Grindr: Joel Simkhai

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28:57Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's March of 2009. Joel has just launched Grindr. He's turned down a bargain basement offer to sell it. And he's now anxiously watching the App Store to see how it's doing. I remember I was alone in my house at that point. I had no marketing plan. I had no budget. There was no launch party. There was no celebration. There was no champagne. It was almost just like any other day except for this phone call I got. So before you hit the launch button or, you know, whatever, the proverbial launch button and it went live, what was the plan on how it would make money?

29:37Was there a plan? So we added ads. There was the provider AdMob, which would serve ads. And then it would just suck in whatever ad, you know, the algorithm pulled in, and you would get pennies on that ad or something like that. Yeah, that's right. So initially, when you opened the app on March 25, 2009, tell me what you would see. What could you do? I open it up, and then what's the first step? Yeah, so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and to get onto the app. So we didn't even require an email address, no phone number, nothing. It was just we had used the device ID.

30:15You could log on and you didn't have to even create an account, which later became a problem. But initially, you could just log on and photos were not required. They were optional. And so the idea here was two things. One is that, you know, not all gay people are going to be comfortable. So let's not make a lot of requirements. Number two, let's make this as frictionless as possible and very, very simple and straightforward. And it was just going to be free. There was no paid model initially, right? Yeah. So it was just like, you know, grid, just like your photo album. The first photo essentially was the closest person.

30:51You would look at their profile and it would say, you know, so-and-so is, you know, 500 feet away, you know, five miles away, whatever the distance was. And then you could chat with them. And so you would hit the chat button, send them a message. I think at the time you might have been able to exchange photos. I can't quite remember if we launched with that or not. But eventually you'd be able to exchange photos and chat. So when you launched the app, I mean, this is a time where there were probably only like 10 ,000 apps in the app store total. So discovery was just much easier. And was it just discovered?

31:24I mean, was it pretty soon after you launched it? did people start to find it because there weren't many, first of all, gay hookup apps, if any, and probably not even that many dating apps yet? There was a few other apps. But certainly if you would type in gay into the app store, you wouldn't come up with much. You know, what we decided to do was to have parties. And we would go to local gay bars in L.A. and, you know, throw grinder parties. June was, you know, Pride Month. I remember we went to different prides. And I remember going to San Francisco Pride. And what we would do is we would hand out little business cards, you know, Download Grinder.

32:01And the reaction was very, very positive. Anytime someone at that time heard that there was an app for gay people, they were really excited. It was a free app. And so we got probably about 1 ,000 downloads a day. At what point, though, did you have to figure out a way to get money? I mean, every 1 ,000 downloads a day, even in the first month, like a certain point, you've got to build out a team to support that. So did you get a loan? Did you go to a bank? Did you ask family, friends? Like, what did you do? Yeah, I got a loan, about$100 ,000 from my parents. You know, fortunately, I wasn't paying Scott.

32:37He was working for Equity. Morton was getting... Eventually, the deal I had with Morton was a rev share on the ads that would come in. So he would get paid as ads would come through. And it was just the three of us, really. So the costs weren't that high other than... And the serving costs were not that much at first. Yeah. But quickly the complexity kicks in and we needed to find ways to monetize. So how did you – I mean so I hear this idea of Grindr, okay? And my instant reaction to this is what a brilliant idea. You know, gay men have a hard time meeting other gay men and you're going to come up with a solution to it.

33:18But I have to imagine that even me in 2009, if you would have told me this, I might have said, I don't see how this is going to work. You know, from the vantage point of 2023, it looks like a brilliant idea. But did you have other people say to you, you know, I just don't think people are really going to use this. I don't see this working. Yeah, I mean, I was met with a lot of doubt. And I asked a lot of people to help me. I mean, I asked some friends, hey, would you come work with me on this? A lot of people turned me down. You know, when we were launching this and I was looking for beta testers, I had reached out to my friends and I said, hey, can you help me beta test?

33:51A lot of people didn't respond to me. What was the pushback, do you remember, that people gave you? What was a reason for why this wouldn't work? Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, some of the responses that I got from the competitors that the iPhone wouldn't take off, that, you know, now we understand how important location is. But back then, that was not the assumption. There was no Uber, there was no Foursquare, there was nothing like that. And so our minds at the time were not oriented around location. My mind was oriented around location because I was the guy who would go online and would have to talk to people who were nearby.

