
a business model the belief is that like we will grow through Word of Mouth which is the most effective and efficient and
00:49:12
cost- effective way to grow if we just create more great dates and more relationships and the thesis is like as
00:49:19
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 h which
00:49:25
feels more like a utility that's truly effective versus like perhaps something that feels like a little bit more like a
00:49:31
game since the company started have you seen any changes in the dating
00:49:36
environment the dating landscape dating culture yeah gen Z for lack of a better
00:49:42
term has different dating patterns I think in some sense like when I started hinge people were there was a lot of
00:49:48
stigma around dating apps because um uh people just didn't use them at all
00:49:54
then I feel like everyone started started to use them and it became sort of the default way to meet people and I
00:49:59
think this is why we've actually like hing's growth has accelerated so much even recently is that there actually is
00:50:07
a desire to move away from the sort of like quick kit superficial swipe swipe swipe yeah yeah and moving to something
00:50:14
that's people are willing to share more about themselves and be more like I think like genz is generally willing to
00:50:22
like you know it's like the Tik Tok instead of the Instagram kind of feel of
00:50:27
being vulnerable putting yourself out there you don't have to look so polished and so perfect and that's actually great
00:50:33
for for uh dating because that's exactly the kind of ethos that we actually need
00:50:38
for people to be successful and hinge as I was reading is got these sort of five first
00:50:45
principles what is the um current company mission statement well so the we want to Foster
00:50:53
intimate connection to create a less lonely world and a lot of social we'll call them like
00:50:59
social networks they started social networks were also I think had a similar Mission like you wanted to get you
00:51:04
connected to the people who matter most to you and they've all kind of like f like
00:51:10
they all became social media companies instead because it turns out that like Brands and influencers and outrageous
00:51:16
people are just more interesting than your friends and it's easier to get you to spend more time in app and more time
00:51:22
looking at ads if we like show you much more sensation content than than like
00:51:28
you know real um like creating real moments of connection with the people who matter most to you and that's what I
00:51:34
wanted to drive home like really clearly in our mission is that like hinge at its
00:51:40
core even if we were expanded in new business lines or do something in the future like we are a company about
00:51:46
intimate connection about onetoone deep connections between people and we don't ever want to deviate from that as our
00:51:53
core because it's really what the world needs right now first principle two radical trust so you've got designed to
00:52:00
be deleted number two is radical trust yeah which means so radical trust Is our
00:52:05
commitment to and so these cultural principles that you're reading off came from this book um called how we do
00:52:11
things and so when I when we rebooted the company in 2015 at the end of 2015 beginning of
00:52:19
2016 we um at that point I didn't think about company culture kind of at all it
00:52:25
was just like just we bunch of people in a room trying to solve problems like that's and we were only 30 people so
00:52:31
culture just kind of emerges naturally among that group of people it really rotates around the founder but I didn't think consciously about
00:52:38
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
00:52:43
offsite and we did a a breakdown and a really had like some really honest at
00:52:49
times tearful conversations about like what had gone wrong what did we do right what what didn't we do right right what
00:52:56
do we wish we had done better um and a a lot of them were of course like product
00:53:01
decisions like oh we focus 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
00:53:08
operated as a company and coming out of that we actually started a like
00:53:15
open-source Google doc that listed our kind of what we believed and how we
00:53:21
think things should should get done around hinge and originally it was just like a long dock of just all kinds of
00:53:27
principles it was me just trying to like put my management algorithm like down
00:53:33
and on a 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
00:53:39
and what we should do so then eventually as Hing got a little bit bigger and we started to you know have more than 100
00:53:44
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
00:53:51
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
00:53:56
the wrong ways and that led us to learn to do it the right way and so that's
00:54:01
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
00:54:08
what features our competitors had when we did the reboot we just focused on you
00:54:13
know making our one metric getting people out on great dates and I like prohibited people from looking at the
00:54:19
competition I didn't want any of their apps on my phone like I just just focus on novel inovation in service of our
00:54:26
customer radical trust was about a lot of the decision making was like very top
00:54:32
