20VC: Grindr: The Most Insane Story in Startups | How the Chinese Bought and Lost Grindr | The Successful IPO with $300M Revenues and 40% EBITDA Margins | How Grindr Built a Free Cash Flow Machine

George Arison is the CEO of Grindr. The app that results in 40% of lesbian and gay marriages, the average user uses the app for 1 hour per day and sends more messages on Grindr than they do Whatsapp. The company will do over $300M in revenue in 2024 with a 40% EBITDA margin. One of the insane public company success stories. Prior to Grindr, George was the Founder and CEO of Shift, which he took public in 2020. In Today’s Episode with George Arison We Discuss: 1. Wild Story of How the Chinese Bought and Lost Grindr: How did the Chinese come to buy Grindr and then fire the founder? Why did the US government force the sale of the company from the Chinese? What happened when the whole development team was in Taiwan and then resigned overnight? George got the CEO role in Sept and the company went public in Oct. How did that all happen so fast? 2. How Grindr is a Free Cash Flow Machine: What are the three core ways that Grindr is able to print money with a 40% EBITDA margin? Why does Grindr not spend any money on marketing or customer acquisition? Why does George think that most companies have way too many people? Why does George believe that most startups are very badly managed? What will Grindr do with the insane amount of free cash flow the company is producing? 3. Lessons Building Grindr to $300M in Revenue: What has George done with Grindr that he wishes he had not done? What has he not done that he wishes he had done? Why does George not make political statements today? Does George think we have freedom of speech when CEOs face such repercussions for political views? What does Wall St not understand about Grindr that it really should understand?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The second thing that I think Silicon Valley showed and has learned is that there's insane inefficiency in each individual that you have working for you. Because there's very bad management. Management does not mean micromanagement. Grindr has less than 150 full-time employees. We are very, very efficient. You know, our revenue per head is very high. It's over 2 million bucks per full-time employee. We shouldn't be just comped to dating apps when they talk about what the multiple on the stock should be. That we should be comped as much as to social network products as much as we're comped to dating products.

• 0:33Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And today we feature the truly incredible story of Grindr. A company founded by a non-technical founder that was a cash printing machine for years before he sold it to the Chinese. The US government then forced the sale of the company from the Chinese to a US private equity house who took the company public. They installed George as CEO and today the company does naught of 300 million dollars in revenue with 40% EBITDA margins. It is one of the best businesses of our time. Truly insane story. And joining me in the hot seat is George Arison, Grindr's CEO. Before we begin, one of the easiest investment decisions I have made over the last three years is investing in 11X.

• 1:16Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:00Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:41Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:22Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, you cannot imagine life without it, once you've experienced how powerful it is. And you can check them out today by heading over to tegus.com. You have now arrived at your destination. George, I am so excited for this, my friend. I've been such a fan of the Grindr business for a long time. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for having me. I love your podcast. It's done really well and I'm really impressed with what you've built. So psyched to be here.

• 3:47Harry Stebbings?

  It's amazing how far a British accent can take you.

• 3:52Harry Stebbings?

  Literally. My question to you is, for those that don't know, what is Grindr? And how did you come to be CEO of Grindr, the public company today?

• 4:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm happy to discuss that. So Grindr is the largest network of gay and bi men in the world. Started out as a product for hookups and casual dating in two thousand and nine, took over the gay world in a very viral way. I remember when I first saw Grindr on a friend's iPhone in two thousand and nine, I was building a company on BlackBerry, so didn't have an iPhone. And the next day I went and got an iPhone because I'm like, whoa, this is like way too good. I have to have this. And there's some estimates like Grindr sold half a million iPhones in the first year it was around, et cetera, in early adoption. And over time, it grew bigger and bigger. I mean, we're at over fourteen million active monthly users now. And so we have a much broader spectrum of audience now than just people who are looking for a hookup.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  It's now the largest source of gay relationships in the United States. Four in ten gay relationships start on Grindr. People spend, on average, an hour a day in the app, which is really remarkable. And we had one hundred and twenty-five billion approximately messages sent in the app last year. That's about fifty messages per person per day, more than WhatsApp messaging in a given day per user. It's become like a very critical network for gay and bi men all over the world, and by way, one hundred and ninety countries and territories all over the world.

• 5:18Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know what's insane is I think the average stat is like one in two heterosexual relationships is started like over the internet, mobile, or and you have forty percent.

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Yep, it's really awesome.

• 5:30Harry Stebbings?

  That is insane. An hour a day? Do they not work?