34:27And so for me, my struggle was all about location largely. Now you realize, hey, I want to order some food. Of course I want to order food to exactly where I am. I want to order a car. But none of that existed at the time and none of that was done through your phone. The other question I have for you, Joel, and I'm – one of the things that is so hard about starting a business or having an idea is hearing no. You tell somebody your idea and they poke holes in it or they tell you this is why it won't work. And just in our interaction, like you don't come across as like a hustler or like a wheeler-dealer type.

35:04But are you – would you consider yourself to be confident and good at kind of presenting and selling? You know, what I do know is that I have one skill, really. I don't know how to program. I don't know how to design. I don't really have any hard skills. The only skill I have is to figure it out and to know that everything has, every problem has a solution, especially with technology. And so surprisingly, to me, that's always been my greatest skill. And the way I'm able to do that is being able to work with people and leverage people and to get people to execute kind of my vision. All right. So it's clear after you launch this app, right, that you're getting some traction.

35:49People are downloading it, right? That's right. And like you said before, I mean, there weren't a lot of people out there at the time who even knew how to make iPhone apps. So this guy you were working with, this guy Morton, I mean, he just kind of figured out on his own how to create this and make it all work? Yeah. The beautiful thing is he's a hacker. And so he essentially figured this out. But Morton was a developer, an iPhone developer on the front end. What he wasn't was a developer on the back end. Those skill sets of front end and back end are very, very different. And so that was, you know, soon after launch became our big challenge was how do we scale and how do we deal with all this traffic?

36:34Him and me and none of us expected the scale we would get. I remember when I had this server before, I would go on once a day and I'd have to restart the server to kind of flesh out. I don't know exactly why, but it was not built for scale at all. And, I mean, I have to imagine that the, I mean, at a certain point, like early on, did the ads start to generate some revenue to keep you afloat? Yeah, that's how we funded the business was through ads, maybe a few thousand dollars the first month. And I would imagine the first year we probably made a few hundred thousand dollars in ads. And you weren't, you didn't have like an ad sales team.

37:15It was just like whatever would come in through this server, ad server. Yeah, there was no cost to us. It's just a check, you know, wire or deposit into your account once a month. A couple pennies every time there was a little ad. And it could be an ad for whatever. I mean, this is probably still early days when it came to, like, targeted ads. So not necessarily, like, ads that would be targeting gay men. Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, this was in the early days. So these were very general ads. And most of them, I don't think, even were location-based ads at the time. These were just very, you know, ads for other apps, too, right?

37:47Right. You know, Uber at one point was a big advertiser, so other apps would advertise. And Joel, you were very clear. This was not a dating app. If people met somebody and they dated, great. But this was really, you described it as a hookup app. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, various times I thought of it in different ways. But yeah, essentially I see it as a hookup app. But even, you know, if you peel it a little bit more, I just thought this is a way to meet someone, right? This is just a way for you to meet someone nearby. And whether you go have sex or you go whatever you want to go do, the whole point is to go meet.

38:21And that was something that was not really happening on iPhone at the time. So it was probably super viral right away, right? Because once you're on it, you're telling your friends about it, and then that's how it spread. Yeah. So our strategy was twofold. One was these grinder parties, and the other was press and to reaching out to the press. And so, you know, I didn't have a PR firm. I would just pitch them and just send them a short email. You would just write to the reporter yourself? Yeah. I would just look up who's covering the space or who was, I don't know, and find any reporter I could, email them, said, hey, I just launched this app.

38:57And that's how, you know, we got the word out. So at a certain point, Apple, they enable you to sell the app, right? And that essentially allowed you to create two tiers, a free tier and a paid version. And what was the difference between those two options? Yeah, so the paid version, you could see more people, you could block more people. Because remember, every time we would show you a new profile, that was a call to our server. And our architecture was not very good. And so there was an added expense for each new profile you saw. So we essentially started charging for that. And did you find a lot of people paying for it?