down and um and I think people felt disempowered they felt a lot of Whiplash
00:54:38
and radical trust was about how do you push decision- making down to the front lines and how do you Empower people with
00:54:46
the information that they need so I 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
00:54:52
so that people on the front lines can go solve it love the leap love the leap is
00:54:58
this idea that small incremental optimizations can be can be great but
00:55:04
real uh the the things that matter require like a level of um a much bigger
00:55:10
Innovation leaps and we have to not be afraid of failure because when you make those much bigger Innovation leaps a lot
00:55:16
of them like won't of course land or you have to I think even more importantly
00:55:22
trudge through a whole lot of failure to finally get to success I think there's a culture of like that comes from people
00:55:29
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
00:55:35
works great and then if it doesn't then you just like move on and try try the next thing I I think the difference between that and then the way that like
00:55:41
often a Founder an 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
00:55:48
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
00:55:54
I'll throw something out there and see if people use it oh gosh they're not really using it I guess the dating app's not a good idea I'll go like build a you
00:56:01
know whatever uh a car hailing app you have to like trudge through that so
00:56:06
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
00:56:12
a variance and even your team members but other people you work with they're biased towards failure they're at
00:56:18
they're different failure appetites yeah and it gets harder and harder as you get bigger and and bigger and you're
00:56:24
fighting against the larger cultural inertia like and it's is very Human by the way to like not make mistakes and
00:56:29
not um look bad and that's why by the way this whole book is written is like
00:56:35
here's all the mistakes that we made and how we did it all wrong just to give people the permission to know like we're all works in process we're all trying to
00:56:41
learn um so you are overcoming like a much larger cultural inertia to get people to take risks and and make
00:56:48
mistakes how'd you do that uh you exhibit failure from the top
00:56:54
like you admit I think when you've when like when you've made mistakes like when
00:56:59
I've made mistakes or even talking about you know my development plan or things that I'm working on I just think it like
00:57:05
you almost all of these cultural attributes have to be modeled from the very top Super interesting because most
00:57:12
people are just incentivized to just do their job so when you bring along a new idea or a new innovation you know
00:57:18
incentive structures mean listen I'm not getting paid to take that [ __ ] risk and then be be made to look stupid yeah
00:57:25
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
00:57:32
in fact we're going through a process right now it's kind of ironic because we're walking through these and I'm about to release a new version of these
00:57:37
to the company and there has been a bit of a refinement and we're actually kind of changing this one and combining it
00:57:43
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
00:57:50
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
00:57:56
intuition of a Founder anymore you like do deep research on a problem you get conviction around it and then you're not
00:58:03
afraid to like fail again and again trying to solve that problem because you are convinced that it's a real problem
00:58:08
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
00:58:15
currently is on my iPad here Guided by principles and that one's definitely staying and that's one of the biggest
00:58:21
um uh my own personal journey and I would say like this journey it just it's sort
00:58:29
of what I talked about when I talked about how this got created in the first place is that if you keep making the
00:58:34
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
00:58:40
and so both of my own personal journey and this has happened through you know recovery through alcohol and addiction
00:58:46
and getting better and better as entrepreneurs like I was always self-reflecting and thinking about like
00:58:51
okay like seeking feedback like what didn't go well there what did go well there how can I do that better next time
00:58:57
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
00:59:02
that Google doc so that everyone at the company could hold me accountable to this like management algorithm I was
00:59:07
developing and what I wanted us is to do as a company is always make decisions
00:59:13
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 because Justin likes it that
00:59:19
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
00:59:24
we want people to think like to understand like how am I making those decisions what's underneath that what
00:59:30
principles do I believe in that made me to choose this over that because if you make that really explicit and clear then
00:59:37
you gain trust people understand like why you're making the decisions and two they can start making decisions on their
00:59:42
own without you needing to be in the room and start developing their own principles for how they make decisions
00:59:48
