Hinge Dating App CEO: Everyone Said Hinge Was A TERRIBLE idea! The 7 Love & Dating Secrets From Hinge’s Founder! AI Will Change Love & Dating!

24:02So things like a launch party. I can you know I can see how those things would work then but I question whether people listening to this right now that I've got an app. And it would like a thousand party and like that's what's going to solve the problems probably not. So interesting and then Tinder around that time starts with a bit further on right. Yeah right about that time. So right around the time we threw that launch party I think Tinder had launched just a couple months prior out in L .A. So almost the exact same time we had a very similar model. They took off. And we started to grow as well.

24:35In fact their growth helped our growth because it was like the category was emerging and now people were like. Seeing Tinder and Tinder was a was an app that was all about location and ours was all about friends of friends and that was really the main difference. But as a result people viewed hinge as like this sort of like. More serious intent dating app because it was friends of friends people you needed a house party or dinner or wedding. And then we were like the other one was a bit more of like a casual reputation and like meeting at a club. And as a result all of a sudden the VCs who were telling me there's no way this market is totally saturated.

25:11Now I was no longer begging for money I was like turning away the people are trying to send like like trying to raise around at that point. We went from like you know begging for scraps to like raising almost a 20 million dollar round where I was turning away money because I just couldn't take anymore. So it really that changed the game. And was it a straight line up from that? No definitely not. So we had some good success in 2013 2014 2015 growth started to level out. Tinder definitely gotten successful. Beat us at the game of like overcoming stigma like that it was cool to use it was quick it was easy it was fun.

25:54And ours was just like a Tinder copy that was friends of friends but we weren't we were like the growth just like wasn't there. And more importantly though around that time there's an article that came out in Vanity Fair called like the dawn of the dating apocalypse. It was all about how dating apps had destroyed dating culture and romance and and hinge was featured like pretty heavily in that article. And I was just thinking like gosh this is not what I like I built this because I like wanted a girlfriend like this is not what I what I wanted to build from a like a values perspective. I remember going out with my my head of marketing at that time.

26:36Her name was Katie and I was about to head home for Thanksgiving and we sat a little cafe in New York and I was just telling her like gosh I like I wish I could just start over from scratch like this is not the company I want to build is not what I want to do. And she's like well I mean you're the CEO like what's stopping you. I went home and I thought about that and you know nothing was not like what was stopping me we just raised a big round we had resources and so I decided to reboot the company again so we first reboot 2012. This reboot let go of half the company and then throughout the old code base and built something new from scratch that would be about really helping people who wanted to find their person like a long term relationship brand and totally change the user interface and the profiles and the whole flow and design it for people who actually like really want to find their person.

27:30If you hadn't have had that interview with Deborah from cafe .com before right yeah do you think you would have made that decision to tell me about that interview with Deborah from cafe .com and how it changed change things for you. So in 2014 someone reached out to me your name is Deborah and she had downloaded hench she was in New York and the very first person that she that like we suggested to her she liked and matched with and then fall in love with and so she reached out and was like how did you like I want to learn more about you want to learn about your company we're just you know we're getting popular in New York but not hugely popular.

28:13So we met up for an interview one day in Madison Square Park near my office and and you know I didn't have like it was dumb luck I don't know the first person that happened to show up on her app like we didn't we didn't it was just we were lucky but as we chatted kind of a standard interview at the very end of the interview we were getting up and she's like you know one last question of your been in love and I was like well once a long time ago but I you know I just didn't really like that. I was like I didn't realize it until it was too late and Deborah turns off the tape recorder and she's like listen I have to tell you a story and she tells me the story of how actually she sort of had this misconnection moment she wasn't with someone that she had met much younger and they had found each other all these years later and realize they should have been together and she was like you know you don't have to make the same mistake I did like you can still be with the one you just have to do something dramatic you have to just go over there and like for your heart out and like put yourself on the line and I was like listen lady like you know it's been almost eight years since I've even seen her it's it's kind of over there's there's no way.

29:23That said I was about to head over to the launch party for hinge in London and I thought okay like I'll just shoot her one last note and so I reached out to her and I said hey I'm going to be in London. We'd love 15 minutes to say hi and goodbye is just weird to think that we're never going to see each other again and she wrote back and she was like for the first time so in now another four years and she was like listen I don't live in London anymore I live in Switzerland but I'll be around this weekend and happy to hop on the phone. So I like got that message I went to the airport I got the ticket to Switzerland I got on a plane to Zurich and and she reached out the next stage as a K I'm around if you want to chat I'm like great because I'm going to customs in Zurich right now and she agreed to meet me at a little cafe and we sat down with each other and I think at that time I.

30:30I had you know part of me thought like I really want to grow back like this is it and part of me thought like it's been eight years like I've changed so much as a person like I'm sober now I'm like running this company like she's with someone else now and by the way was literally like a month away from getting married at that point she was chatted for and say she had a fiance yeah and to be married in a month like so like on the verge of getting married. I thought we'd see each other and just like laugh it off and glad we saw each other and I just didn't know what's going to happen it felt but there was this hope in me that like wow maybe she really is the one maybe we'll like realize it and we sat down at this little cafe and it was just like I think we both felt like an incredible amount of that connection that we'd always had.

31:26And we sat and we we talked for like seven or eight straight hours in this cafe never even got up to get a coffee and at the end of that conversation she's like I think I'm calling off the wedding and and so about a week later she moved out of Zurich and moved from back into back to New York into my like 300 square foot apartment in the West Village and and my. And this is a long way of getting back to your question, which is like how does this relate to hinge and what I have done the reboot because here I am and I've like gotten. The person like this is the person I've always want like wanted like I finally got her back and it was totally amazing for.