39:35We got a good amount. And I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free. And no one's going to ever pay for an app. And I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm essentially a dating business. And people have been paying for dating for centuries. You're a matchmaker. I'm a matchmaker. I'm not an app. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it because we're providing a lot of value. And fortunately, I was right. Okay, what about, let's go back to the technology side. I mean, getting a thousand downloads a day and then just the virality of it.

40:10Well, that's putting more and more pressure on the back end. So from what I've read, the user experience in the first couple of years sucked. Like it would crash all the time. Right. Like what was going on? Yeah. Our app store ratings were, you know, one star. We had horrible reviews. And it doesn't seem like it affected downloads. No. And user time. I mean, people were using the app for hours. But giving you one-star reviews. That's right. And why were they giving you one-star reviews? What would happen? The app would crash. You would have to wait for the profiles to load. You know, it just wasn't very good software.

40:50Right. But my real problem was I didn't have a technical co-founder. So I didn't have anyone who had a deep understanding of what was going on technically. Morton probably at this point had left and I had hired someone else. And so I had another friend, childhood friend, Yvette Pasqua, who worked at a consulting firm down in Costa Rica. And so eventually I turned to her. I don't know exactly what, I can't remember exactly what year that was, but it was fairly early on. And through her consulting shop, they developed the app. They had developers for, you know, iOS eventually, Android and BlackBerry, and also the back end.

41:28You outsourced the maintenance of the app to this group of code developers in Costa Rica? That's right. Wow. That's right. So that was very efficient. But did you ever think, you know, I just got to get an office. I got to get everyone in this office. I got to have all these people here, staff, employees. Or was it just, did it make more sense to you to just kind of do patchwork? Like we'll outsource this, we'll outsource that. We'll, you know, just patch these holes like that. Yeah, I was very reluctant to get an office. I was working from home. I was very happy. I remember I had maybe eight people.

42:06They would come to my house. I had a very small house. The neighbors would complain with all the people parking on our small street. And how were you, even with a small team, I mean, how were you finding yourself as a boss? I mean, did managing people and projects come easily to you? No, I was not very excited about managing. but at some point it became a business. Yeah. And I was kind of reluctant for it to become a business in some ways. I really kind of loved it as a small project, something that I could kind of do from home. I remember at this point we were getting people interested in investing because we had been getting quite a bit of attention and they wanted to see my financials.

42:47And so we didn't, I said, well, financials, I don't have financials, I don't have projections. I don't, you know, who knows? You had investors coming in wanting to like look at your data room. Yeah. And I said, data, what are you talking about? I don't have a business model. I don't have a business plan. I don't have a marketing plan. I don't have data, nothing. You know, what you see is what you get. And, you know, my collegehood friend, her husband wasn't working at the time. And so Carter McJunkin, who ended up being our COO later on, he came in and he helped me put my projections together.

43:18And so he would consult and I said, how much do you want? He said,$100 an hour. And I almost fell off my chair. Because that's crazy expensive. That's a lot of money. Yeah. And so a few months into the project with Carter, I think he understood that this was going to take off. And he called me and said, listen, I need to move from – he was out in Maryland at the time. I need to move in Los Angeles. I need to work on this full time. And we need to build a business here. You could tell that this was on a very good trajectory. I remember when I went to San Francisco Pride in June, three months after we launched, I was out and handing out cards and someone said to me, Joel, Stephen Fry mentioned you on Top Gear.

43:59Stephen Fry, the great, obviously British comedian. Yeah. And I went back to my hotel room and we got 10 ,000 downloads. Stephen Fry was on Top Gear, obviously the racing show on BBC, and he talked about how he had Grindr on his phone. Yeah, so Stephen Fry went on Top Gear, which at the time was the number one show on the BBC. Right. And, you know, Stephen Fry is a bit of a tech geek or tech lover. Yeah. And so Jeremy says to him, oh, you know, do you have any favorite apps? And he says, yeah, I have two apps. One is this app where you can play music on it. And the other app is this app called Grindr.

44:39It's a gay cruising app. And they pan to the audience, and you can see their reactions. Like clutching their pearls. Exactly. And he then goes out and takes out the app, and he basically gives a demo. Wow. And so that was a huge moment for us, where everyone in the U.K. at this point knew about Grindr. And it was possible to download it in the U.K. too? Like the location service would work just the same? Absolutely. So we launched around the world, and it was available everywhere. One of the things about one of the early criticisms that you got was critics writing, oh, this is so superficial. It's just like torso shots of guys with six packs and, you know, bulging muscles.