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
00:59:55
of work and it just aligns everyone on the um what's the what what was like the
01:00:01
core set of assumptions and beliefs and values that we have before we get into the details of the work and that kind of
01:00:08
counteracts the whole CEO because I said so you know Vibe which might get I guess
01:00:13
um might get compliance but it probably won't deliver upon whatever someone calls leadership yeah it's not scalable
01:00:21
and maybe some CEOs always know the right thing to do but I don't always know the right thing to do do I I think my job once we got past 20 or 30 people
01:00:29
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
01:00:34
much bigger like I can't be close enough to the to the information to like make really great decisions and so my job
01:00:42
primarily is is building and fostering the culture that makes good decisions I've been thinking a lot about
01:00:47
comedy 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
01:00:54
especially post pandemic which caused all of these companies and businesses to start thinking about what their company
01:01:00
culture was in a new way MH you'd see CEOs and
01:01:05
managers almost like brainstorming a principlist culture and it was more like how what days do you want people to come
01:01:12
in Mondays and Wednesdays should we say two days a week one day a week should we you know um and that just doesn't feel
01:01:18
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 cult is already there and you just
01:01:26
kind of have to reverse engineer from the problem you're trying to solve in the world which means for example if we
01:01:31
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
01:01:37
values and then with those values we're going to use those values to create systems processes and hire the people
01:01:43
that we need and so you can almost reverse engineer your mission as a company um backwards to figure out what
01:01:49
your culture is you said something about like you're just describing the culture that already
01:01:54
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
01:02:00
when it's like relatively close around the founder you've only got like 30 or 40 or 50 people then you definitely have
01:02:07
some sort of culture and at that point though I think you want to start defining defining it so that everyone's
01:02:14
clear on what it is because it will start you'll start losing is it starts expanding and people start it's a game of telephone right and it will like it
01:02:20
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
01:02:27
well right because I think you're you're trying to like articulate when we're at
01:02:32
our best this is how we're acting and when we're at our worst this is how we're acting because both are always
01:02:38
happening within a company like and you don't want to you want to constantly prune away the stuff that's not that's
01:02:45
sort of not great and start having more on people replicate what is great so it's that it's more like a pruning
01:02:51
process and not just like a here's our culture like describe it and put it out the door but you on the other hand you
01:02:57
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
01:03:03
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
01:03:09
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
01:03:15
tell a kid like a but you always have to be watching and like giving those little guidances like here and there you always
01:03:21
have to be giving those little nudges when you when you see people acting with
01:03:27
in accordance with the culture and praising it or not in accordance with the culture and giving them constructed feedback because it's such it's this
01:03:33
living breathing thing like defining it is just like one one step but a very important step and as the company grows
01:03:40
and scales I was thinking about this idea of um the best of what
01:03:46
is is it possible that the best of what is when there's 10 of you and you're
01:03:51
potentially sleeping under a table like The Stereotype goes is not going to be the right culture for when there is like
01:03:58
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
01:04:04
people and and now we're 300 and something people and and we're evolving
01:04:10
them and we're actually changing some of them because I've learned things over time that like no longer work at a
01:04:16
company this big I'll give you an example one is that idea of radical trust which we just talked about which
01:04:22
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
01:04:29
anymore you want to push decision-making down somewhat but if you do it too much
01:04:34
especially in a larger organization you start getting like a lot of silos and everyone just doing micro optimizations
01:04:39
and there's there's you actually want to be there needs to be much more of a conversation and actually watch the the
01:04:47
the Brian interview and he talks about pulling decision- making in and that actually is I think more in line with
01:04:53
where you have to to be if you want to stay Innovative and still think like a startup even at a big scale so there's
01:04:59
things that I took for granted because when we were a 100 people that was happening already but I didn't see it
01:05:06
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
01:05:12