32:12For like a month or two or three months maybe max and then the honeymoon period ended and were two people living in this little tiny apartment together in New York who haven't seen each other in eight years and we've got to like start figuring each other out and it wasn't perfect and the part of me like I would have if I were just dating this person I would have run right I would have like cut it off and been like okay like not the right person like it's not. It's not perfect like I imagine it was going to be but she called off this life she like cut you know she left her person she left her whole existence over there so I couldn't just like break up there.

32:56And that's when I think the real work of the relationship started and like real intimacy and vulnerability and like love started to form and I realized like I would have just passed over this person and I think it just totally changed my. My mentality of how a dating app should be designed because I think up until that point I thought you know it's a it's a numbers game you just got to like get through enough people and once you find your person then it's then it's kind of happily ever after after that and realizing that like how many people you know we all must just skate right past because we don't because we're not vulnerable because they're not vulnerable and we failed to like make that connection.

33:39And so I wanted to like rebuild an app if it were really for relationships. You just it would be a very different kind of app you would have to like have people slow down you would have to have people be more vulnerable you have to people share about themselves and put themselves on the line a bit more in order to form that initial connection and so that was the foundation and sort of like the design principles for what we wanted to build with a new hinge. Fairy tale endings are made for movies because there's a lot of work that happens when the credits after the credits roll totally. Yeah, we were just getting started I had no idea.

34:16And you also when you talk about this new vision for hinge it's quite idealistic you know this idea of just being up to create an app where people slow down and they give more information and they're more vulnerable tends to be the case that your ideal scenario for how humans behave isn't actually how they want to behave. Right, especially these days because we're all we all believe things should be like quick and easy and it's not quick and easy you get you get out what you put in and so we were always fighting this balance of like what people are willing to do in what they should do you know and and we were trying to to like we could of course build an app that's just like makes it like what people think that they want like quick and easy and fun.

34:59But you have to slow people down get them to put in a little bit more effort and it's a real it's a real balance of of like getting people to be vulnerable as much as at least like they can tolerate. And because the more that they are the more effective their experiences the better chance that they have a finding the person. How is that received when you come up with this new vision for hinge which is going to be slower much more meaningful and much more deeper and really based on forming long term connections. How is that received by people. I think in theory it was it was celebrated right in theory I think people are like yes the world needs this kind of this kind of new thing like we definitely want something that's like a little bit less like fast food and more like you know a nice nutritious meal when it comes to dating.

35:45You know it was it was still hard to really get people like they like it in theory but then they're like wait I have to fill out like three prompts like wait I don't just swipe on people have to like like something about them. Wait if I like someone they're just going to see it like you're just going to tell them I have to add a comment and like say something about them. So it was like a lot to get people's head around to are used to something that was quite different but it was effective and that's what mattered the most and you know the that was a it was such a huge mindset and shift for us to stop thinking about user engagement and user retention and all these like classic metrics that.

36:22You know VCs look for when they look at like social media apps and to just think are we getting people out on more good dates or not and that's going to be our North Star metric and will grow through word of mouth because people are actually going to go on good dates and they're going to tell their friends about it and so that was our North Star. And so we didn't worry so much about. Like all those engagement metrics and you know we didn't there wasn't many matches and there wasn't as much whatever engagement on the app it was actually way more efficient and effective at getting people out on good dates and so.

36:52We launched this new thing our user numbers actually started to decline initially from the old version of the app and what about money. Yeah and so right about that time we're starting to we've burned through all that cash in order to build this new app and we're starting to run out and so I went out to start fundraising again and telling the story of like look at these like we were way more effective now people love the product. But on the other hand we used to have I don't know at the time 400 500 ,000 users and now we're down to like 100 ,000 150 ,000 users and that's a pretty tough. Story to tell to venture capitalists and you're shrinking yeah we're shrinking but we're going to grow because look at how amazing these and no one really like really bought that story and I was flying around everywhere talking to every VC.

37:40And I could talk to you know at that point him just gotten popular enough that any VC would like take my meeting and talk to me. But it was just I probably had 50 or 60 VC meetings and like not a single not a single yes. But right on that time we also started talking to match group they saw they could see what I saw they saw wow this is actually something that's different it's different she ate it and it has real promise. And so when we were down to like once again like days of cash probably like a week or two left of cash we negotiated a deal for like an initial investment from them. That would set the stage for them to eventually acquire the company.

38:21And between 2016 and 2019 when they acquired the company what was growth like. It was slow at first 2016 2017 we were kind of still figuring out the it was a completely new model and so we're figuring out how to really make that new model work and we were like you know tuning it. And around 2018 we felt like okay we really started to like now people really starting to love this app it's starting to really grow through word of mouth. And and then we started to like pour on marking money and at that point it was showing like how much that could accelerate the growth and that's when match group invested.

38:57Hinge labs. Mm -hmm. What is hinge labs? I don't believe any other dating apps have something like hinge labs. Yeah and it's all part of this idea that we want to build like we're just focused on user effectiveness and does this actually get people out on good dates and a huge piece of the the you know a dating app is is relatively unique it's not just a piece of technology it's. You know what what it's the people that are on there and how they're behaving and the technology like that's your experiences a user it's not just like we if no matter how good we get it. Product and product design or whatever like we have to control for the behavior so other people and making sure that we have the right people on her behaving the right way.

