00:00 Let's talk Hinge itself. What led you to launch it? Did you see it as a viable business opportunity
00:06 right from the outset? I was in business school at the time, so I think I was thinking like this is
00:11 well and actually at the time I was imagining a bunch of different startup ideas because I was
00:17 trying to enter a business plan competition and then the idea for Hinge through a sort of random
00:22 series of events just kind of hit me and... Walk us through that. Give us some specifics,
00:27 some color. Yeah, I was so I was in my second year of business school and I think that the
00:33 I'll say like overall I feel like the search for connection has kind of been like the
00:38 a theme in my life and romantic connection and like has been like a very big piece of it and
00:44 I had been dating on and off someone in college and she and I didn't work out in the end and I
00:55 and also during college I was actually a very heavy like drinker and drug user and had like a
01:01 pretty intense addiction problem and so those two were very related and on the day that I graduated
01:06 I stopped drinking, I like got sober and then when I went back to business school I just
01:10 I had always relied on drinking and drugs in order to like you know have the courage to go out and
01:18 meet people and it was my is the way that I socialized and I was just stuck I didn't really
01:22 know how to do that without that crutch and I just had trouble meeting people and I actually
01:27 reached out to my college girlfriend to try to actually like get her back and she turned me down
01:33 and I was heartbroken and I really just needed I was like really looking for a way to be able to
01:40 find people and connect with people outside of like going out to bars or going to parties
01:44 and that's kind of like when the that's when the idea came. One thing I do want to talk about
01:51 is you know Hinge has this subscription tier you also say that your mission at the end of the day
01:57 is to get people to go on more dates how do you balance the two getting people to pay for
02:03 subscriptions but also saying that at your core you know you're just looking to simply get people
02:07 to go on dates are they mutually exclusive? No and we have a principle that like the free
02:12 product is sacred and we really only charge for what we say we can't give away for free
02:17 so there are things that by their nature have to be scarce like roses like if everyone had
02:22 unlimited roses then the rose wouldn't mean anything anymore or if everyone had unlimited
02:27 boost then a boost if everyone boosted all the time then no one would be boosted
02:31 or there are things that harm the ecosystem like we think that a lot of some of like the
02:38 preferences that people set actually limit them and they're not actually good for them but if
02:42 someone has like a real intention they really want to set a preference then then they can upgrade to
02:46 do that but overall what we're trying to do is we think that the free product is great at getting
02:51 people on dates if you do want a leg up by using things that are that by their nature have to be
02:56 scarce then you can pay for those to have a better experience. Given that Hinge is a business at the
03:00 end of the day they have to be a business proposition do you or does the algorithm try
03:04 to steer people towards a paid subscription? No the algorithm does not try to like we
03:13 uh like how to describe it like there's not like the algorithm changes once you
03:19 um i'm trying to think about how to answer that question it doesn't there's no like
03:24 designing of the algorithm to get you to pay yeah i think no. Is that the end goal for you
03:31 as a CEO to get people to pay i mean to like this is a business model? No i mean genuinely like the
03:38 what we found as a business is that when we help people get on more dates we grow faster and people
03:43 tell their friends more and so that kind of like overall user growth is the lifeblood of our
03:48 company and so if we were to trade that off by like limiting your experience by getting you to
03:54 like just pay more money that wouldn't be good for our overall long-term trajectory and long-term
03:58 growth. Talk to me about who you are as a CEO what is your leadership style what have you learned over
04:04 the last decade running a tech company a tech platform? Yeah i don't know where to begin uh
04:10 i've changed so much i mean i think one of the i think one of the things that people say about me
04:15 who work with me is that like i'm on just inversion like 12.0 i think that i've like i
04:21 one thing that i'm is like very true that means i take feedback very seriously i'm like constantly
04:27 in a in a state of like self-reflection and continuous self-improvement i was so bad at being
04:33 a CEO so bad at product and a marketing and pretty much everything when i started Hinge
04:37 and i think over time through a lot of incremental improvement and self-reflection and feedback
04:42 i and persistence which i'd say is like my probably number one quality i think that has been like the
04:49 main key to success. Any growth numbers you can share whether it's revenue valuation anything of
04:54 that nature any financial metrics? Yeah so we went from less than a million dollars in revenue in 2017
05:00 to we're projecting to do about 400 million this year which is a like i think in the fourth quarter
05:07 yeah we're expecting to do well over 40 almost 50 percent revenue growth we are setting up a date
05:15 every two seconds about every two seconds now for the number three dating app globally.
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