45:24And it really is all about looks. And and your response that was, yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. I mean, I think that. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think the way I had always thought of it was, you know, you walk into a bar and what is it that you first see is you first see that person. You walk into any situation. And so that is actually mimics real life in some ways. That humans are superficial initially. We do just look for looks. Well, that's what you see. That's what you see. You don't know anything about the person before you meet them. Right. All you know is what you see.

46:01And so for me, this was not very inconsistent with how we meet people normally. Now, one of the things that the app did not have was like any kind of sexually explicit photos. Like the photos were, if they were real, but there were no, they could not put any, no one could put like a sexually explicit photo up there. Well, so the way I viewed this was what I tried to do with Grindr was I tried to mimic real life as much as possible. And so what we thought about is that there is a public space and there's a private space. And so with Grindr, there's the public profile. And in your public profile, you have to keep it PG-13.

46:42In your chat, which is a private chat, you can discuss whatever you'd like. And you can exchange whatever photos you'd like as long as it's legal because those are private. And so that's how if you wanted to exchange explicit photos, you could. And that was a very, very popular feature. And that was in our private space and that was in compliance with Apple and Google's guidelines. And that's what people did. So, I mean, sounds like you guys started to bring in revenue, maybe even profit, even if it was small from ads, pretty soon after you launched in 2009. We didn't bring in profit. I don't think we were profitable maybe until a year, maybe three, year, four.

47:26Right. But, you know, revenue did come in. Maybe 2010, we probably maybe did a few million dollars in revenue. But it was, you know, break even and trying to grow the team and pay for the servers. And, you know, those were two big costs. And, you know, we ended up using Google App Engine. And at one point, this is later on, they increased their pricing. And it almost killed the business because— What's the Google App Engine? Sorry. Google App Engine was our hosting provider. It was the Google WebCloud services, essentially. Oh, and they raised the prices and you did not, and that almost killed the business?

48:01Well, because, you know, our costs went up dramatically and we simply couldn't afford what they were going to charge us. Eventually, we went on, we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive. But largely because we had implemented them in not a very efficient way. So we weren't profitable for a number of years, but we were fortunately making revenue. So that could float the business for a while. Yeah. Our ability, we were able to achieve everything we were able to achieve because our marketing costs were virtually zero. We had a number of people who helped with these grinder parties. But our marketing spend was essentially zero.

48:38So our cost to acquire new users was essentially zero. I mean, that's what allowed us to grow. oh, you know, if I had to spend money acquiring users, we would not have been able to achieve what we achieved. You were spending no money on user acquisition. That's right. I mean, it's like a dream business. Absolutely. And, you know, initially, I think, you know, ads were 80 % of our revenue and, you know, the subscriptions were 20. And eventually it would flip to the opposite where, you know, most of the money came from subscriptions. And, you know, we had a lot of users. And for me, you know, this is a network product.

49:12And so from my perspective, we wanted to have a lot of free users because we wanted the network. And that's the power of the app. You go on and you see someone nearby. And so if we had to charge everyone, it simply wouldn't have worked. I have to imagine that not that long after you launched it, there were competing apps that would pop up. Oh, yes, absolutely. How did you kind of create the moat around Grindr, given that the user experience was so bad in the first year or so? So if other competitors were coming on board, I have to assume that some of them might even have had a better app. How did you guys?

49:49They all had a better app. So how did you manage to compete against them? What was the reason? It's the size of the network. Just because you were there early. You were there first. Yes. Size matters. I think that even was our tagline for a while. And, you know, for a location-based service, when you're meeting people, it's really, you know, all about you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. And so we had the, you know, first movers advantage. We had the network. And we were growing very quickly. And so that was fortunate for us that we had the network and that was our moat.

50:26And in that sort of year, first year, year and a half, I mean, you know, you come across as a very kind of quiet and even keeled guy. Do you get stressed? Did you get angry? Would you like, you know, with the team around you, would you like, we got to we got to fix this? Would you ever panic? I mean, tell me a little bit about just kind of step outside of yourself for a moment. And who was who was Joel at that time? Well, I remember the first phase of the first year was actually quite a lonely time, you know, starting from the development until maybe after launch, until I actually had invited people to come work, you know, physically at my place.