39:38You know we can only guide them so much with. You know UX we also have to like kind of coat people and guide people and teach people how to become better data. And so Hinge X or sorry hinge labs was developed to sort of study data to a successful study data to not successful figure out what are the patterns what do we see. And how can we help level up everyone to become better and more successful. Data's and so Hinge Labs really does you know deep dive research studies on just what is what makes data successful and and gives us the fuel to be able to. Build better product or build user guides things like that so what makes data successful.

40:27Makes dating successful yeah like you know I've got friends that seem to be successful dating in friends that are just those prolific serial data's that go on 100 days a year and never seem to make any progress. Yeah and also are they like categories of data's that you talk about you must have got like categories like the serial data that's never going to be successful they're just doing it for the fun of it. Yeah and they're like one hit one. We we definitely have different profiles but we anytime we try to like just put people into discrete categories it never works because people are complex and they have different.

40:56Everyone's story is kind of unique and so it's hard to put people just like into buckets. And there I think some general principles that I've learned and we've learned through Hinge Labs and you know again you had Logan here relatively recently and if people are interested they should definitely go into her. And I think you're a great partner for podcast because with you because it's like a masterclass and how to become successful in dating. But I would say like the more that you are willing to be honest and vulnerable and real like the quicker you can find those connections and the higher quality connections that you're going to get.

41:32I think that's the kind of up shot in the way that we really try to design Hinge to help people maximize their success on that front. Why does that matter at a human level being honest and vulnerable. I think two reasons. One is that you get to an accurate assessment more quickly if someone right like if you're trying to be pretend to be someone you're not or just trying to be cool or get a lot of likes or whatever. People aren't seeing the real you and they're going to eventually see the real you so the faster that you can just put like be clear about who you are and what you're looking for and what you want and what's not perfect about you.

42:14Then I think the faster you're going to find someone who's like yes this is a type of person that I want to be with and you're going to avoid all those people that were attracted to the kind of veneer that you'd put up but then they get to know the real you and then that's not. And then I'd say the second piece is that it gives people like hooks to grab on to like there's just nothing to talk about with someone who's perfect and an and vulnerable and invincible like what do you like what do you have to say like we connect over the cracks of and the little imperfections and that's how we connect and relate to one another and so you'll form a much better and deeper and quicker bond with someone when you open up like that versus try to impress.

42:53Okay, what about this then so if I wanted to be the world's worst data. If I wanted to be the world's worst most unsuccessful hindus or dating app user more generally what would I have to do. So I've got your first point which is about be really inauthentic pretend I'm perfect and use fake photos or just portray myself in a way that's a lot of like filtered photos with you and sunglasses are hanging out with a lot of friends. One word answers to your prompts you know just like everyone or no or wait for likes to come to you. I think like that that's the kind of mentality they're trying to get people out of we want to we want people to like fill out deeper like that so much of our work is like helping people select better photos that show more their personality help people answer prompts which are these short questions designed to get you into conversation and answer them thoughtfully to be really thoughtful with your own.

43:49So you know, you know, I think that's what I think it's like a lot of people are like because the more thoughtful you are with your likes the better our algorithm gets because we actually understand who you like and you don't like. So don't just like, you know, no because then we can't we can't learn your taste right and we're not going to get closer and closer to the type of person that you like. Okay, interesting. And what about these these serial data's because I've got some friends that are like those serial data's literally a hundred dates a year and I'll sit with them and we'll chat and I'll tell me I want to three dates this week etc.

44:17For those people I'd love to be able to get off of them some advice thinking of one of my friends in particular. I know it's going to watch this. Yeah, I mean, I was one of those people right I mean I was a person who you know constantly was I wouldn't necessarily just go on a whole lot of first dates but I would go on a whole I had had a whole lot of two to six week relationships and And then as soon as I would find something quote unquote wrong or I wouldn't feel good in the relationship then I was like well this doesn't work like this is wrong because I think I had such a I had such a fantasy about what a good relationship looked like I like my model was totally broken and I think for some of us were like we're trying to fit.

45:04Like a model in our head with the re with the reality that we're trying to like match this reality to like some model in our head about what a good relationship is or should look like and I think my model was like. You know it stays sexy and fun every single time we're together we don't fight there's never any you know there's like I think I just had this like very happily ever after moment in my mind and so I skipped over and passed over so much because it just didn't fit this like model had my head and I think some of us have models in our head that are exceedingly narrow they have to be like over six foot and they need to work in this type of job and they need to be like this and so you go out and you're just looking for some reason to say no because it doesn't fit your model and I think the biggest thing is for us to like change the model in our head that were that like of like what we're trying to look for and like why didn't that aperture a bit and give people more of a chance and like see things through a bit more.

46:09People have to this height height thing you mentioned this six foot thing seems to be a lot of conversation because I think the vast majority of people. The vast majority of women I imagine would want someone that's more than six foot is that correct. No I don't I don't know if that's actually true but people like someone taller than them. Yeah. That's just one example I mean I don't know about the height but I think it's just the point is like we have very specific and narrow models and I think a lot of people who end up in successful relationships say. This isn't you know if I were making a shopping list and like you know riding down all my like little features that I'm looking for in a partner like this person didn't necessarily.

46:57That like I would have what would have missed this person. There's a website isn't I can't remember the name of it but you go on there and you say what you're looking for in a partner and it shows you your statistical probability of finding that person. Okay yeah I don't know about that but yeah I think if people saw that. It's horrifying yeah you're pretty horrifying like you're cutting out 98 % of people based on your criteria. The salary the high the way the race you put on there and then it shows you it goes like you have a 0 .0 % chance of finding this person. And obviously you want them to be single as well as another criteria to find interesting.