• 5:36Speaker 00

  I actually, when I first heard it, I'm like, what do you mean like a week? But yeah, it's a remarkable thing. And then as far as how I became CEO of Grindr. So Grindr has a very unique kind of founding story and how it got to where it is today. And I assume we'll talk about that. But there's an ownership group that owned Grindr as of twenty twenty, and they had a temporary management in place, knew they wanted to take the company public, and wanted a long-term CEO. They really wanted a product-driven person who had built a company from scratch and who had run a public company and who was ideally in the community, which kind of leaves you a very few Set of choices. They found me and made a really strong pitch. I was like, man, I've built three companies. I never thought I'd run anybody else's company.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  But the argument was really strong that this was a really amazing business and kind of once in a lifetime chance to do something really special. When do you get to run a business with, you know, forty plus percent even a margin? And I saw a huge opportunity to take this community that we have and build a lot more stuff for them. And become more of a super app product for for the user base. That got me really excited and so I took the job.

• 6:41Harry Stebbings?

  I'm still in awe of the stats you just gave me, but I I'm fascinated because you mentioned there the super app element. But then we also have the the specific word that you said was hookup app. And I remember I had Sean Rad from Tinder on the show and like there was this like visceral objection to any hookup app from him. It was like, do you mind being a hookup app? And how do you think about that? Like hookup app to super app transition?

• 7:05Speaker 00

  Totally. So, look, in gay culture, sex is a really critical part of who we are. Even like the term homosexual, like the reason we are different than the majority is because of sexuality. And I think we are far more open about sexuality. We are far more willing to engage in sexual activities with people and then be able to have, you know, friendships with them. Like, it's very not common for people to hook up and then develop a friendship in the straight world. It's very common in the in the gay world for for that to be the case. And so the way we look at sex is very, very different, but it's a very core part of who we are. For that reason, that makes Grindr very unique because that's the thing that people really want to solve for in any given day and Grindr lets them solve that.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  So we have actually no qualms about being viewed as as a hookup app and we actually are leaning more into it. The really big product we're going to be launching, you know, worldwide sometime towards the end of next year. It's now live in two markets today. It's called Right Now, which is actually making the hookup experience better and more easy for a user to access. This is a way for people who are looking for a Right Now encounter, whether it's hookup or otherwise, can kind of get into that Right Now mode. And then they're only talking to people who are in that mode. As well, right? Because we have people who have different intentions in the app. And one of the things that we hear from users is, hey, make it easier for me to find the person who wants to have a right now occurrence. And so we are leaning into that massively and will continue to.

• 8:34Speaker 00

  But in gay life, a lot of friendships, social connections, even networking and relationships originate with a hookup. And so that gives us a chance to kind of do all those other things as well for people on top of the thing that makes Grindr, at its core, be this interconnection product for the community.

• 8:53Harry Stebbings?

  What are the other things on top of like the insertion point of the hookup app? That's a really natural extension that you can overlay?

• 9:01Speaker 00

  Totally. So two things that Grindr is already really big in, in small ways, but plays a really big part. One is travel. Twenty five percent of Grindr users, so one in four, is traveling in any given week, which is a really remarkable thing to think about, given that, you know, in the US, average person takes two vacations a year in a car to visit like family sixty miles away or something. But it makes sense, right? Like, we have an audience that is high disposable income, that is usually single or if not single, doesn't have children. And so travel is a big part of their life. So there's a lot we can do in that. Whether it's, hey, where let's allow somebody on their profile to say, I'm going to Coachella this year and let's start connecting about the fact

• 9:45Speaker 00

  that we're all going to be at Coachella together, right? In the spring, or whether we're going on this cruise together and let's kind of all connect about it before we get on the cruise. To hear the top fifty hotels that people really like to stay at when they go to various cities. And maybe we do a deal with those hotels and create special packages and experiential ways for people to stay in them that right now are not available. The second area where there's a lot of connection already is health. Grindr really did an amazing job way before my time at educating people about PrEP, which is a medication that you can take and it prevents you from catching HIV. PrEP really changed life for a lot of people in a very fundamental way because if you're on PrEP,

• 10:30Speaker 00

  The single biggest fear that so many people have about having sex, which is, hey, am I catching HIV? Because it is gone, right? Like, you're not gonna get it. But it came out a while ago, and for a long time, it was not getting an uptake in the community that ideally you'd have. And only when Grindr added it to its profile page and allowed people to say, I'm on PrEP, and then did a massive effort inside the app to educate people about the benefits of PrEP, did PrEP start to take off. We do other things in health that are similar. A year and a half ago, we started working with the CDC to allow people to order an HIV test to be shipped to their home to get an HIV test. We've sent out about half a million tests since then, which is really incredible. And more importantly, thirty percent of people who are getting that test have not had an HIV test before.

• 11:16Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so sorry to sound like such a venture capitalist, but do you then make margin on the PrEP that you provide, on the tests? Is that not an amazing answer?