51:06It was a very lonely time because, A, I was so busy working on it, so my social life had become essentially nothing. And this is going to sound very cheesy, but I remember I was so, so lonely and I was so depressed. And I said to myself, you know what, Joel? I had a conversation with my future self and I had my future self tell me, Joel, keep on going. You need to persevere and you need to just keep on the hard work, keep on the perspective and keep on going. And that was very helpful for me. And, you know, I still have conversations with my future self. You know, what advice does he have for me?

51:43What perspective does seven-year-old Joel have for current Joel? The other beautiful thing about it is that you can't really argue with your future self because it's yourself. And so it's hard to say, eh, he doesn't know what he's talking about or that kind of thing. And so that's kind of a mechanism that I've employed in my life. So, all right. So one of the things that I think was a really interesting break or probably the first time that I think I can remember hearing about Grindr was because I think by September of 2011, you had like two and a half million users all around the world, which is quite amazing.

52:22I think it was 2012, right? Summer of 2012. You had the Olympics in London. And basically, for some reason, the app crashed at around that time. Yeah. Somehow a rumor started that this coincided with the arrival of athletes in London at the Olympic Village. Tell me the story. Did you plant that story? Did somebody plant that story? Because it's a great story, but what do you remember about that? Yeah, so this is right before the Olympics had started, and the athletes had just arrived at the Olympic Village. And we got an email from one of the tabloids in the UK. hey, they said to us, hey, you know, we noticed that Grindr went down right around the time the Olympians had arrived.

53:14Is there any correlation? And I remember I turned to the head of marketing and I said, don't respond. And they ran with the story without comment from us that Grindr had crashed because gay Olympians has essentially crashed the servers. And said the company had no comment, no response. No response. And it was ridiculous, right? How many Olympians are there? A few thousand. How many of them are gay? Maybe a few dozen or a few hundred. For them to be able to crash our servers when we had hundreds of thousands of users and daily active users and millions monthly was simply ridiculous. But that became part of the urban legend, I guess.

53:59And one of the things I realized also is that, you know, our outages actually, we had a lot of outages. And we would actually see that any time we would have an outage, our traffic would go up afterwards. And any time we would have a negative news article about outages, our traffic would go up and we'd get more downloads. And so one of the things I realized here was that even bad press, you know, quote unquote bad press, might be good. When we come back in just a moment, Grindr starts to get even more attention for all the other problems it has, from uncontrollable spam to critical concerns over privacy.

54:36Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This.

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57:14Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2013, four years after launch, and Grindr has about 5 million total users. And at this point, Joel starts getting calls from people who want to invest in the app. But he says, no, he's not interested. I don't like to answer other people. And I felt that if I would take venture backing, I would essentially become a monkey to them and that I would need to essentially work for them. And a lot of them were, you know, straight men who I felt like didn't understand my business. And, you know, I didn't want to answer to straight corporate America.

57:57And also, I mean, your revenue started to become significant. I think by 2013, it was$25 million. That was a combination of subscribers and ad revenue. Yeah, we had the financial, you know, we could support ourselves. So there were certainly points where we could have used the money. But I was very stubborn about this that I didn't want. And I also didn't, the other thing is I didn't want someone to push me to an exit. I just said to myself, hey, I don't know when we're going to exit. And that's not what it's about. This is about building the business. And I think the other part of it is, you know, I'm a person who doesn't look for external validation.

58:34And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with valuations, headcount. And to me, those were vanity metrics. Those were not metrics that were important. The only metric that was really important to me was my daily active users and how many messages people sent. And what impact were we making? That's what mattered to me. Has the app gotten more and more popular? You also get scammers. People who are trying to get credit card information and all kinds of scams. When you found out about that, how did you handle that? I don't know that we had a lot of, in terms of credit card hacking and, you know, Apple would process our payments, so we didn't have any of those types of problems.

59:22But we had spam. You know, spam was, you know, visit my website, go download this, go download that. You had spam profiles being set up? Oh, yes, absolutely. And so going back to the initial founding of the app, we didn't have accounts. Essentially, anyone could message anyone. And that was because I wanted to make it very easy for someone to be able to use our service. That made it a perfect opportunity for a spammer to be able to spam our users. And so you would go on and you would start talking to someone and they would send you a marketing message. And it was very hard for us to solve this because we didn't have accounts.

