Grindr CEO is betting on AI to solve online dating's biggest problem

0:00Hi, I'm Connie Loizes. And this is Alex Gove. And this is Strictly VC Download.

0:15Hi, and welcome back to the Strictly VC Download. Quick mention, if you are in New York, we would love for you to join us at Ideal Glass Studios in the West Village on Thursday night, September 10th. We are hosting a Strictly VC get-together with some people you will definitely want to hear from, including Keith Raboy of Coastal Adventures, Devin Parekh of Insight Partners, founders Tristan Walker and Bryn Putnam, both of whom sold their last companies to Procter & Gamble and Lululemon, respectively, and are building again. And also Craig Shapiro of Collaborative Fund in conversation with Jason Levian, the CEO of DC United.

0:53They are joining us to talk about the risks and rewards of investing at the intersection of tech and sports. We'll have drinks and food to nab a spot. Just search for Strictly VC New York and 2026 and you'll find what you need. As for this week's guest, we talked with George Arison, the CEO of Grindr, who took over back in 2022 when the company was, in his words, adrift, bounced between Chinese ownership, a forced government-mandated sale, and a private equity rescue with no real product strategy to speak of. Four years later, he's built something Wall Street is finally starting to take seriously.

1:31Revenue is on track to nearly triple since he arrived, margins are strong, and analysts at Morgan Stanley and Goldman have been raising their price targets all year. But there's a lot happening under the hood right now as well. Grindr is testing a very pricey new AI powered tier called Edge that's already gotten mocked online. The engineering org is running lean and leaning hard into AI. Arison says something like 80 % of the company's code is now AI written. And there's a bigger ambition behind all of it, turning Grindr into what Arison calls a gaverhood in your pocket, expanding into healthcare, long distance AI matchmaking and beyond.

2:11So much progress has been made, in fact, that Arison is not shy about the fact that he thinks investors are still discounting the stock simply because of what Grindr is. Here's that conversation. We hope you enjoyed as much as we did, and we will see you back here next week.

2:29George, quickly, I had talked to my colleague Kirsten Korosek, who I guess used to talk to you when you were running shift and was... When I was in the car business, yes. Exactly. And she was singing your praises. So I just wanted to say hello on her behalf. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. But you have had a really interesting career. You built this used car marketplace, a conversational AI platform for auto dealers. Now you are running Grindr. What is the through line for you as an operator? Well, I never thought I'd have a job like the one I have now, I'll be honest. I never thought I'd run a company that I didn't start from scratch, having done that a few times.

3:06And I didn't think that I would be running a dating or connections product because that was not really where I had spent most of my time. But when they reached out to me about this opportunity to come to Grind and run this company, I had this like weird, oh, well, in some ways I'm made in a lab for this job because dating products and gay connection products had played such a big part in my own life when I was younger. because through them, I figured out what it was like to be gay and came out and et cetera, and made my initial first set of gay friends and so forth. This is before Grindr. Grindr didn't get started until I was a few years after college.

3:47And then Grindr was in a very unique moment in time where it had been around for a while. The business was making really good revenue, was growing really nicely, but there was no product strategy. There was no business strategy, really lacking kind of long-term vision. as a company as well. And more importantly, a lot of company building had to be done. So in some ways, I was being offered a chance to run a series A company, but one that was going to be public in a few months and had 150 plus million dollars in revenue and a 40 % plus EBITDA margin, which is like not something you normally see.

4:23And so to me, that was really interesting because it really leaned into things I care about from perspective of business, like running early stage businesses that you need to figure out what to do with them and how to scale them. While at the same time, the product itself was quite interesting because I had this personal allegiance towards, hey, this really matters and having this be really, really good is important. In some ways, the folks who bought Grindr from the Chinese saved the company because this company was not going to survive under Chinese ownership, given that there was very little investment happening.

4:54And so to come in on top of that and have this chance to really revive it and turn into something a lot bigger was quite exciting. And so that's why this opportunity made a lot of sense. And it's been a tremendous amount of fun over the last nearly four years now. It is interesting. Grindr has gone through so many different chapters and not everybody listening will know the background. But as you said, it was owned by a Chinese group dating back to the mid 2010s. Yeah. So Grindr was founded by an incredible entrepreneur who started it in his living room, on his own, couldn't get VC funding. So Grinder was profitable almost from day one as a result, because he needed to fund it all himself.