team influence on the team that that was kind of hidden because it just happened naturally so we thought we were pushing
01:05:18
decision- making down however I was I was in conversation with Junior developers and Junior engineers and
01:05:23
Junior designers all the time giving like little nuggets of feed like I was like I was involved just not
01:05:29
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
01:05:35
to like pull it people in and coordinate and there are people at the top that have a view across what's going on
01:05:41
across the whole company that need to actually be making decisions we can't just like push it down just to be super
01:05:47
clear on that for someone who is you know in their first month of business um pulling decision- making in in that
01:05:53
regard is empowering people to make decisions but those decisions coming again through the
01:05:59
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
01:06:05
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
01:06:11
marketing person and and the product person over here working on this product feature I I'll think like oh I should probably Market that product feature
01:06:17
like I there's just this like understanding of what's going on so you are making you're like kind of a hive
01:06:23
mind you just take that for granted and as you get much bigger you can either make
01:06:30
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
01:06:37
lot of people feel disempowered but in the other hand you push decision- making completely down you say you all just
01:06:43
handle it I'll just articulate the high level vision and strategy and you but then you usually don't make great sort
01:06:49
of uh interdisciplinary or major cohesive leaps that are that feel cohesive
01:06:56
everything starts like so it's this balance of having just like a constant
01:07:02
conversation opportunity for feedback I still ultimately the decision makers of the people who are close to the work
01:07:07
however we are like pulling it in and articulating strategy and and generating conversation I'm in the room with more
01:07:14
Junior people a lot now than I frankly more now that I used to be so that we can
01:07:21
continually um bring people along what the strategy is what are the big leaps we're making and what are all the little
01:07:27
ways that we keep this cohesive it's interesting because in the age of the internet um and the age of
01:07:33
dating apps and all these other tools and Technologies even though we have better internet connections the stats continue
01:07:39
to show that we're getting lonelier and lonelier yeah which is a word you used central to your mission the word
01:07:44
loneliness 52% of Americans report to feeling lonely and 57% of Americans
01:07:50
report to eating their meals alone Etc so something's clearly failing isn't it something's clearly not working in this
01:07:56
pursuit of connection and social connection and social media Etc yeah and I think so loneliness has been a problem
01:08:01
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
01:08:09
you look at you know I've seen charts that show like time spent together in
01:08:14
real life with friends and time spent consuming media uh consuming like
01:08:20
digital media on apps and it's like over the last like 20 years the one has
01:08:26
almost completely displaced the other we used to spend hours a day with friends
01:08:32
in real life on average um and make like having genuine connections seeing and
01:08:40
being seen and now people are virtually almost always consuming some form of
01:08:46
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
01:08:54
whatever like a music or a podcast or you are nothing wrong with that Justin nothing wrong with that listen
01:09:01
get rid of M we're not designed to be deleted fine because you're because because you're conscious I mean so and I'm not saying all media consumption is
01:09:07
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
01:09:13
longer talking with friends because you're just like Doom scrolling on social media platform X Y or Z you've
01:09:21
you've really we've really lost something and I think it's that I think more than anything has led to this like
01:09:27
Crisis level acceleration in in loneliness I'm so interested in the
01:09:32
disparity between men and women in dating we've had lots of conversations over the years on this podcast about
01:09:38
this but even in your app you see a big disparity between like the bottom 50% of
01:09:44
men or the bottom group of men on dating apps and like the top one or two% of men on dating apps I'm going to be
01:09:50
completely honest much of the reason why I never use dating apps is is I had no success I would get like no good matches
01:09:57
I was a 18 19 20 year-old kid that had nothing was super scruffy had no money I
01:10:04
had no chance on these apps and I had this best friend called Logan who looks like he comes out of like a Calvin Klein
01:10:10
ad we were both broke yeah yeah but he could go on those apps and he would he
01:10:16
would clean up and I look over at him I Think Jesus Christ like what's left for me I genuinely believe and people might
01:10:21
find this quite shocking in my life I've been on five dates in my entire life my
01:10:27
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
01:10:33
document and it was a three-day like itinerary I just went all in I've only
01:10:39
been on five dates in my life but I but I emphasize with men that really struggle with dating apps and have