• 11:25Speaker 00

  We don't, we don't, we don't make money on, on HIV tests because CDC actually sends those to people for free. And we don't make money on PrEP because we don't sell PrEP. There are companies that do sell PrEP, we just do education and marketing for them. But, but my point on that is like, we already play a role in healthcare for people. And so there are things in health and wellness that we can build on where we will make money. Totally hypothetically, you know, you can imagine that a lot of gay men use various compound drugs that are quite popular these days, whether it's ED medications or hair care products or skincare products. One area, for example, that we can play in, where we can provide our users with a really good experience, and the margins are also really great.

• 12:06Harry Stebbings?

  Which will have a more impactful hit on revenue or addition to revenue, travel or healthcare, do you think?

• 12:12Speaker 00

  Look, these are both zero to one products, right? I don't know if they're gonna work, and I say this to investors all the time, like, if they work, they can be massive, but you gotta understand that we're starting at scratch and they might not work. With that caveat, I think if healthcare works, it will be very large. Because if you just do the math on it, right, like, a compounded ED medication costs a hundred to a hundred and thirty dollars per month subscription, and people, I think, average lifetime value of a user is six months. That's a pretty, for Hims, because Hims is public, so it's a pretty significant dollar value in a year on that subscription. So if, if those things work, I think from the revenue perspective, they'll be pretty significant.

• 12:54Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, when you think about like market adoption and breadth versus depth and penetration within existing market, how do you think about the balance between we need more grinder users just period versus we need to get deeper adoption for the products we have from the existing customer base?

• 13:12Speaker 00

  Totally. So our MOW has been just naturally growing. You know, we grew MOW like seven-ish percent last year. We're on track to do something similar this year based on public data so far through Q3. So we don't really focus on MOW growth frankly at all. It just kind of happens. We do know that there are a lot of users that we can add that are not using the product today. We have a 95-plus percent name recognition in the US. In a lot of countries abroad, it's closer to 60%. 60% is still amazing when you think about it, but 95% is just totally remarkable. And if people don't know us, they can't use us, right? So there's a lot of room in a lot of places internationally to gain more adoption by just getting better brand recognition. And that's something we are

• 13:54Speaker 00

  going to start working on in the coming years. We kind of view international as a midterm opportunity for us rather than immediate. Meanwhile, enabling more features and more products that our users can pay for today is something we are working on every day. Our payer penetration is about a little over 7%. You know, our peers, again, public data and even confidential are viewed as like 15-ish percent for Tinder, for example. So there's a lot of room to have a lot more paying users in this business. We don't need to be at anywhere near Tinder's payer penetration to hit our, say, three-year financial targets. And so we think there's a ton of opportunity to go deeper with paying products for our users today.

• 14:37Harry Stebbings?

  It's a tough balance because if you have the Tinder app, it is a hard monetized product. I mean, it sucks. It sucks as a US company.

• 14:45Speaker 00

  And they've dramatically under-invested in the user experience, which is, I think, why they're suffering so much. And it's not just Tinder. It's also Bumble. But basically, what happened, I think, with those products is they had a hit, right? Like they had a thing that worked really well, and they just spend years monetizing only, not really adding anything new to the user. Experience and that I don't think is a really right approach. And so we, from the very beginning, kind of even before I took this job, like when I was thinking like, what do we do with Grindr? My sense was there's so many features that have not been built on Grindr yet that people really badly want. And you know, there's an incredibly long running list of things that we need to create. Our job should be to build those things, create value for users through those features and products.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  And if you create value for people, people will pay for those. And so we have a very, very robust free product and we're going to keep that to be a very robust free product.

• 15:38Harry Stebbings?

  I mean this with total respect to you and other colleagues in the industry. There's been relatively little innovation in the market over the last years, the simple swipe functionality or cross and tick. But other than that, segmentation on customer groups.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 15:53Harry Stebbings?

  Would you agree with that or am I being harsh?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, I fully agree. Whether it's for us or for other companies, innovation has been dramatically limited. Except for maybe Hinge, which has had a little bit more innovation, um, kind of along the way. I built an AI company in twenty nineteen, twenty twenty and then sold it. And so I had some AI experience coming into this, this job. And that was one of the more exciting things about what was possible. Because we have so much rich data about our users, whether it's from their behavior patterns in the app or their chat history. And so only obviously with their consent, but if we use all that data to create better matches for them between what they want and what we know other users want.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  We can really reshape how dating happens, at least in our community.

• 16:41Harry Stebbings?

  I, I saw Whitney say that we would actually have kind of extensions of ourselves, robots that would kind of date each other in a virtual world.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I said that six months before she did. So I think it's totally gonna happen.

• 16:52Harry Stebbings?