5:35He was not a tech person, he was a marketer. And so this was very new to him. He built this really incredible business. And then in mid 2010s, he decided to sell at least a portion of his stake and sold it to a company called Kunlun in China. But as soon as that transaction went through and was announced, the CFIUS authorities came in and said that Chinese cannot control a company with the kind of data that Grindr has on Americans. And so they were required to unwind it. And that took a couple of years. And then it was bought by a group of investors in 2020. The transaction literally was signed, I think, like two weeks before COVID and had to close after COVID.

6:17So you can imagine what that was like in May, June of 2020 to do. They brought in a temporary management to run the business and stabilize it and then hired me in 2022. And then we took the company public a few months after I got here in October 2022. Right. So no surprise, there wasn't necessarily operational excellence as it was getting bounced around. But so you come in, they hire you to lead it through SPAC. You had taken your company previously shift public via a SPAC as well. SPACs obviously have a not stellar reputation. What did you learn the first time that changed how you did it the second time?

6:53Well, SPACs have a lot of use in specific circumstances, one of which is if you need certainty that the deal can get done in a specific time period, SPACs are a great way to take a company public, which is what Grinda needed. You know, there was a big amount of debt outstanding as a result of the Chinese sale to the new ownership and that debt needed to be refinanced. And as a public company, Grinda was going to have a lot easier time refinancing that debt versus a private company. And so getting public with certainty in the timeline that it needs to happen, especially at the time when the market was more or less closed for IPOs, SPAC made a lot of sense for Grindr.

7:34Plus, Grindr didn't have to raise any money because the company was printing a ton of cash and is still printing a lot of cash. And so we didn't need to raise cash to kind of do investments or sustain the business. And so for us, SPAC made sense. I think there are other circumstances when SPAC makes a lot of sense as well. For example, if you haven't done all the prep work through an S1 prior to wanting to go public and want to do it quickly, it's a really good path as well, which is what Shift needed back in 2020. So there are places when SPACs make a ton of sense. But in 2021, 22, there was a bit of a craze of too many companies went public through a SPAC.

8:08And obviously, as a result, that's very common, right? Like tech investing is a little bit like a herd. Everyone runs in the same direction. So SPACs became popular and then everyone wanted to do a SPAC. And then suddenly they become not popular. But in reality, it's neither one or the other, right? SPACs make a lot of sense in some cases and don't in many others. Yeah, I'm kind of curious to see where we are a year from now, because I think we're all starting to see a couple of robotics companies filing to go public through SPACs. And of course, as you say, it starts with a trickle and then suddenly it's not such a trickle.

8:37Totally. George, was it challenging selling the vision of Grindr to conservative money managers? Has Grindr been embraced by funds or do you still have some people who say, oh, I can't really own that stock because it's too controversial? It's they don't directly say that most of the time, but it's definitely still out there as a topic, which leads to a lot of interesting discussions. When I got here, I had been fortunate to live in places in the U.S. where acceptance of gay people is extremely high. When I came to the U.S. from Soviet Georgia, I moved to Maine. Then I went to college in Vermont, lived in D.C.

9:17and then the Bay Area. Like that's my U.S. kind of life. And so, as you can imagine, you don't really experience prejudice very much in these places. And I was going in, didn't, I think, have a full appreciation of how much homophobia there is out there. My husband was a lot more cautious. He's like, you're going to experience homophobia in ways that you've never have before. And he was right. You know, we've had things like a leading consulting firm refuse to work with us because they were worried about reputation risk, even though they have an office in Saudi Arabia. And I don't know what else is what is more damaging, right?

9:53Like reputational risk. for working with most tyrannical and criminal enterprises out there. We had a bank not take our money when Silicon Valley Bank was going under because a bunch of our money was in Silicon Valley Bank. We wanted to move it and we couldn't get a bank that we reached out to accept our money. Now, so there were those negative cases. On the other hand, you know, there have been banks that have been incredible partners to us through the entire time I've been here. And I'm obviously very grateful for them working with us and leading banks cover grinder. We have very good coverage from Goldman, from Morgan Stanley, et cetera, and many others.