47:32One of the things people say about dating apps and like dating app companies and founders and CEOs is they want people to stay single because then you've got more customers and surely if every if you have this metric where people are becoming. Getting married you're losing customers. Yeah so our belief on that which has always been we like our motto our tagline is designed to be deleted and that came from by the way. We were working with a branding agency and they were like what's hinges stick you know like what makes you different like your tender but what. And I was like I don't there's no gimmick like there's no like oh we're tender but like X or tender but why like every single part of the app is like designed to be different and like designed to help get people out on great dates.

48:26And that's kind of where this like designed to be deleted which by the way was like there's so much debate internally about that because it's so. It sounds so technical like design like in your own tagline like designed to be like that and it's people won't understand it. But we kind of went with it because it's the only thing that really represented what makes hinge. Really different and it means that do we get people out on great dates or not and that's what's driven every design decision and why hinge looks different than all the other apps is like that optimization function. And so in terms of a business model the belief is that like we will grow through word of mouth which is the most effective and efficient cost effective way to grow.

49:07If we just create more great dates and more relationships and that these is like as long as there are single people in the world which I'm pretty sure there are plenty of single people left in the world that they'll want to use hinge which feels more like a utility that's truly effective versus like perhaps what something that feels like a little bit more like a game. Since the company started have you seen any changes in the dating environment the dating landscape dating culture. Yeah, Gen Z for lack of a better term has different dating patterns I think in some sense like when I started hinge people were there was a lot of stigma around dating apps because.

49:45People just didn't use them at all then I feel like everyone started to use them and it became sort of the fault way to meet people and I think this is why we've actually like hinges growth accelerated so much even recently is that there actually is a desire to move away from the sort of like quick hit superficial. So yeah yeah and moving to something that's people are willing to share more about themselves and be more like I think like Gen Z's generally willing to like you know it's like the tick talk instead of the Instagram kind of feel of being vulnerable putting yourself out there you don't have to look so polished and so perfect and it's actually great for for dating is that's exactly the kind of ethos that we actually need for people to be successful.

50:33And hinge as I was reading is got these sort of five first principles. What is the current company mission statement? Well so the we want a faster intimate connection to create a less lonely world and a lot of social we'll call them like social networks they started social networks. We're also I think had a similar mission like you want to get you connected to the people who matter most to you. And they've all kind of like like they all became social media companies instead because it turns out that like brands and influencers and outrageous people are just more interesting than your friends and it's easier to get you to spend more time in app and more time looking at ads if we like show you much more sensational content then then like you know real.

51:24Like creating real moments of connection with the people who matter most to you and that's what I wanted to drive home like really clearly in our mission is that. Like hinge at its core even if we were expanded in new business lines I do something in the future like we are a company about intimate connection about one to one deep connections between people and we don't ever want to deviate from that is our core because it's really what the world needs right now. First principle to radical trust so you've got designed to be deleted number two is radical trust yeah which means. So radical trust is our commitment to and so these cultural principles that you're reading off came from this book called how we do things and so when I when we rebooted the company in 2015 at the end of 2015 beginning of 2016.

52:14We at that point I didn't think about company culture kind of at all it's just like just we're bunch of people in a room trying to solve problems like that's and we're only 30 people so culture just kind of emerges naturally among the group of people it really rotates around the founder but I didn't think consciously about it. When we did that reboot we we let go of have the company we took their meaning half and we went and did an off site and we did a breakdown and I really had like some really honest at times tearful conversations about like what had gone wrong. What did we do right what what didn't we do right what do we wish we had done better and a lot of them were of course like product decisions like oh we focused too much on the competition and copying the competition and not focus enough on our customer.

53:00But a lot of it was like how we operated as a company and coming out of that we actually started a like open source Google doc that listed our kind of what we believed in how we think things should should get done around hinge and originally it was just like a long doc of just all kinds of principles is me just trying to like put my management algorithm like down and on piece of paper so that everyone was very clear about that. So we thought about how I made decisions and how we should all make decisions and how we should prioritize and what we should do. So then eventually his hinge got a little bit bigger and we started you know have more than 100 employees.

53:38That model didn't make as much sense anymore and we put it in this book called how we do things which was at that point just a list of all our lessons it's really about it's a story of our lessons learned it's like we did it all the wrong ways. And that led us to learn to do it the right way and so that's where just to give the context on where these principles came from so designed to be deleted was like we used to focus on the competition and focusing on like what features our competitors had when we did the reboot we just focused on you know making our one metric getting people out on great dates and I like prohibited people from looking at the competition I didn't want any of their apps on my phone like I just just focus on novel innovation in service of our customer.

54:20Radical trust was about a lot of the decision making was like very top down and and I think people felt disempowered they felt a lot of whiplash and radical trust was about how do you push decision making down to the front lines and how do you empower people with the information that they need so have a lot of transparency from the top down about like where we are as a business what our needs are what our problems are so that people in the front lines can go solve it. Love the leap. Love the leap is this idea that small incremental optimizations can be can be great but real. The things that matter require like a level of a much bigger innovation leaps and we have to not be afraid of failure because you make those much bigger innovation leaps a lot of them like won't of course land or you have to I think even more importantly that you can get a lot of trust through a whole lot of failure to finally get to success I think there's a culture of like that comes from people especially who have worked in tech companies and much larger tech companies of like oh you just test and iterate like you test this thing and then if it works great and then if it doesn't then you just like move on and try the next thing I think the difference between that and then the way that like often a founder and entrepreneurial think is like I believe in the thesis I'm going to get there no matter what and if I had like I mean think about how many iterations of hinge I had to eventually get to the successful hinge if I just been like I think I'm going to get the I'm thinking about building a dating app I'll throw something out there and see if people use it.