  You think that's gonna happen? Can you just envision that world for me?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I don't think that people are want will want to have synthetics, robots, agents, call them whatever you want, doing the whole conversation, right? But one of the things that I think is very constraining to dating, and it's particularly true for for gay men because of density issues, is that dating mostly happens by geography. Like, you normally end up settling down with somebody you meet in the geography you live in. And that makes no sense, because the idea that the best person for you is necessarily in the city that you live in or in a town you live in makes like no logical sense, right? The reason it happens that way is because the cost of, hey, I'm just gonna like, you know, date anybody, anywhere, is prohibitive from both time perspective and and money perspective.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  But if I could give you an incredibly transparent and rich recommendation for five people around the world who are the right matches for you, based on your behavior patterns in my product, based on your entire chat history, maybe even pulling information from outside of Grindr that you give me and match you with other people for whom I have the same rich data. And then on top of that, expose it to where, okay, George and Harry are the right match, and their synthetics spend some time talking to each other about a set of questions that they really care about, and gave each other the answers, and then you're provided with like a write-up of like, okay, these are the things we talked about, and these are the things that make a lot of sense for us.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  And this is why I think it's okay for you to pack a bag and fly to London to meet him. That'll make people a lot more open to meeting people further away. And so I think for our community in particular, where density is a huge problem, other than maybe in New York City, London, and San Francisco, maybe LA, you don't have a huge number of people to potentially partner with. It'll be really game-changing, and I can't wait to to make that available to users.

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  You you mentioned the forty percent EBIT at the beginning. I mean, it's extraordinary, George. I said at the beginning, what a great business it is and what a fan I am of it. But like, I think it's a hundred and twenty million of free cash flow and three hundred million of revenue, give or take. And I might be getting this slightly wrong, but kind of ballpark. How are you so efficient when everyone else isn't?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's like three things that make us, I think, very different. One is we don't spend any money on on marketing. And the reason is that we don't do any acquisition on marketing. Our marketing is focused on on brand building and we do a lot of stuff in social, narrow casting to, again, gay and bi men, but it's a lot of storytelling, but we don't do payer user acquisition. We don't have to. All our user acquisition is through word of mouth and kind of the the brand building approach. Number two is we have a tiny team. I'm a really, really big believer in super lean organizations that get a lot of stuff done. We have a very audacious mission and my expectation is that people who are here work super hard to deliver

• 19:49Speaker 00

  results. Grindr has less than one hundred and fifty full time employees. We are very, very efficient. You know, our revenue per head is very high. It's over two million bucks per full time employee. And that's something I'm really proud of. We are actually nowhere near the peak capacity we were at when I joined. We had two hundred and twenty five people at the very peak when I first joined and we had some transition on staff and we've seen a ton of productivity improvements in our team. And I think there's still a lot more to be gained, right? So like I'm a huge believer in using AI in work and I want us to be, you know, in a world where a lot of our code is written by AI and our engineers are actually overseeing that process rather than necessarily being the first ones to be writing that code. And so there's still a lot more leverage to be had with the team that we have. So it's like

• 20:34Speaker 00

  the second really kind of big thing. And then thirdly, our cost structure is pretty simple. Like we have, we pay Apple and Google, we pay Amazon, and we pay people. But there's really nothing else that we kind of heavily spend money on. And so that's how we end up with a really good EBITDA margin. But amazingly, there's still actually a lot of leverage, right? Because we're a public company and all the costs that public companies have, we still have to have. And we'll have them at three hundred plus million and we'll have them at a billion in revenue. And they're mostly going to be the same. Like the accounting team is not going to grow that much from where it is today as we grow. And so there's still a lot of leverage in the business for us to actually improve our margins over time.

• 21:10Harry Stebbings?

  Drill down on number two, which is like the efficiency and the lean focus. When does a focus on efficiency and leanness impact growth negatively?

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a good question. I'm asked this question a lot in a lot of different ways. You know, we just did our earnings on Thursday, so I've been doing a lot of investor calls and this like comes up in every investor call. Like, hey, could you spend more money and do more things? And the reality is actually no. I think what Silicon Valley showed in the last 10 years or so is the idea that just adding more headcount to do more stuff actually is not the right thing because you end up spending a lot of money on a lot of stuff that doesn't work and probably shouldn't be getting as many resources as it needs to. We're going to launch a bunch of new stuff this year, but a lot of it's going to be done through partnerships with one or two people working on those things. We'll learn our way into them. If they work, we'll put more resources behind them, but we don't need to be having

• 22:04Speaker 00

  teams of five, six, seven people launching these different products that we're organized. It's not necessary. The second thing that I think Silicon Valley showed and has learned is that there's insane inefficiency in each individual that you have working for you because there's very bad management. Management does not mean micromanagement. There's a big difference, but being able to have really strong accountability is really critical, and I don't think we have it in the tech world today.

• 22:30Harry Stebbings?

  Can I just dive in and ask, why do you say that? Why do we not have the accountability, do you think?