10:30And that's not an issue at all. And we have really good investors as well who've come into the stock and I think have done really well. A while back, maybe in like 2023, an investor walked me through his financial model and showed me kind of what he was projecting the stock should be worth based on his estimates of earnings over the next few years. And then below his estimates, for a share price, he had another line and he called it the Grindr discount. And it was 25%, which is like he's discounting whatever he was projecting the share price would be because he is concerned about the fact that some people will not buy the stock because Grindr is a little bit more controversial.

11:11And I think the really interesting thing here around those discussions is that what do people think happens on Tinder, right? I mean, Tinder literally has a button on its front page that says free tonight. And so this has less to do with hookup culture or people meeting up for casual encounters and more to do with the fact that Grindr is a gay business and Tinder is not. And so I'm like incredibly grateful to be alive when I'm alive because being a gay person in America today is more or less completely OK. Here I am married with two children and I never face any challenges on that front. But it also still tells you that there is a way to go in terms of achieving full acceptance that we haven't yet fully realized.

11:53Well, it does seem like the stock performance doesn't really reflect the many changes that you've made. It's been very flat, really, aside from the spike it enjoyed when it first went public, which, of course, happens. So let's talk a little bit about that. First, when you came in, again, it's not like building from scratch, which in some ways is so much easier. On the other hand, you had this stockpile of cash. So what were your immediate priorities for the company? Was it maybe to make it less about hooking up? Because it seems like that's been a direction for so many dating sites is to really promote community and friendship and other types of relationships.

12:31I think we thought of things in three buckets. Number one, company building itself. There was a lot of company building that Grindr needed to do. And then I realized once I was here that even more company building needed to be done. Grindr had hired a lot of people during the peak COVID era when everyone was working from home and expectations for work were very low. And it turned out that a lot of people here were just not working. Like our average productivity was maybe three to four hours a day. And so we needed to really change things around. We came back to the office two days a week in 2023.

13:07We made a decision in the summer of 23 and it was pretty controversial. There was a lot of press around it because people were really upset about me telling them that they had to be back in the office. I think it was an incredibly important decision for us, though, because our productivity has skyrocketed since then. And it has been really awesome to see. We did have a ton of people decide to transition away from Grindr as a result of that. And we went down to 70 people running a business growing 30 percent a year. And I think we were like at 250 or 275 million in revenue at the time. So it was a pretty tough kind of period in that company building because we had to rebuild everything almost from scratch.

13:43Today, only about 25 people who work at Grindr were here before I got here. And we're still a very lean business. I mean, we're going to end the year with, based on our guidance from a couple of weeks ago, 540 in revenue. And we only employ like 175 US employees. And then we have some folks in Columbia as well. And still the 40 % EBITDA? Over 40 % EBITDA. I think we are guiding to something like 42 roughly for the year. We give guidance in flat dollar numbers. I don't remember the margin, but it's like 41 and a half or 42 and a half for the year. Yeah, we're very, very profitable as a business, which is awesome.

14:19But we've also grown it dramatically, right? Like in 2022, we had 195 million in revenue. We're going to do nearly 550 this year. So it's been an incredible scaling period for Grindr. And there's no reason it won't continue. So the first thing was just kind of like company building internally, rebuilding the team, really creating an amazing engineering culture, which we now have. Grinder Engineering is not recognized as such because we don't talk about it very much, but I think it's among the best engineers in the country. 80-ish percent of our code is written by AI. I think there are very few legacy businesses that are as forward in terms of AI adoption as we are.

14:57There is not an AI tool that our team does not use. And as soon as new ones come out, they kind of jump on them really quickly. And we've had a 2.5x increase in our inch productivity just over the last 12 months, which has been incredible because we can do so much more now as a result of that. So company building was one. Number two was just putting Grindr on a path towards driving revenue growth. And obviously, you know, the proof is in the pudding here. We've grown revenue 25 plus percent every year that I've been here. And that's been through building a lot of new product that users want to use and are willing to pay for.