55:50Oh gosh they're not really using it I guess the dating apps not a good idea I'll go like build a you know whatever. A car hailing up. You have to like trudge through that so that's love the leap is like you have to suffer through a lot of failure to make the big innovation leaps. Do you see it variance and even your team members but other people you work with are biased towards failure they're at the different failure appetites. Yeah and it gets harder and harder as you get bigger and and bigger and you're fighting against a larger cultural inertia like and it's just very human by the way to like not make mistakes and not look bad and that's why by the way this whole book is written as like here's all the mistakes that we made and how we did it all wrong just to give people the permission to know like we're all works in process we're all trying to learn.

56:36So you are overcoming like a much larger cultural inertia to get people to take risks and and make mistakes how do you do that. You exhibit failure from the top like you admit I think when you when like when you've made mistakes like when I've made mistakes or even talking about you know my development plan or things that I'm working on I just think it like you almost all of these cultural attributes have to be modeled from the very top. Super interesting because most people just incentivize to just do their job so when you bring along a new idea or new innovation you know incentive structures mean listen I'm not going to pay to take that fucking risk and then be be made to look stupid yeah so I'm not doing that yeah I think that's right and that's why I think we're and we're continuing to evolve these principles and and and refine them in fact we're going through a process right now it's kind of ironic because we're walking through these and I'm about to release a new version of these to the company and.

57:32There has been a bit of a refinement and we're actually kind of changing this one and combining it with the first one to call it love the problem because so much of about what we're really trying to get across to this is that you have to go like really deep and develop a deep thesis on a problem and that's what you do I think at the stage of a company you don't take like wild leaps based on the intuition of a founder anymore. You like do deep research on a problem you get conviction around it and then you're not afraid to like fail again and again trying to solve that problem because you are convinced that it's a real problem and you understand a lot about it and you're making a very informed decision you're taking a very thoughtful approach to solving it.

58:07Number four was and it currently is in my party I guided by principles and that one's definitely staying and that's one of the biggest.

58:17My own personal journey and I would say like this journey and it's sort of what I talked about when I talked about how this got created in the first place is that. If you keep making the same mistakes over and over again and you're not having an honest self assessment about where you are and how things are working you won't get better and so both of my own personal journey and this has happened through. Recovery through alcohol addiction and getting better and better as entrepreneurs like I was always self reflecting and thinking about like okay like seeking feedback like what didn't go well there what did go well there how can I do that better next time.

58:50And it became like I said to arduous for me to even to track all these things in my mind so I started putting them in that Google Doc so that every one of the company could hold me accountable to this like management algorithm I was developing. And what I wanted us is to do as a company is always make decisions based on principles like what's the underlying reason like if I'm making a decision known to everything well that's just because Justin likes it that way or that's just because. Some other leader at the company that's just what they want so let's just do it their way we want people to think like to understand.

59:20Like how am I making those decisions what's underneath that what principles do I believe in that made me to choose this over that because if you make that really explicit and clear then you gain trust. People understand like why you're making the decisions and to they can start making decisions on their own without you needing to be in the room and start developing their own principles. For how they make decisions. So so many of our meetings start off with like well here the principles that we sort of aligned on as we start to make you know think about this body of work and it just aligns everyone on the.

59:53What's the what what was like the core set of assumptions and beliefs and values that we have before we get into the details of the work. And that kind of counteracts the whole CEO because I said so you know vibe which might get I guess might get compliance but it probably won't deliver upon whatever someone called leadership. Yeah it's not scalable and maybe some CEOs always know the right thing to do but I don't always know the right thing to do I think my job once we got past 20 or 30 people which by the way I didn't know the right thing to do even when we were that small but I thought I did.

1:00:26But as we got much bigger like I can't be close enough to the to the information to like make really great decisions and so my job primarily is building and fostering the culture that makes good decisions. I've been thinking a lot about company culture and I threw this at Brian Chesky when he was here this idea of how you create company culture like how do you decide. I think some people think especially post pandemic which caused all of these companies and businesses to start thinking about what their company culture was in a new way. You'd see CEOs and managers almost like brainstorming a principle this culture and it was more like how what days do you want people to come in Mondays and Wednesdays we say two days a week one day a week.

1:01:10And that just doesn't feel right it doesn't feel like it's based on anything. So I said to Brian I said one of the things I'm thinking about is maybe culture is already there and you just kind of have to reverse engineer it from the problem you're trying to solve in the world. Which means for example if we want to be the best dating app in the world then there's a set of behaviors we're going to have to exhibit to get there which is going to require a set of values and then with those values we're going to use those values to create systems processes and hire the people that we need. And so you can almost reverse engineer your mission as a company backwards to figure out what your culture is.

1:01:45You said something about you're just describing the culture that already exists and I think that's kind of true especially if you do it early enough where it's not out of control yet when it's like relatively close around the founder you've only got like 30 or 40 or 50 people then you definitely have some sort of culture. And at that point though I think you want to start defining defining it so that everyone's clear on what it is because it will start you'll start losing is it starts expanding and people start it's a game of telephone right and it will like it will get lost over time so you want to get really clear on like what it is.