• 22:35Speaker 00

  Because in the beginning, when companies are built, and look, I'm a founder, again, I built companies, I built three companies from scratch. So like, I'm a full-on founder in every way, right? Like, we hire people who have a ton of self-accountability. Most founders have incredible self-accountability. They work all the time. It's like they're, you know, like animals. I'm going to get this done. And they hire a lot of people like that. So your first 20, 30, 40, whatever number it is, employees are all like that. They don't need management. That's why so much gets done at very early-stage companies. But eventually, you end up hiring people who are not going to be like that. For one thing, because whatever equity grant you give them is not going to be large enough to justify that level of work, right? It is not possible. You hire more normal people.

• 23:16Speaker 00

  That's totally okay, like the world you're in. At that point, you need management. And by management, primarily, I mean, sets culture, sets goals, sets clarity around how to achieve them, and holds people accountable. Unfortunately, most people who work at startups in the first phase are really bad managers because they never learn how to be managers. They don't want to be managers, and they don't like To make people feel bad or they manage in the way that kind of, you know, the stuff that you'd hear about Uber and like the culture that Uber had in twenty sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. And that does not attract to people either. And so the result is very bad management across startups. Startups that succeed succeed because they either have really amazing margins and they just kind of like pour more people at problems and have massive inefficiency.

• 24:02Speaker 00

  Or through kind of cultures that are just not very healthy. And I think there is a better way to do that. And I think lean organizations with really good management where everybody is in founder mode is kind of what I classify. But we still allow for good integration between life and work is how one should build businesses.

• 24:22Harry Stebbings?

  This is a hypothetical situation. I am a young CEO and I do not have your years of wisdom. You are an angel investor in my company. If you were to teach me how to be a good manager, what would you say I should know from the twenty years that you have learned?

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think there's a difference between being in the details and micromanaging people. I stay really, really close to details and I need everybody else on my team to be really close to details. Like if someone comes to me and says like, I don't actually know this number, that raises a lot of red flags for me because I'm like, that's a pretty crucial number for you. Like, how can you not know it? So being in the details on the numbers and what is happening in the business is different from letting other people make decisions. And I think it's really crucial to let other people make decisions and guide them to the right decision if they're not making the right decision, but not to micromanage them.

• 25:16Harry Stebbings?

  How do you guide them without micromanaging them?

• 25:19Speaker 00

  You ask tough questions and you you raise the hypotheticals of what could happen if the decision that they want to make happens. And get them to understand what the problem might end up being. Because ultimately, you as the founder and the CEO know the full picture and they don't. What you can bring to the table is they wanna do X, they don't understand how that X impacts Y and Z over here that they're not thinking about, only you can do that. But that does not mean you tell them, hey, you're wrong and this is the answer. I think that's like a really big kind of factor. Secondly, that I think is really crucial to kind of how I would do things differently now is you've gotta know what you're not good at and get the right people around you.

• 26:01Speaker 00

  That's different from, oh, man, I'm really bad at this and so I need to change this. The idea that a grown adult is gonna change everything about themselves is very low probability. Like, it's probably not gonna happen. You can pick like one thing you really wanna change and I'm gonna work on this really hard. But man, in a series A company where cash is running out and your product market fit might not quite be there and your team is causing problems and your investors are yelling at you, like, trying to change everything about yourself is not gonna happen, even changing one thing about yourself is really hard. But you can put people around you who catch your blind spots and you need to be comfortable with them coming to you and saying, hey, George, you do this a lot. You are really stressed right now and you're doing the one thing that causes a lot of problems

• 26:44Speaker 00

  and I'm gonna straight tell that to your face and you need to listen to me. And sometimes they're right and sometimes they're wrong, but if you don't have people around you who can kind of catch those blind spots is a huge problem.

• 26:53Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask a weird one? What did you think you were good at that you turned out to be bad at? And how did that show itself?

• 27:00Speaker 00

  There are a lot of things that I thought was not very good at that I actually am really good at. Like, I thought that I was not very good at recruiting engineers. I was terrified of recruiting engineers. After I started my company, first engineer outside of the CTO that I went to recruit, like, I was literally scared to death. I have a huge fear of snakes and this was like the second most thing I was scared of. Like, how am I gonna talk to this guy about engineer problems? I know nothing about engineering. Turns out, I'm actually pretty amazing at recruiting engineers. And engineers really like transparency and I'm super transparent. And so having very transparent discussions and being very honest, like, I don't know this and this is why I need you to come and help me here, really works with them. They actually appreciate that. Instead of it coming off salesy, they actually like, oh, here's a business guy who like is willing to say, I don't know X or Y.

• 27:45Speaker 00

  And that was a huge learning. I was a business person working in the tech world and you can't be successful in that unless you're very good with engineers. But it was challenging for me to believe I could be good with them. Big learning that I became quite good. Another one I had to learn that's really tough is it's okay to be quiet. Because I respond to things really fast and a lot of engineers are actually very different. They probably have an opinion or whatever you said right away. But they spend a lot of time thinking through what they're gonna say before they say it. And for like an extroverted dude who talks all the time, that's really difficult, right? Because you kind of like need to get comfortable with silence. And that silence can last like one or two minutes. And you wanna fill that silence with content, but you just need to shut up and wait.