1:00:02And so this was one of our moments where I thought I could lose the business. Because you weren't clear how many accounts were fake. Well, no, the customer experience was horrible. You would go on and people would spam you. Imagine getting your inbox without the spam filter. It's just impossible to communicate. And so we had to fight the spammers. Yeah. So how did you do it? Yeah, so it's creating accounts. So everyone has to have an account. You have to verify your email address. So at some point, if you didn't sign into your email, you would lose access, which wasn't a problem because people would do intentionally anything.

1:00:38You know, they had put up with so much. Giving an email address was not going to be a challenge. But, you know, you also go through messages and you do message detection where you look for keywords that people are, you know, the spammers and you shut down the spammers. So it's quite an effort to combat spam. How long did it take? Years, I mean. It took us, you know, a few months to really, you know, solve the crisis. But, you know, it's an ongoing battle. It's a guacamole with spammers to fight them. So there are obviously always unintended consequences to any technology, right? This is normal.

1:01:18And one of those unintended consequences was that the app did put some people in danger, right? Particularly gay men in countries where homosexuality is illegal. Afghanistan and Ghana and Iraq, Iran. I don't know if it is today still in Saudi Arabia where it's punished. Egypt. And allegedly in Egypt, the state authorities use the app to track and even arrest gay men. I don't know exactly. It's not alleged. It happens. It happens. So, yeah. I mean, on the one hand, it was probably this incredible opportunity for these very closeted, fearful men to meet other men. Then, on the other hand, it put them at risk.

1:02:04What could you do to fix that or to mitigate that? Anything? Yeah, well, a couple of things we did. One was we had messaged our users and told them not to put their faces in their profile, not to publicly declare who they were. The other thing is, you know, Grindr is all about location, so you see how far away you are from someone. Yeah. Well, using that data, the police are able to find where you are. So in Egypt, we turned off that ability so you couldn't see how far you were from one another. You know, it's a tough call when you think about these places and you say to yourself, should we make the service not available?

1:02:43And from my perspective, what I realized is that this was the only kind of gay bar for a lot of people in a lot of places. And to take that away from them, I thought would be the wrong decision. because for them, that's largely their access to other queer people. And as this became more and more successful, I mean, your market was gay men, which is a big market, a lot of dollars. But did you think, I mean, I know that there were people coming at you saying, hey, this is exclusionary. It's only for gay men. What about gay women? What about non-binary folks, trans folks, et cetera? Or, I mean, just from a business perspective, and I hope this doesn't come across as cynical, from a business perspective, it might have been a good opportunity to just expand the user base, right?

1:03:30Yeah. And, I mean, beyond that, we had straight people. I mean, a lot of people. Asking to get on it, yeah. Yeah. Hey, this is, you know, before Tinder. Hey, why can't I meet someone on my phone? We need a better way. And, yeah, so we got that feedback from all corners. And so one of the ways you addressed this was with another app called Blender that you created. That's right. And was, I mean, to kind of spoiler alert here, but Blender did not do quite as well as Grindr by any stretch. Was it already too late when it came out? Was Tinder already kind of the dominant app? No, we predated Tinder by quite some time.

1:04:05Wow. Our failure was in the architecture of what we did. And so, you know, if there was a woman, she would get hundreds and hundreds of messages. We also allowed people to exchange photos. and so women would get unsolicited nudes. That was a problem. We also would say how far you were on Blender and that made women uncomfortable. So overall, the failure of Blender was the failure of understanding what were the needs of women. And part of it was we didn't have women. We mostly were gay men on the team and we didn't have enough straight women and we thought we understood the market, but we didn't.

1:04:49How did you cope with the occasional criticism or more than occasional criticism you would get? You know, media stories about underage boys going on and signing up, stories about men endangering themselves in countries where it was illegal or, you know, like how did you personally deal with that? Did you just – was it just for you? It's just the price of doing business or did it ever get to you? Well, I mean each of those are different. Yeah. But I think on the bigger picture, I think the answer is that with every technology that there is negatives. You know, one of the good things we had was we had the location of these users.