01:10:45
become disillusioned in fact when we had I think it was Whitney wolf Herdon from Bumble um I was really surprised because
01:10:54
those men showed up in the comment section and they felt like they've been forgotten
01:11:00
about so uh it's a big I mean it's a big Focus for us and we I mean part of this
01:11:07
is like larger cultural forces that I think are at work but um part of it are things that we can really address I
01:11:12
think within dating apps and some people are just good at dating apps and some people
01:11:21
I think are quite datable but they're just not good at dating apps and it's I think the question is like how do we
01:11:27
help really make it a much more focused quality over quantity experience how do
01:11:32
we help the people that are struggling this is where I actually think a lot of the promise of of what's being unlocked
01:11:38
through Ai and generative AI is going to like really help us coach people who
01:11:44
aren't finding success and help them find better success and create matches that a much more like quality over
01:11:51
quantity I mean that when we rebooted h you want to make it more quality over quantity and we went from a world where
01:11:56
people used to like it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date and in the new hinge it took about
01:12:03
50 likes so we made a big leap back then in terms of helping people get on on good
01:12:09
dates I think now with AI I think there's like a whole other leap of focus
01:12:14
in terms of learning about you learning about who's out there helping match people up in a in like a really nice
01:12:20
onetoone way and you don't feel like you're in this like very owed room where you know some all the attractions you
01:12:27
know or all the attentions going to just a certain group of people and so I think there is a like I think the future is
01:12:33
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 a 2021 study by hinch
01:12:41
found that the top 1% of men on the app receed more than 16% of all of the likes
01:12:46
while the top 1% of women receive just over 11% this indicates a significant disparity in the level of attention men
01:12:52
and women receive on dating apps and similar things from Bumble um a 2022 study by Bumble found that men send an
01:12:59
average of 13 messages per day on the app while women only send roughly three messages per day this suggests that men
01:13:05
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
01:13:12
Galloway that talks about how the very top 10 10% or the top group of men are
01:13:18
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
01:13:26
finding relationships and aren't having intimate connection and it's that group of men that he says are the most dangerous of all because they're like
01:13:33
lonely broke disillusioned young men we still have work to do to there's like a major opportunity to help those people
01:13:39
that are struggling to find their person by helping them zero in better on the
01:13:45
person that they like and and the person who will like them back helping them put their best foot forward and make sure
01:13:51
that they are not shooting eles in the foot by like choosing the wrong photos or like putting getting one word
01:13:57
answered on prompts or any of those types of things so that I think is the
01:14:02
the key is like so like a big effort at
01:14:07
at hinge right now internally we're calling it flat in the power curve but it's it's it's essentially that it's like how do you help the people who
01:14:12
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
01:14:21
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
01:14:27
going on more largely in society through dating apps and so I'm clear we do that by
01:14:34
coaching people to be better at dating apps basically like picking better pictures understanding better ways to
01:14:40
reply we do that by helping them match with people that are more suitable to them and that are more likely to yeah
01:14:47
and I think giving like better more warm introductions so that people have a people have more focus and more of a
01:14:53
chance and you also limit like what's going on in terms of um people sending
01:14:59
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
01:15:06
base is there a challenge in getting people to go from the app to the real world because I was I would always be super scared of that yeah I mean there's
01:15:13
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
01:15:21
whole the whole funnel is a challenge in terms of of getting you know getting people to sign up getting people to like create profiles getting people to match
01:15:27
getting people to like move from a match to conversation and conversation to date
01:15:32
you mentioned AI big topic of conversation this year of course um generative Ai and how that might be able
01:15:38
to help people find their person I mean the conversation around Ai and relationships and dating has always been
01:15:43
quite pessimistic because people are thinking about sex robots and stuff
01:15:51
yeah yeah that that's not the that's certainly not going to be what Hing is working on how how can you use AI to you
01:15:59
mentioned it briefly there but I want to make sure I'm clear how
01:16:04
specifically you can give me feedback kind of like whoop does they have their they've released their I think one level
01:16:11