• 28:28Speaker 00

  That one was a really tough for me to learn, but I think has served me very well.

• 28:32Harry Stebbings?

  You said as a manager, not many people don't want to make people feel bad. Do great managers make people feel bad?

• 28:39Speaker 00

  So I have a really hard time with this one because I'm told by everybody else, I'm like, I love feedback, George, tell me, give me feedback. It's okay. But if I have to give them developmental feedback, even though they might be selling, telling me it won't make them feel bad. I believe it, I'm gonna make him feel bad. And that's really tough. Not everyone has this issue, but I do. And it's probably my single biggest challenge in being a leader. It's the one thing I've picked that like I have to work on this. Because if I don't become better at this, I cannot go to the next level as a CEO and as a leader. On an individual level, being in front of somebody like, hey, you are not doing this very well is really hard for me. Especially if I care about that person.

• 29:19Speaker 00

  So there is a level of like, if I care for you, it's difficult for me to be giving you direct feedback when something is not working. When things are working really well, totally not a problem. So like with very high achieving people, I have no issues with giving them feedback. But when there's developmental feedback, it's really tough. So, you know, I've learned how to do it and it's painful, but I write everything out. So I give people like very long written documents that are like really detailed. And then I like send it to them in advance and then I sit down with them and go through them. Which is not the necessary, maybe necessarily the best thing for them, because usually it's better to do it in person. But like to be able, for me to be able to express fully what I think, I have to do it in writing.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Because otherwise I will like not tell you the full story, because I again will feel like I'm making you feel bad and I won't come there. Yes, it's a hundred percent true, like I actually don't give a shit what people think about me in the broader sense. But on an individual level, it's something I kind of run into problems with.

• 30:14Harry Stebbings?

  Has it ever hurt you on a broader level? I saw also there was like some tweets that you sent like upset people. Does that really get you in trouble or is it like people get over it?

• 30:24Speaker 00

  I mean, people get over it, obviously, and you have to have right people behind you. You know, when I was taking this job, I actually told the big shareholders, at this point, granted, it was still private, so that kind of the owners, like, look, I'm a conservative guy. I'm Republican. I'm also gay. I'm very social on these social issues of being gay. I'm very liberal and libertarian. I'm libertarian on some other issues as well. But on a lot of stuff, I'm pretty conservative. And I don't think there's a conflict on those things. And and people knew that and they were okay with it. I also knew that, like, some people are gonna have a problem with that, and we need to be prepared for that. Because unfortunately, we are in a world where people are not willing to appreciate differences of opinion, right? Like, you have to be exactly down this line, and that's true on both sides.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Like, you have to be all in on this side or all in on that side. I don't think that makes any any sense.

• 31:13Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we have freedom of speech? I had the founders of Anduril on the show recently, and Intercom, we talked about it. Do you think we are in a society where freedom of speech is pleasant?

• 31:23Speaker 00

  Look, I grew up in the Soviet Union, where literally, like, if people knew what you believed in, you could go to jail. I remember evenings where my great grandfather, who, like, had fought in World War II, and was a general in World War II, would turn on a radio and try to find Voice of America on on on the radio to listen to what actually was happening in the world. And we all knew that if ever anyone ever got a hand on his radio, he'd be arrested, even though he was like a, you know, seventy five year old Soviet hero, right? And and so I know what not having freedom of speech truly means from that perspective. Obviously, that is not the world that we live in today. Has there been a little bit too much self censorship? And or censorship from other sources in the last decade? Yes, absolutely. I think the pushback against it has been pretty strong,

• 32:07Speaker 00

  and I think we're gonna end up in a pretty good place. I I don't like saying I'm a free speech absolutist, but at the same time, as much as I despise the idea of burning the American flag, because I think this is the greatest, most amazing country in the world that has ever existed and probably will ever exist, and part of my mission in life is to do everything I can to perpetuate that, people have the right to burn the flag. I can't stand that idea, like, it makes me wanna puke. But if people wanna burn the flag, they have the right to do that. They shouldn't do that, but they have the right to. Do it. I need to accept that on my level and somebody hearing something that somebody else says they don't like. That's totally okay. They need to be comfortable with that as well.

• 32:42Harry Stebbings?

  Do you not worry that you will offend your stakeholders being the customers? If you think about it, maybe a more Democrat audience in terms of your user base. Do you not worry that maybe like I have LPs, I'm a fund manager. I'm always wary of saying something that might upset my stakeholders.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Oh, totally. And look, the decision I made when I took this job was I don't make political statements today at all. It is not my job. My job is to be the best CEO I can be for Grindr. And the things I might say that distract me from being doing that job and providing my users with the most awesome experience in the app and outside of the app are not the right things to do. That will be distracting to my shareholders, it'd be distracting for my employees and would not be good for my users.