15:31And so we've had our pay-up conversion increase in a significant way, below 6 % when I got here. It's now over 9%, even though Mao has grown by a pretty significant amount in that time period as well. People are also very willing to pay more for the features that they're getting. So our ARPU has nearly doubled in that time period. Thirdly, setting out a vision for what Grindr can be over the long term. And we call that the gay-bouhaha in your pocket. Grindr is really the only place like this in the world where you have gay men from virtually every country in the world coming together and have a way to be able to meet each other in a very open architectural way where anyone can find anybody and have a conversation.

16:14Those of us that live in cities or used to live in cities have a chance to have a gay neighborhood in real life because we can walk into the Castro Inn and have a community. But most people don't have a chance to do that. And certainly in all the places around the world where acceptance is much lower than here, it's even harder to be gay. And Grindr offers you a chance to have that community on your phone. So really doubling and tripling down on that is something that we've been really actively working on. And then from the business perspective on that, what are all the other things that people want from Grindr that they're willing to buy?

16:47Not necessarily related to connections, whether they're casual meetups or long term relationships, but health care or travel or other things like that, that we can be an active player in and offering them products and services. And so we've started to really lean into healthcare and are offering a ton of healthcare products to people, which are doing really well. And we believe there's a lot more to do. And then over time, we'll expand that into our expansion use case as well. So that's been kind of the three-part focus for what we've been doing. And it's been a really fun journey of building something not from scratch, but it feels like it has been, and setting it up for long-term growth as a business.

17:28You talked about increasing ARPU and developing products that encourage users to try more premium features. What percentage of your revenue is non-subscription revenue? You know, you talked about healthcare. Is that still sort of a nascent part of your business? It's still a nascent part of the business, for sure. Subscriptions are about 83 % of our revenue today. And that's down from 86 % or so in 2022, I guess. And so we have been growing up our revenue. But given how much subscription revenue has grown, it's kind of hard to have the percentage come down. And that's very much in line with what we said, you know, two and a half years ago, we would do.

18:12We had an investor day and we kind of outlined. the plan. A lot of the expansion opportunities are things that we're laying foundations for now and starting to do, but the revenue story behind them is all upside on our plan and things that we would expect to materialize two, three, four years down the road, not immediately. What I want is a world where 10 years down the line, Grindr has a great subscription business, a great advertising business, an awesome healthcare business, and a great travel business, and so forth. But today, the newer stuff is very small, obviously. So interesting, the healthcare and travel stuff.

18:46I want to get into that, but I did want to touch on something that I think maybe we'd covered fleetingly, which was this edge product pricing controversy, which was this AI-powered top subscription tier that I think people misunderstood, you know, people joking online saying it was just cheaper to pay for the company at$500, I think per week. Can you walk us through the vision there and what was misunderstood about that? Yeah, I mean, we actually haven't released Edge. We are testing Edge and obviously some people have access to it as a result, but it's not live to everyone yet. Edge is a new premium tier.

19:20So we have two tiers today. One's called Extra and one's called Unlimited. One is about$23.99 in the US and one is$44.99. Edge is going to be priced at a premium to that. It takes a lot of new AI capabilities that previously were not available. And AI is orthogonal to that, meaning we're not selling the AI. We're selling the features and the capabilities of the product. They're derived from AI, but it's not like we're selling the AI itself. And they're really cool features that people really like. Retention on them is really incredible, far higher than retention we've had in the past for paid products and features.

19:56So it's great that people want these kinds of things. But we are running a variety of tests on the price. And I think people took our Canadian test price, which was, I think,$499 Canadian dollars, and which is less than, obviously, U.S. dollars. I think it comes out to like$375 or$350 American per month and claim that that's what we're charging. We're actually not charging that. We don't expect the price to land at that level, but we wanted to understand what the price elasticity for this experience would be. So we offered a variety of prices to see where people would land. because obviously someone will always pay a certain price for something.

20:34And what we need to understand is how many people are going to pay$350 and how many are going to pay$100 and$150 and$250. And that would help decide where we price the product. We're going to be going live with that towards the end of this year, early next year. And we'll have a sense of where the price lands at the time. That's a big deal. I mean, I don't blame you at all for testing this market afield, but I'm curious to see what happens in the Bay Area as a response to all of the wealth being generated here. I remember years ago, I would sit down at a restaurant and all of a sudden it was like an$800 meal for two people because restaurants could get away with it.