1:02:17I think it's the best of what is as well right because I think you're trying to like articulate when we're at our best this is how we're acting. Because both are always happening within a company like and you don't want to you want to constantly prune away the stuff that's not that's sort of not great and start having more people replicate what is great so it's that it's more like a pruning process and not just like a here's our culture like describe it and put out the door but on the other hand you can't just like. Throw it up on a wall and invent it from scratch like once the organization is big you can't just say like our culture suddenly is going to be X Y and Z will be so enough in to what's actually going on on the ground that no one will ever follow it I almost think about like parenting in a way like you can tell a kid a rule or tell a kid like a but you always have to be watching and like giving those little guidances like here and there you always have to be giving those little nudges when you when you see people acting within accordance with the culture and praising it or non accordance with the culture and giving them constructive feedback.

1:03:26Because it's such it's this living breathing thing like defining it as just like one one step but a very important step and as the company grows and scales thinking about this idea of um the best of what is is it possible that the best of what is when there's ten of you and your potential sleeping under a table like the stereotype goes is not going to be the right culture for when there is like 200 of you yeah totally and you know the book you're reading from right now is when we were you know 50 to 100 people and and and now we're 300 and something people and and we're evolving them and we're actually changing some of them because I've learned things over time that like no longer work at a company this big I'll give you an example one is that idea radical trust which we just talked about which I actually kind of pained me to talk about because that's not I've learned that's like not right for a company this big anymore.

1:04:23You want to push decision making down somewhat but if you do it too much especially in a larger organization you start getting like a lot of silos and everyone just doing micro optimizations and there's there's you actually want to be there needs to be much more of a conversation and actually watch the the Brian interview and he talks about pulling decision making in and that actually is I think more in line with where you have to go. You have to be if you want to stay innovative and still think like a startup even at a big scale so there's things that I took for granted because when we were 100 people that was happening already but I didn't see it because I just had I knew everyone's name we were all in the same room and so there was a lot of CEO and executive team influence on the team that that was kind of hidden because it just happened naturally so we thought we were pushing decision making down however I was I was in conversation with junior developers and junior engineers and junior designers all the time giving like little nuggets of feet like I was like I was involved just not officially and I think as we got much bigger we realized like I actually can't just like push decision making down and like hope for the best you have to like pull it people in and coordinate and there are people at the top that have a view across what's going on across the whole company that need to actually be making decisions we can't just like push it down.

1:05:39Just to be super clear on that for someone who is you know in their first month of business pulling decision making in in that regard is empowering people to make decisions but those decisions coming again through the central lens of the company's mission. When you're really small it's it's happening already right if you're if you're a team of 10 people or 12 people like you're all aware of what each other are doing you're talking and you're being conscious about if I'm the marketing person and the product person over here working on this product feature I think like oh I should probably market that product feature like I there's this this like understanding of what's going on so you are making you're like kind of a hive mind.

1:06:17You just take that for granted and you get much bigger you can either make you know I think the extremes are you you just have like a founder who makes all the decisions everything just gets brought into them. Which I think makes a lot of people feel disempowered and in the other hand you push decision making completely down you say you all just handle it all just articulate the high level vision and strategy and you but then you usually don't make great sort of interdisponary or major leads that are that feel cohesive everything starts like so it's this balance of having just like a constant conversation opportunity for feedback I still ultimately the decision makers of the people who are close to the work however we are like pulling it in and articulating strategy and generating conversation I'm in the room with more junior people a lot now than I frankly more now that I used to be so that we can continually bring people along on what the strategy is what are the big leaps we're making and what are all the little ways that we keep this cohesive.

1:07:23It's interesting because in the age of the internet and the age of dating apps and all these other tools and technologies even though we have better internet connections this starts continue to show that we're getting a lonely or a lonely yeah yeah which is a word you use central to your mission the word loneliness 50 to 2 % of Americans report to feeling lonely and 57 % of Americans report to eating their meals alone etc so something's clearly failing isn't it something's clearly not working in this pursuit of connection and social connection and social media etc. yeah and I think so loneliness has been a problem that I think has been creeping up on us for a while but it's really started to accelerate in the last few years and if you look at you know I've seen charts that show like time spent together in real life with friends and time spent consuming media consuming like digital media on apps and it's like over the last like 20 years one is almost completely displaced the other we used to spend hours a day with friends in real life on average and make like having genuine connections seeing and being seen and now people are virtually almost always consuming some form of digital media or they're working.

1:08:41so even when you're at the gym you're probably like listening to you know a like whatever like a music or a podcast or you are yeah nothing wrong with that isn't that you're not designed to be to be because you're because you're conscious I mean so I'm not saying all media consumption is bad I'm saying that like when you are but when you're pulled in all day and it's completely displaced like you're no longer talking with friends because you're just like doom scrolling on social media platforms. So you're not saying that's not a platform xyz you've you've really we really lost something and I think it's that I think more than anything has led to this like crisis level acceleration and loneliness.

1:09:23I'm so interested in the disparity between men and women in dating we've had lots of conversations over the years from this podcast about this but even in your app you see a big disparity between like the bottom 50 % of men or the bottom group of men on dating apps and like the top one or two people. So I'm going to be completely honest much of the reason why I never used dating apps is I had no success I would get like no good matches I was a 18 19 20 year olds kid that had nothing was super scruffy had no money I had no chance in these apps and I had this best friend called Logan who looks like he comes out of like a Calvin Klein ad we were both broke.