• 33:23Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think Wall Street doesn't get about Grindr?

• 33:26Speaker 00

  The biggest thing we are really focused on educating people on today is that we shouldn't be just comped to dating apps when they talk about kind of what the multiple on the stock should be. That we should be comped as much as to social network products as much as we're comped to dating products. Because people are using Grindr for dating, yes, but they're also using Grindr for all these other social experiences that are more akin to Pinterest or Instagram than the dating product.

• 33:55Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, if we take that, then they are powered by advertising engines, which are incredible free cash flow machines. Does Grindr become an advertising engine like they are?

• 34:04Speaker 00

  Well, we have an advertising business and we'll talk about that in a minute. I also think it's actually pretty cool that we are a social network that has a monetization engine that's subscriptions, right? Because that's pretty unusual. We do have an ad business. The ad business actually is how Grindr got started. So Grindr was profitable from day one. Because it was a bootstrapped company that was one founder built from scratch and he always made money on it. And ads were the primary way he did that in the early days. So we've always had an ad business. You know, in 2018 to 2022 period, there was a big underinvestment in our ad business and so it was not growing really well. We started to change that in 2023 and those investments actually helped us to have a really strong year in ad, in the ad business of this year.

• 34:45Speaker 00

  Ads are about 15% of our revenue in total, but obviously on a margin basis, they're even higher percentage because it's a very profitable part of the business and we don't have to pay the Apple and Google taxes on that revenue. But we want that business to be bigger and we're going to continue investing in that. Today, most of our ad business is what we call third-party ads, meaning we use networks like AppFolio or Google, et cetera, to source those ads. We do have some direct ads as well, where we partner with brands to market directly in Grindr. Over the long term, I want us to have a much bigger direct ad business. But we need to do a lot of work inside the company to get ready for those types of partnerships. That's work inside the products specifically, right?

• 35:27Speaker 00

  We need, we need to have better ads, we need to have more ad formats, they have to have better data access in terms of how the ad is performing for our advertisers. And we need a much better approach to how we sell, better relationships with the agencies. So that's all going to happen in the, in the future. But in the near term, kind of, we can do a lot more with the third-party ads as well. So I think ads can be a much bigger business. What we've said publicly is we want it to be growing at the same pace to stay at that kind of 50% or ballpark part of our revenue story. If we do really well, maybe it does better.

• 36:02Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we compute, instead of to dating apps, we compute to social networks, as you said.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Combo, both dating apps and social networks, I'll take that too.

• 36:10Harry Stebbings?

  What does that mean for how perception is changed? It's just an increase in revenue multiple? What does that actually mean for the substance?

• 36:17Speaker 00

  It would be an increase in the EBITDA multiple, right? We are, we are valued of EBITDA and you know, the reality is that Facebook's EBITDA multiple is much higher than dating products, even EBITDA multiple. But I think just thinking of this business as purely a comp to Tinder or a comp to Bumble is not the right approach. Just because users also don't use us that way. I mean, people are in the product way longer, they do way more in the app, they stay with the app over time for much longer time periods. Even when they are in a relationship, they still stay in the app because it's this social network for them. So just thinking of us as Tinder, it doesn't make any sense.

• 36:49Harry Stebbings?

  What happens with Tinder and Bumble?

• 36:51Speaker 00

  I don't buy at all the notion that young people don't want to date off online channels. Like, they do everything else online, like they don't want to date online, that doesn't make any sense. They want different experiences in the products than what is offered today, but that's different from they want to do things online. And so I think ultimately they'll figure things out, or new online dating products will arise that will meet users' needs. I don't know if Bumble and Tinder will be able to figure that out. You know, clearly Hinge is doing a lot of things really well and is growing super nicely and. Both in revenue and in user traction. So there is a way to build online dating products for straight people that that work. So I don't know what Tinder specifically and Bumble will do, but I'm very bullish about the online dating opportunity as a whole. I think it'll

• 37:36Speaker 00

  continue to do very well.

• 37:37Harry Stebbings?

  What have you done in your Grindr tenure that you wish you had not done?