21:09The market supported that. So what are you offering or planning to offer for this very top end subscription experience? So the way we kind of describe Edge is more action for less effort. Generally speaking, what you hear from users is that Grindr is a lot of work, meaning to figure out who I want to be talking to because of whatever intention I have at any given moment is pretty difficult. And it requires a lot of conversation for me to understand what the other person really wants. Partly that's driven by the fact that we have a pretty minimal amount of information in profiles. We don't ask people to say a lot about themselves, partly because our users are quite discreet.

21:49about a third of our users choose to be discreet. And so you don't ask them too much, ask them too much to say publicly. And partly because people have a lot of different intentions, right? Grindr is a social network where a lot of dating and casual connections happen. 50 % of all gay relationships in America have started on Grindr. But obviously, like hookups are a big thing on Grindr as well. So people have different intentionality, intentionality changes based on what they want to be doing. So it's a lot of work to kind of figure out, hey, I'm an X intention. What does the other person want?

22:19What we are doing with Edge is taking a lot of what we know about a user based on their behavior patterns, based on what they talk about with other people, and obviously only with their consent, use that information to create much better connections between people. And so if somebody wants X, Y, Z things, and there's somebody else who wants those things as well, bringing them together in a way that previously was not possible using AI capabilities is something that we can now do that previously we could not do. So think of it, for example, from the relationships perspective. One of the fundamental challenges for gay people everywhere, really, maybe except for New York, is that density is very low, right?

22:59Even in San Francisco, where the percentage of the gay population is much higher than almost anywhere else in the country, we're talking maybe like 50 ,000 to 60 ,000 gay people living in San Francisco total. And so if you're trying to find a partner, that's a pretty small pool to be fishing in. And that is a big reason why gay men often have a hard time finding a partner. So what if you could use AI to find potential partners for somebody that lives in San Francisco in a broader geography than where they live? and dating is very constrained by geography most of the time. But what if you can break down that geographic barrier and say, hey, here's a person in St.

23:35Louis that actually really matches what you actually want in a person. Not what you say in your profile you want in a person because most of the time people say in their profile what they think other people want to read rather than what they really want. But what we know you really want. And the same that we know those things about you because of everything we know about you from your behavior in the app. We also know that about that other person as well. And here's a transparent view on why you two are a great match. To me, that's unlocking something that previously wasn't possible. And I think our users are really excited about those kinds of experiences.

24:06And so that's what Edge is all about. We're starting at a premium level because we are learning our way into how to build products like this. This is all very new. It doesn't exist in nature in general. And we kind of think of it as like our version of the Model X for Tesla. And then over time, we will offer this to everybody at lower pricing tiers as well, because we want our entire user experience to be as AI native as it can be. That's really interesting. Although, what data do you have to support that relationships are sustainable? If you're introducing somebody in San Francisco to somebody in St.

24:42Louis, do you follow the journey of your users? Well, we don't necessarily follow that. That's probably going a little too much in. in. But we do know from surveys that Grindr is the primary place where gay men meet each other for relationships. And so what we also know from talking to our users and from a lot of data is that younger cohorts of gay men really want to be in long-term relationships. That's a massive change from what used to be the case before. But 50 % of gay men under 35 say they want to be in a monogamous relationship long-term. 25 % of gay men under 35 say they want to have kids.

25:19that was like night and day change from what used to be the case back in the day when I was of that age cohort. I'm sadly not anymore. I would say I wouldn't have kids and I was literally one in 100 guy who would say that he wouldn't have children. And now that's really changed. It's not surprising that it's changed because with gay marriage becoming legal, you know, it's become much more normalized and that's kind of the direction people are going into. But when you ask people, hey, why are you not in a long term relationship? It's because I have a hard time finding a partner. And so I'm not certain that what we're going to do is going to solve the problem, but it's certainly a thing we should try to see if it does solve the problem in helping people find each other better.