1:10:05Yeah, but he could go on those apps and he would he would clean up and I look over him. I think Jesus Christ like what's left for me I genuinely believe in people might find this quite shocking in my life. I've been on five dates in my entire life my strategy is like I'll all in so the minute my current girlfriend said she wanted to go on a date with me I pulled up an excel document and it was a three day like itinerary. I'm in the middle of five days of my life but I but I emphasize with men that really struggle with dating apps and it become dissolutioned in fact when we had I think it was Whitney wolf heard on from Bumble.

1:10:43I was really surprised because those men showed up in the comments section and they felt like they've been forgotten about. So it's a big it's a big focus for us and we I mean part of this is like larger cultural forces that I think are at work but part of it is that we can really address I think within dating apps and some people are just. Good at dating apps and some people I think are quite dateable but they're just not good at dating apps and it's I think the question is like how do we help really make it a much more focused quality over quantity experience how do we help the people that are struggling this where I actually think a lot of the promise of.

1:11:29Of what's being unlocked through AI and generative AI is going to like really help us coach people who aren't finding success and help them find better success and create matches that a much more like quality over quantity I mean that when we rebooted hinge we want to make it more quality over quantity and. We went from a world where people used to like it used to take a thousand swipes in order to get on a date and then the new hinge it took about 50 likes so we made a big leap back then in terms of helping people get on on good dates. I think now with AI I think there's like a whole other leap of focus in terms of learning about you learning about who's out there helping match people up in like a really nice one to one way and you don't feel like you're in this like very crowded room where you know some every all the attractions you know are all the attention is going to just a certain group of people and so I think there is a like I think the future is getting brighter for us to be able to solve that problem.

1:12:29What are the what is that disparity I read and this might not be accurate at two thousand and twenty one study by hinge found that the top one percent of men on the app receive more than 16 % of all of the likes while the top one percent of women receive just over 11 % this indicates a significant disparity in the level of attention men and women receive on dating apps and similar things from. Bumble a two thousand twenty two study by Bumble found that men send an average of 13 messages per day on the app while women only send roughly three messages per day this suggests that men are putting in significantly more effort to initiate conversations on dating apps and then more broadly from that we've had people on this podcast like Scott Galway that talks about how the very top 10 10 % or the top group of men having all the sex and basically there's this kind of like dissolution disenfranchised group at the bottom of men who are having no.

1:13:18No sex and our on finding relationships on having into the connection it's that group of men that he says are the most dangerous of all because they're like lonely broke dissolution young men we still have work to do to there's like a major opportunity to help those people that are struggling to find their person by helping them zero in better on the person that they like and the person who will like them back helping them put their best foot forward and make sure that they are not shooting themselves in the foot by like choosing the wrong photo. Those are like putting getting one word answered on prompts or any of those types of things so that I think is the the key is like so like a big effort at at hinge right now internally we're calling it flat in the power curve but it's essentially that it's like how do you help the people who aren't getting to success how do you level them up to get to success and then how do you focus the people so that there's not that kind of like power curve behavior on in society and on dating apps we think we can actually correct what's going on and more largely in society through dating apps.

1:14:25And so I'm clear we do that by coaching people to be better at dating apps basically like picking better pitches understanding better ways to reply we do that by helping them match with people that are more suitable to them and that are more likely to. Yeah and I think giving like better more warm introductions so that people have a people have more focus and more of a chance and you also limit like what's going on in terms of people sending too many likes are matching too much and getting them to focus on the people that they actually really want so that you don't over engage the rest of the user base is there a challenge in getting people to get from the app to the real world because I was I would always be super scared of that yeah I mean there's that's the whole point of our app and.

1:15:10That's very much what we're like pushing people towards but yeah I mean the whole the whole funnels a challenge in terms of getting you know getting people to sign up getting people to like create profiles getting people to match getting people to like move from a match to conversation and conversation to date. You mentioned AI big topic of conversation this year of course generative AI and how that might be able to help people find their person I mean the conversation around AI and relationships and dating has always been quite pessimistic because people are thinking about sex robots. Yeah. Yeah.

1:15:44Yeah. Yeah that's not the that's certainly not going to be what a hinge is working on. How how can you use a it's you mentioned it briefly that but I want to make sure I'm clear. How specifically. You can give me feedback kind of like who does they have that they've released their AI. I think one level of it is like just thinking like how do you make the the dating app experience better how do you help people build better profiles how do you help coach people through the conversation process and help them move up to a date so you can certainly. Like coach people be like hey you should choose these types of photos or whatever like all that is possible AI.

1:16:22What I think like the bigger leap though is to move much closer to what feels like a matchmaker model and that I think starts to solve some of the problems that that what you were just talking about where. It's less like you're just sitting there evaluating and that that whole idea of like creating a profile matching trying to chat trying to move it off to a date like when you work with a matchmaker you just have an interview and they learn who you are they go out and interview other people and they say hey we think you all should meet will set up the date and after the date. I'm going to follow up to see how it went and provide some feedback.

1:16:55I think we can get closer and closer to that model where we're like going almost straight to setting updates that are with a much higher likelihood of success then sort of leaving it on the user to create a personal advertisement for themselves and you know do all the work to sort of find through people that are going to like them that are going to that will like them back etc. The word company by definition means group of people. You talk about hiring in your principles quite often and just generally in this book principle number five here is people with heart, high people who embody the core values.

1:17:33I've come to learn longer of business that hiring is really central to everything. I'm culture being the thing that binds those group of people together but what have you learned about hiring and what would your message be to maybe your younger self that is 2012 when you're re launching the new hinge what would you say to that guy that you know now about hiring. We made a whole lot of hiring mistakes in the beginning and and was still we sort of did it like we did the principles which is we looked at okay who are the people who have succeeded at hinge what are their attributes who are the people who have not succeeded at hinge and like what are their attributes and then we started to just create a new way to do it.