1:05:26So if someone committed a crime, we would, you know, turn over to the law enforcement and say, you know, here's where you can find them. But, you know, this was one of my, I think, my challenges at Grindr was not taking maybe seriously enough some of the other issues that we could have dealt with, that we could have helped. You know, people spend an hour a day on Grindr. That's a long time. That's not very good for you. And so thinking through how could we have better, you know, help without all these negative things, without the racism, without the transphobia, without all these other negative aspects and aspects of the community.

1:06:03And I guess we should mention that there was quite a bit of that on the site, too. There were, right, I mean, there were men who were saying, I don't date this kind of person, I don't date that kind of person. Or they were even in chats quite explicit in their racism. Yeah, absolutely. That was a problem. I think it remains to be a problem. And, you know, after leaving, I think I now have a different perspective on that. I think we should have had been a lot more involved and guiding of our users and letting them know that certain behaviors was just unacceptable. In 2016, you announced that you had sold a 60 % stake in the company.

1:06:45This is after many years of many suitors and investors coming at you and you turning them down. This was a Chinese video game developer called Kunlun Tech Company. And they took a 60 % stake and that deal valued Grindr at$155 million. So you guys got$93 million at that point. What was the reason? What changed? Like, why then did you say, you know what, let's bring it on now? I think there were two main things that were going on at this point. One was the technology. We were still struggling. We were still just dealing with our scaling issues. We were not shipping updates. We were not releasing new features.

1:07:27And so I just realized I was essentially a firefighter, and our team were just firefighting. We were fighting fire after fire. and we just didn't have the expertise that we needed. And so I thought, you know, what if I can find a partner who can help me scale this and grow this and someone who really understands technology? So that was one part of it. The other part was I had no idea what my business was worth. So I said to myself, you know, why don't we go out there and find out what the business is worth? And then we got to the point where, hey, this is a lot of money and this is a life-changing amount of money.

1:08:00So we found Kunlun, who they had a lot of experience with mobile gaming in China. And also China at the time, we wanted to break into China. So they would be the perfect partner to help us with China. And this partner is going to help us where we're weak. And this will finally be kind of this technical co-founder that I've never had. All right. So they come in and they buy 60 % stake. And the other side to it is, did part of you want to just eventually get out? Because when they take a 60 % stake, eventually they're going to take 100 % stake. Yeah, I mean, and we had a mechanism for that. It was essentially a three-year.

1:08:41At that time, we said ourselves, okay, likely to be out in three years, but maybe not. I think I probably fooled myself in some ways and thought that I would, if I wanted to stay, I could stay. If I wanted to go, I would go. and from an external perspective, you're right. Hey, you sell control, you lose control. But I know that I fully understood that. All right. So now this Chinese company comes in and what did that mean? Did everything seem to say the same more or less or did things start to change quickly? I mean, 60%, they own a majority of the company now. I mean, I think, you know, things, you know, we didn't have the best relationship.

1:09:21The honeymoon was very short. And we got hacked soon after the deal closed. And I said, great. You know, you guys are not great that we got hacked, but like. You can solve this. You can help me solve this. But, you know, they weren't very helpful and they were very focused on us launching in China. And they wanted us to really become the number one app in China because there was another app that was gaining a very significant traction to China. Yeah. I try to look at it from their perspective. You know, they're sitting there in Asia. They're seeing that someone else is becoming the dominant player in Asia.

1:09:56They're worrying about that. But I'm sitting here in Los Angeles and I'm saying, you know, that's not the end of the world. Even if we don't get China, you know, that's fine. I'd rather lose China than have the business be hacked and lose all our data. And so that became very contentious. They exercised their option to buy the rest of the company out about two years later, exactly two years later. Bought the rest of the company out for$150 million. And I guess at that point, Scott Chen from Kunlun comes to run, becomes the head of Grindr, and they sort of politely asked you to step aside? I'm not quite sure the word polite is the right word.