25:56Because obviously, it's best to try things that previously have not been tried to solve a problem that exists, because clearly what we've been doing so far has not been the solution. You talked about the younger cohort of gay men who are using your product. And I'm just wondering, and I'm sure you've heard this question before, but is there a danger that Grindr becomes the Facebook of gay dating apps, enormous and ubiquitous, but increasingly viewed by younger users as something their older peers use. So we don't see that with anything that's happening inside the app. 46 % of Grindr's users in the U.S.

26:32are in the 18 to 29 age cohort, which is significantly higher percentage of our user base than that population in the U.S. male population overall. We don't let anybody under 18 use Grindr because Grindr is an 18 plus only product. But in many ways, Grindr is the rite of passage for people as they mature and become, you know, adults, either while they're in college or after college and try to figure out what it's like to be a gay person, right? And so we have this kind of constant stream of people coming into the product as they become 18. It's also just culturally a different world among gay men versus straight population.

27:15Many younger gay men, meaning like in that 18 to 29 cohort, want to be around older gay men. There's a lot more dating across generations in the gay population. And so that's another kind of benefit that we have that straight dating products necessarily don't. So this whole idea that young Gen Z does not want to be online and doesn't want to meet each other online, I think is not really that accurate in general, but it's especially not accurate for Grindr. I think it's a great excuse that my peer CEOs have used to try to explain challenges with their products rather than an actual problem. Young people have no trouble spending an hour on TikTok and another half an hour on Instagram every day.

27:58The issue is that they don't want to use products that are not modern and that haven't created anything new. And I think that's the difference between products that succeed and that don't. So the way for us to ensure that people always want to come back to Grindr and use it is to be as ahead of the curve in innovation and launching new stuff as we can be. Another question about your younger audience, because it is so critical to your growth. It seems like young people in general, straight or gay, are turning away from dating apps to a certain extent and looking for IRL experiences, bars, events, clubs.

28:33What does Grindr do to bridge that gap? So Grindr has always been about in real life connections, right? Our goal is to have people meet each other online and then to connect to each other in person. And we certainly measure like what's the likelihood of people meeting each other and how that goes. And our users have a lot of success in meeting each other in real life through Grindr. There's also plenty of people who maintain communities on Grindr and then end up seeing each other at a bar or in a restaurant or at a gym and start talking to each other there because they're connected to each other on Grindr.

29:06That piece is something that Grindr has always really excelled at. And I think it's right that most straight products are trying to be a lot more like Grindr has always been versus what they've done historically. because people do create community. As we are in a world where people go to the office less and that removes a big part of where they used to meet each other in person, the need to kind of replace that with something else becomes even more critical, right? As good as partial work from home might be for people, the fact that you're spending so much less time with people in the office means you're making a lot less relationships that you can build on over the long term, right?

29:47Like when I think about like where do my friends come from in life? It's either people I met in college or it's people I met at work in my early jobs, whether it's at BCG or Google or elsewhere. And so that is a really big part of where our relationships are built from. And as we go to the office less, that goes away. And so I think we actually, it's a big imperative for products like Grindr or Raya, et cetera, to offer people something that is even more important now than it used to be previously. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting shift. I'm going to have the opportunity to talk to some founders about this at an event in New York that's upcoming because there is such an opportunity to bring people together.

30:27And one of the things that I think that you're doing, it seems that's a little bit newer, goes back to what you're saying about your travel products. So you launched one in 2024 called Rome that lets people start chatting with locals before they arrive at a destination. Tell me a little bit about that and what kind of traction you've seen there. So our users travel a ton. it's actually I guess the stat is crazy but one in four Grinder users is more than 30 miles away from their normal login place in any given week so it's like very surprising how much Grinder users travel I think it's partly driven by the fact this density question that we're talking about there's not as many people as you would want that you can get to know in any given community that you might be living in and so Game and choose to travel out to try to meet a lot of new people We definitely try to nurture that.

31:18We have two different features that allow people to start conversations with people outside of their home area. One is explore where you go and find people in a different place. And so I can log on to Grindr and go see who is on the grid in New York, even though I'm in the Bay Area right now. And then the other one is where I can put my profile in a different location from where I'm based. So Grindr is very location based. You normally show up where you are based like geographically and will tell you how far you are from other people. But when you roam out, you can put your profile somewhere else.