of it is like just thinking like how do you make the the dating app experience better how do you help people build
01:16:16
better profiles how do you help coach people through the conversation process and help them move off to a date so you
01:16:22
can certainly like coach people be like hey you should choose these types of photos or whatever like all that is
01:16:27
possible with AI what I think like the bigger leap though is to move much closer to what feels like a Matchmaker
01:16:34
model and that I think starts to solve some of the problems that that what you were just talking about where it's less
01:16:40
like you're just sitting there evaluating and that that whole idea of like creating a profile
01:16:45
matching trying to chat trying to move it off to a date like when you work with a Matchmaker you just have an interview
01:16:52
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
01:16:57
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 I think we can get closer
01:17:03
and closer to that model where we're like going almost straight to setting up dates that are with a much higher
01:17:10
likelihood of success than sort of leaving it on the user to create a personal advertisement for thems and you
01:17:16
know do all the work to sort of find through people that are going to like them that are going to that will like
01:17:22
them back EX ET the word Company by definition means
01:17:28
group of people um you talk about hiring in your principles quite often and just
01:17:33
generally in this book principle number five here is people with heart hire people who embody the core values I I've
01:17:40
come to learn longer I've been in business that hiring is really Central to everything um culture being the thing
01:17:46
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 20 12
01:17:53
when you relaunching the new hinge what would you say to that guy that you know now about hiring we made a whole lot of
01:17:59
hiring mistakes in the beginning and um and it was still we sort of did it like we did the principles which is we looked
01:18:04
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
01:18:11
their attributes and then we started to just create attributes for like who like
01:18:16
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 it hinge which is
01:18:22
enally like assesses for those attributes and um that led to a dramatic
01:18:29
increase in success making sure that we you know when people came they didn't
01:18:34
quit or weren't fired within their first year and um now we have extraordinarily
01:18:40
low attrition at hinge especially voluntary attrition um and I think it's because we focus so much on making sure
01:18:46
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 that
01:18:52
it's like a place they want to stay because it feels it they feel so aligned
01:18:58
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
01:19:03
to hiring a hinge person which one would you keep our Three core values are authenticity and courage and empathy
01:19:09
that's like and and they are a bit of a trifecta because one without another is like is very imbalanced I think so um
01:19:17
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
01:19:24
mean to people right there's that level of empathy but I think like those two values especially that like authenticity
01:19:30
showing up being who you are saying what's on your mind and that level of empathy is ultimately what builds trust
01:19:37
and I think trust like within an organization is really the lifeblood of the organization and those two values I
01:19:44
think build more trust than anything else they're like the two ingredients of a great
01:19:49
relationship 10 years from now we sit here and we have another convers ation we talk about what hinge is the impact
01:19:56
it's had on the world what you tell me I think the the next level impact that we
01:20:05
can have in terms of shaping dating culture and coaching and teaching people
01:20:11
to become not just better daters but like we become it's better better people
01:20:16
really and coaching people how to like have more harmonious relationships form better relationships like I think
01:20:22
there's so much opportunity to guide people on that process and and so the
01:20:29
idea that 10 years from now we like really shaped dating culture in a way that just
01:20:36
made everyone more successful that I think is like the vision for where where we're
01:20:41
headed as you know whoop are a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company and last month I had the
01:20:47
chance to sit down with Kristen Holmes she's the VP of performance at whooop and I learned so much from our conversation about circadian rhythms and
01:20:54
things like sleep studies show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that you acrew that your decision-making ability
01:21:00
will drop by up to 10% and when you're chronically underslept you'll only be a
01:21:05
fraction of the person the fraction of the boss partner friend manager that you can be that's why I'm obsessed with
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whoop which not just tracks but coaches you on how to get better at sleep so you can bring your best to everything that
01:21:18
you choose to do if you're not convinced you can try whoop for 30 days completely risk-free with zero commitment just by
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going to join. whoop.com