1:10:35Maybe impolitely asked you to step aside? Yeah, listen, it was very contentious and not the way I wanted to go. But, you know, we ended up settling it and, you know, we came to an agreement. Joel, let me ask you this question. I mean, and it may sound obvious to some people, it may sound just utterly stupid to others. But, you know, you've been grinding away at this, so to speak, since 2009. It's now 2018. And they've asked you to leave in a contentious way. And you are not happy about it. But you're going to walk away with$100,$200 million of value. that's a pretty great outcome. And, you know, you're walking away from the stress of that business too.

1:11:22So I guess my question is, who cares, right? Like why did it matter to you? And I'm not saying who cares, of course it is. But why did it matter to you that it was contentious and you had to leave? I think starting a business is a very emotional thing. And I think it is something that I dedicated myself to. And I had many lonely nights. I had many difficult days and nights. You know, it took all of me. And I was helping my community, helping them meet, helping them, you know, find great sex, finding love. You know, there are people who have gotten married because they found someone on Grindr. And so such a tremendous impact and, you know, something that I love more than anything is matchmaking.

1:12:13And so a combination of all those things, I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me because I made a lot of money. But kind of ironically, a few months before I finally left, I met a guy in New York and we started dating. And Brendan and I are now, you know, married. And interestingly, I've asked him, I said, you know, he said, you know, I don't think I would have taken you very seriously if you were still the CEO of Grindr. I don't know that this relationship would have worked. And I think for myself also, I think I was able to prioritize him and my, you know, relationships in general. And that created the space for me to fall in love and get married.

1:13:00I know that after you stepped away, Joel, Grindr continued to grow for some time, but it did have some challenges. And I know that the Chinese company that had bought it from you eventually sold it. And then the new owners took it public a few years later. And for a time, the market cap was over like$2 billion. I think it's dropped quite significantly now. But when you saw that, I mean, at the time, right, the thing that you built was valued at$2 billion. I mean, it must have been quite amazing to see that. Yeah, you know, I was very, that's certainly mixed feelings, right? But the main feeling I had was kind of proud of myself for building something that got acceptance from Wall Street to a certain extent.

1:13:47I was very proud of that, and I was very proud of the queer community, that this was a successful business that served the queer community, and it was a success story of the queer community. Around the same time that Grindr went public, you launched a new company, a new app called Motto, a new dating app, which you now is out in the world. Tell me about it. What is it, and how is it different from everything else out there? Yeah, so Motto is essentially a hookup app for queer people. You have to upload three face photos, and so you see exactly who you're meeting, and we verify every single person, so it's 100 % real community.

1:14:31And it's essentially an experience kind of more like Hinge. You get a batch of people every day at 5 p.m., and you get to react to their profile, and you get to reach out to people. And it's meant to be a lot more straightforward. And a lot of it was built in reaction to, you know, the problems of the current hookup apps, not just Grindr, but the other ones as well. But at the end of the day, this is, you know, I think I had this benefit of sitting there and saying, hey, now, what does a hookup app look like if you build it from scratch? You know, 2009 and 2008 was Grindr, and that was the app for then.

1:15:10and then Motto was, I think, the app for today. Yeah. Joel, when you think about your whole story, you're a guy who is not a computer scientist, obviously very smart, but you studied international relations and you were not a coder or developer. You had an idea. Lots of people do. They go nowhere. But you turned it into a really big business and you became very wealthy as a result of that. and create something that has had a significant impact on culture, certainly on gay culture, queer culture. How much of that do you think is how much time and grind you put in and how much do you attribute to luck?

1:15:56You know, this is a tough one because it's hard to tell, right? I'm not a huge believer in luck. I don't actually really know, understand what that means. I'm also very fortunate. and, you know, I grew up to parents who were supportive financially and emotionally and in many, many different ways. You know, I don't know, is that, you know, luck in some ways? Sure. But I had a lot of people who come up to me and said, hey, I had that idea too. And my response to all of them is always the same thing. It's like, well, what did you do about it? And the answer always is nothing. I go back to what I said earlier, and that's, you know, I believe in myself.

1:16:37I don't let other people tell me what to do or to validate me. And I figure it out. And just understanding that I may be right, I may be wrong, but at the end of the day, I'm a happy guy. That's Joel Simkai, founder of Grindr and Motto. Motto, by the way, is still small. Right now, it only works in New York and Miami, but with plans to expand far beyond in the future. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablui.

1:17:21It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Seifer. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

1:17:52If you like How I Built This, you can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.