31:51For example, I can show my profile in New York. And that's the flip side of discovery where I can find people through Explore and other people can find me through Roam. And, you know, those products both do very, very well and they're quite popular. And there's a lot more that we can do with travel. Local discovery is another really interesting opportunity for us where I am going to New York. I want to know what's happening in New York this weekend. What are the activities that I might want to be a part of? What are the shows I might want to go to? Which bars makes sense for me to go to? Hey, what are the best place for me to stay, right, based on whatever might be happening?

32:28And we now have a mapping feature in SiteGinder, which we're going to be building on a lot more on top of, which is meant to serve as this kind of local hub of information access where you can learn a lot more about what is happening in a given community that you might be visiting. That's great. I mean, there's so many ways to expand your addressable market beyond dating app. I think the healthcare stuff is really interesting. Can you tell us a little bit more about what you're doing there and if you're building these products or you are serving as user interface to service providers? So healthcare is massive and for gay men, healthcare matters even more for obvious reasons.

33:06We started out kind of dipping our toes in healthcare with a product we call Woodwork, which is basically our version of a set of performance drugs that people might want to buy, whether that's ED medications, GLQ-1s, peptides, and so forth. And so that's something that we offer already, and you can buy Woodwork products from Grindr. We actually just recently released an AI bot that is almost like a transaction tool where you can actually do the entire transaction through that inside the app instead of having to click out to a different website like woodwork.com to complete the transaction. So that's one bucket.

33:43And we started out with those types of products because those are cash pay. And so to get started in healthcare, that seemed to make the most sense. And we wanted to enable that. The other big bucket for us will be HIV prevention and treatment. Obviously, that's still a really big factor for gay men, again, for reasons that make a ton of sense. And so we recently committed to enabling 10 million people around the world to have direct access to information for where to obtain PrEP, both in the U.S. and internationally. We actually already do that in America, where in our health center inside the app, you can figure out where to get PrEP.

34:20PrEP is a medication you take to avoid getting HIV in the U.S. And we want to do that in as many parts of the world as we can, because the best way to end the HIV epidemic is to get as many people as possible on PrEP, because you cannot get HIV if you're on PrEP. So that is a kind of second big factor in terms of managing HIV transmissions and reducing those and other STDs is a big factor in our health care work. And then thirdly, and this is definitely longer term, it's not something that we're thinking about today, but will do over long term is clinical care. And if you survey gay men, most will tell you that they want to have a gay doctor, but actually finding a doctor is really hard.

35:02And I think Grindr can be a great unlock for that, whether it's by creating a database of gay doctors that people can find or actually letting you connect to a gay doctor through telehealth and engage them that way. So that's something we've not done yet, but we definitely will over time. So those are the three big buckets of work that we're pursuing on healthcare. And I think it's going to be a massive growth lever. I mean, in some respects, I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now, healthcare is a bigger revenue stream for Grindr than what we do today. But currently it's less than 1 % if advertising is about 18 % of your revenue?

35:37Well, advertising and all other stuff that's not subscriptions goes into the same bucket in our financial reportings. But yes, it's less than 1%. And George, would you bundle some of these things into that edge subscription? Potentially. I mean, there's a lot of regulatory stuff that you need to manage when you do things like that in healthcare. And so assuming that from the regulatory angle, it can be done, I wouldn't be surprised if we do. You mentioned your engineers and how capable they are, even though maybe we don't think about Grindr as an engineering company. Can you talk a little bit about that?

36:11So it sounds like you don't have that many, but of course, AI is enabling you to explore initiatives faster than ever. What is the process there for testing ideas and then either moving forward or killing them? And how do you prioritize them in the first place? Yeah. So our Eng team is about 94 people, maybe 95 now. And then it has all technical roles across the business. So it's not very big, but it's pretty good size. I had a meeting with a very prominent, large tech company CEO when I took this job in a kind of mentorship sense. And I was telling him, hey, like, this is what I want to do. And so my guess is that I'll need a team of like 300, 350 people by the time I'm doing all these things in three or four years.