01:21:31
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
01:21:38
join. whoop.com CEO we have a closing tradition on this
01:21:43
podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave at 4 and the question that's been left for you
01:21:51
is if you could go back in time and give one piece of
01:21:56
advice to your 10-year-old self what would it
01:22:04
be oh what comes to mind if I could have impressed on myself that
01:22:11
like uh you
01:22:16
are I mean impressed on myself that idea of intrinsic worth if I could have like let myself know that I was worthy no
01:22:23
matter what regardless of like who dumped me or who ostracized me um that's
01:22:30
what I wish in some sense I wish I could have understood and in the other sense it's like shaped my entire life and is
01:22:36
the reason that I have hinge and the reason that I have Kate so I think maybe the advice I would
01:22:41
give is just buckle up because it's gonna be a really wild ride and it it uh it um you know does
01:22:52
have a way of working out in the end thank you so much thank you thank you so much pleasure you've built a really
01:22:57
incredible company uh you've built a different business and that's that's so evident in the product that is hinge in
01:23:04
a market where there's a lot of people doing the same obvious thing going for the lwh hanging fruit it was so clear to
01:23:09
me from a very long distance that at some point someone was being Guided by first principles because you went an an
01:23:18
obvious route which has turned in your favor as Society has evolved and we've got sick of surface level things and
01:23:24
people are dissatisfied with not actually the promise of these apps not
01:23:29
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
01:23:35
three or four years later and feeling despair maybe even feeling worse than I did when I started but hinge took a
01:23:40
different route and when you describe hinge to someone you say it's an app that cares more about meaning that cares
01:23:46
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
01:23:53
real authentic potentially successful Bond than the rest of the dating market and
01:24:01
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
01:24:07
it's clear to me this whole design to be deleted thing that and from everybody that I've met at hinge that that is a
01:24:13
promise you are genuinely trying to deliver upon yeah I mean it's totally true and that idea of first principles
01:24:18
is exactly right I think you have to just like rethink from the ground up like how would I build this and stop
01:24:24
thinking like oh other apps do this we'll do this with this twist and that I think is what
01:24:30
initially you don't find success during that path because everyone's like well this is different this is weird there's no blueprint right and um but over time
01:24:38
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
01:24:46
today Hing is you know the fastest growing major dating app or the number one app in the UK and Australia and and
01:24:52
um quickly growing in in Europe to become like a top dating app in Europe so it's it pays off eventually you have
01:24:59
to be very patient I see that in great Founders you know I see saw it in the [ __ ] founder these unobvious decisions
01:25:05
that they made because they're so Guided by their first principles usually based on the Founder's personal experience and
01:25:11
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
01:25:16
driven to end loneliness ultimately um and bring people together because it's never been more important than it is now
01:25:21
thank you Justus thank you quick one from one of our sponsors a
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lot of you have asked me the question about hu over the years about where he fits into your life is it the most
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healthy choice one can make when they're thinking about what their nutrition and here's what I would say to all of those
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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
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ideal option but it because of the nature of my life because I'm moving around often what used to happen before
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hu was I'd end up making bad choices I'd end up snacking I'd have junk food
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options on the go because I was busy and my nutrition would come second to whatever my professional priority was
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what hu allows you to do is to have a healthier option on the go that is convenient that contains a lot of the
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nutrients that you need to have a complete diet and that's exactly where it fits in my life they've now expanded
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the range if you haven't yet checked out the hu RTD I highly recommend you do go to your local Tesco boots or Saints
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spres or onine online and you can grab and try one there do you need a podcast to listen to
01:26:27
next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode
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we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy
01:26:44
[Music] it