1:18:07Attributes for like who like who succeeds and who doesn't and then we started to design an interview which we call the culture interview which still everyone goes through at hinge which essentially like assesses for those attributes and that led to a dramatic increase in success making sure that we you know when people came they didn't quit or weren't fired within their first year. And now we have extraordinarily low attrition at hinge especially voluntary attrition and I think it's because we focus so much on making sure we get people in who have those values and then once you have people in who have those values and they're all around other people have those values.

1:18:45It's like a place they want to stay because it feels it they feel so aligned with the people that they work with. And if there was if you have to get rid of every value but keep one when it comes to hiring a hinge person which one would you keep. Our three core values are authenticity and courage and empathy that's like and they are a bit of a trifecta because one without another is like is very imbalanced I think so you want people to be authentic you don't want them to like be so authentic and so blunt that they like our rude and mean to people right there's that level of empathy but I think like those two values especially that like.

1:19:23Authenticity showing up being who you are saying what's on your mind and that level of empathy is ultimately what builds trust and I think trust like within an organization is really the lifeblood of the organization and those two values I think build more trust than anything else like the two ingredients of a great relationship. Ten years from now we sit here and we have another conversation we talk about what hinges the impact it's had on the world. What you tell me. I think the the next level impact that we can have in terms of shaping dating culture and coaching and teaching people to become not just better data is but like we become it's better better people really and coaching people how to like have more harmonious relationships form better relationships like I think there's so much opportunity.

1:20:18To guide people on that process and and so the idea that ten years from now we like really shaped. Dating culture in a way that just made everyone more successful that I think is like the vision for where we're headed. Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead and over the course of my career I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places. One which has helped me across many of my investments is net suite that also a sponsor of this podcast net suite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform you'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place.

1:21:01Their technology has been a real game changer especially for my team at flight studio as over the last year we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode. We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with net suite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business head to net suite dot com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning that's net suite dot com slash Bartlett. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for.

1:21:38And the question that's been left for you is. If you could go back in time and give one piece of advice to your 10 year old self. What would it be? Well, what comes to mind if I could have impressed on myself that like.

1:22:05You are. I mean, impressed on myself that idea of intrinsic worth if I could have it like let myself know that I was worthy no matter what regardless of like who dumped me or who ostracized me. That's what I wish in some sense I wish I could have understood and in the other sense it's like shaped my entire life and is the reason that I have hinge and the reason that I have Kate. So I think maybe the advice I would give is just buckle up. It's going to be a really wild ride and it it. You know does have a way of working out in the end. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. You've got a really incredible company.

1:22:49You've built a different business and that's that's so evident in the product that is hinge in a market where there's a lot of people doing the same obvious thing going for the low hanging fruit. It was so clear to me from a very long distance that at some point someone was being guided by first principles. Because you went an obvious route which has turned in your favor as society has evolved and we've got sick of surface level things and people are dissatisfied with not actually. The promise of these apps not being realized which was you told me you're going to help me find love. Yeah. And I'm still using and swiping on this app three or four years later and feeling despair maybe even feeling worse than I did when I started.

1:23:29But hinge took a different route and when you describe hinge to someone you say it's an app that cares more about meaning that cares more about fostering deep connections and that as you say in your own words, slow things down a little bit so you can take the time to find a much more real authentic. Potentially successful bond then the rest of the dating market and that's why hinge has always been I think has always represented the future because at the end of the day people are coming on these apps to find love. And it's clear to me this whole design to be deleted thing that and from everybody that I've met at hinge that is a promise you are genuinely trying to deliver upon.

1:24:06Yeah, I mean it's totally true and that idea of first principles is exactly right. I think you have to just like rethink from the ground up like how would I build this and stop thinking like oh other apps do this will do this with this twist. And that I think is what initially you don't find success during that path because everyone's like this is different. This is weird. It's no blueprint. Right. And but over time that like the compound interest that comes from actually building an effective product that grows the word of mouth is is you just and now today hinges you know the fastest growing major dating app or the number one app in the UK and Australia and and quickly growing in Europe to become like a top dating up in Europe.

1:24:47So it pays off eventually you have to be very patient. I see that in great funders you know see it sort of in the loop founder these unobvious decisions that they made because they're so guided by their first principles usually based on the founders personal experience. And that's what I see in hinge so thank you for creating an app that I consider to be a really great one and a really important one and being someone who's driven to end loneliness ultimately and bring people together because it's never been more important than it is now. Thank you Justin. Thank you. Do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode in the description below I know you'll enjoy it.

1:25:37Q1 is often when businesses start implementing new systems and processes in hopes of creating efficiencies for the year ahead and over the course of my career I've learnt just how crucial having the right systems in places. One which has helped me across many of my investments is net suite that also a sponsor of this podcast net suite is the number one cloud financial system through their streamlined platform you'll find all of your accounting financial management inventory and HR in one place their technology has been a real game changer especially for my team at flight studio as over the last year we've moved out of startup mode and into scale at mode.

1:26:12We no longer have to juggle multiple systems and having everything together has reduced the number of manual tasks and errors over 41 ,000 businesses have chosen to future proof their business with net suite. So if you'd like to learn how it can help your business head to net suite dot com slash Bartlett and free download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning that's net suite dot com slash Bartlett.