36:53And he's like, oh, no, you won't. And he kind of gave me this pitch that, you know, AI is going to really change how many people you need. And I was right and he was right. We are doing about 350 people worth of work, but we're doing it with about 100 people. And I think that's pretty awesome. So we are very test and learn is the approach that we use. I know I'm a founder of three companies from scratch. And before this one, our chief product officer is a founder as well. And so our mentality is very founder-like in that sense. We have meetings and talk through ideas and things that we want to do.

37:26The product team then lays out what is the minimum viable version of getting that out into the market and testing it. And we have a really responsive user base. And so once we put products out into the app, the usage tends to be pretty quick. And we learn really fast on whether users want those products or not. And if they don't, we go back and we make them better, which I think is totally reasonable. It's a little bit harder when you're public because people think the first version of what you put out is the end of it. And so they want to kind of start asking you questions like, how much revenue are you making from that?

37:56I'm like, I don't really care about how much revenue I'm making from that yet. Right. What I care about is how much usage am I getting it? Are users liking what they see? And can I make it better? And obviously there's going to be V2 and V3 and V4 of whatever it is that we launch. And so we do take a very iterative and test and learn approach to how we build, which generally I think is the right way to build product. And obviously AI is amazing, but it's double edged. So, you know, you're building with AI. On the other hand, you have to deal with something that everyone's having to deal with right now, which is photorealistic chat fluent fakes.

38:30Spam. Yeah. How are you dealing with this sort of verified human challenge? Totally. Spam, unfortunately for businesses like us, spam has been always a challenge. But in today's day and age, it's even harder, right? Because the same technology that enables us to be a lot more productive makes it a lot easier for people to be spammers. And so we've had to deploy quite a bit of capabilities to try to find spam accounts and remove them. I think our tech has become a lot better in that regard over the last couple of years. Things that previously we used to do through human moderation, now we are able to do through models and tools that we've created for that, both in-house and third party.

39:12And that has been generally pretty effective in removing spam attacks, although they still obviously happen. And it's a whack-a-mole game, right? Like you fight a bunch of spam methodologies and then they come up with something new and then you have to go back and kind of fight those. So it's definitely a challenge and I don't think it's going to end anytime soon because this is going to continue. And I think the other factor here is cybersecurity. We, at least from our side, we're dramatically leaning into creating capabilities for a more offensive cybersecurity approach versus just defensive.

39:44Because with AI, the risk of attacks is going to significantly increase. all companies have cybersecurity challenges. It's just that there's not enough hackers going after them historically to try to breach them. But with AI, that risk increases dramatically. And so I think becoming a lot better at offensive defense where like you're on the offense and defending yourself is really important. And it's something that I've been really focused on. And I think our team is really focused on as well. It's so daunting. George, I want to let you go, but I just wondered if you could give us a little bit of a curtain raiser.

40:17I know that you had an earnings call not that long ago, but we've talked about a number of products that you've rolled out and Edge is coming at the end of this year. And it sounds like that's, again, a very big deal for the company. Is there anything else that people should be aware of that's coming out of Grindr? I mean, stuff that we've talked about, but it's also news is Maps is another really big thing that we're really focused on and making Maps be a bigger part of the user experience in a way that I described it a few minutes ago. So that's another thing that we are super psyched about in addition to Edge.

40:46And then, you know, I'll stay tuned for more healthcare stuff in the coming quarters as well. George, it's interesting you talked about the Grindr discount, but, you know, the fact is that Grindr trades at a substantial PE premium to both Meta and the other publicly traded dating companies. Seems like the market is treating you guys as a growth company and believes in the potential of the new products you're rolling out. Well, I hope so. I mean, we've grown like 25 plus percent for 16 quarters that I've been CEO. So I would hope that we get treated as a growth company. And I don't see any reason why that would slow down.

41:20That's great. Well, George, really a pleasure to talk to you. I'm so glad that we made this happen today because it's been so, so interesting about learning more about the app and your stewardship of it. Congratulations on all your momentum. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

41:38The Strictly VC Download podcast is hosted by TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Connie Loizos and me, Alex Gove of Strictly VC. Strictly VC Download is produced by Maggie Nye with editing assistance by Teresa Lancansolo and Kel. Thanks for listening. We'll see you back here next week.

42:04Amen.