• 37:41Speaker 00

  That's an interesting one. I think when I came in, I didn't fully appreciate how different building trust with people who were already there would be versus ones that I had hired. So this was like a big aha moment for me. I mean, hey, because I never had any trust issues. Like I've had plenty of issues and people have lots of things to say about George should do differently. But like my employees trusting George was never an issue. But then I realized though, obviously, because if you're a founder of a company, no one's going to join that company unless they trust you. So kind of like implicit part of their like decision making process to come to work for a company that's led by a founder is that they trust the founder. And I didn't appreciate how difficult and different, I say different

• 38:22Speaker 00

  more than difficult, it would be to build trust with employees who are already present and there. And so I wish I had done more in explaining to them what my approach to things would be. I started to do that a few months in, but I didn't do as much of that in in the very beginning. Now, some of this was driven by just kind of the time I showed up in. I showed up in October and we're going public in November. So there was like a really big focus. Hey, we got to get the this this process completed and go public. We also didn't have a lot of other people on the team. Like it was me, chief product officer and the CFO kind of were like the leadership and then everything else needed to be built out. And so there was like a lot of building the plane while we were flying it. But I heard

• 39:05Speaker 00

  from people, hey, like, we need to hear more from George in terms of what's his vision for where he wants to take the business. And I had a very strong vision and I thought I talked about it, but not anywhere near enough. It turned out. And so that's one thing I would have done differently in the first 60, 90 days if I had to redo that again.

• 39:22Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, what would you do if you knew you couldn't fail in doing it?

• 39:27Speaker 00

  Have two more kids.

• 39:28Harry Stebbings?

  Why would you worry about failing in doing that?

• 39:30Speaker 00

  Well, kids are really important to me. So like, I'm a very unusual gay guy in that sense. Like, I always knew I wanted children. Frankly, coming out was partly difficult because I'm like, wow, what's that gonna mean to my ability to have kids? Because when I was going through this whole coming out process, like, surrogacy was not a thing yet. Gay men having children was not that common. And so having kids was a very big deal to me. And, you know, what my husband and I agreed on is if we're past forty-five, we're not gonna have more children. Because we just felt like you're too old. After having two kids and given how much time we spent on our children and how important they are to us, like, I am probably the only Russell three thousand CEO that like regularly shows up at school.

• 40:11Speaker 00

  Is that like almost every dinner with my children, like six to seven P M. is like massively sacred. And yes, sometimes I'm not there, but like ninety percent of the time I'm there. And so they're really critical to me. I don't know if I could do that with two more kids. Because kids are a lot of work. I just don't know if I have more in me to be able to give as much time to my two kids that I already have, to more children I would wanna have, and be as good at the job I do. I don't know if there's enough of me for that. And so that's kind of what I mean by could I do it all? But if I was younger, thirty-five, I could wait for another five years, have my kids be ten, and then have more kids. But that's not an option. So that's kind of what I mean by like, I could, I could fail.

• 40:51Harry Stebbings?

  Is it possible to be a really good C E O, a really good father, and a really good husband?

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a tough one. I try to be a really good husband. I'm, my husband tries to be really good to me. But we definitely are focused on each other a lot less today because so much of our energy goes to our children. But that's again a choice that we made, right? Like, part of us being a couple is that we wanted to be really good parents and we wanted kids. And frankly, I would exclude a lot of people as potential partners because they didn't wanna have children. Like, it was a very early conversation topic on any date I ever went on. Because if you didn't wanna have kids, we might have everything else going for us, but it wasn't gonna go nowhere. So you definitely give up a lot if you wanna be a really good dad. I probably am not as good of a husband today as I was before we had children.

• 41:37Harry Stebbings?

  Did having children change how you think about the style with which you lead?

• 41:42Speaker 00

  I think what I would say is the opposite. The way I think about my employees and what I learn from them really shapes things about how I approach my kids. But things I learn about being a dad also do shape how I think about my employees. Because so much of our behavior patterns are formed when we're young and we don't really appreciate that. And so I sometimes notice things about my team members in their behavior patterns. Before, I would have never thought about it this way, but I'm like, oh, they must have really picked this up when they were young. Because I'm noticing my kids pick certain things up now when they're really young. Or I read about how X, Y, Z behavior of our parents results in this type of behavior in children. And I'm like, oh, this is probably what's happening with my employees as well.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  So that I've definitely kind of learned on and I have a totally new appreciation for helping my team members understand their behavior patterns and where they came from and how we can work around those, right? Because again, I don't believe you can change everything about yourself. You can change some things, but not all, but you need to build structures around each person to make them be successful.

• 42:45Harry Stebbings?

  Going back to the business, and I thought when you're throwing off as much cash as you are, George, what do you do with it? Do you do like dividends? Is it buybacks? Is it acquisitions? What does one do when you have this free cash flow machine that you do?

• 42:59Speaker 00

  One thing I can say is very clearly, we're not going to hoard cash for acquisitions. If there are acquisitions that are interesting at some point that we want to do, we'll deal with that at that point. But I don't think it's the right thing to do to kind of just hoard cash and just hope that something happens. We really believe there's a huge organic opportunity here and that's what we're really focused on. And we're gonna kind of look at what is the right approach to get cash to our shareholders at the time when we are doing it. We're not quite there yet. We have debt, we're paying down that debt. We want to get down to 1.5 to 2X EBITDA on the debt. We'll get there soon and then we'll kind of, you know, at a board level, make a decision on what is the right approach. But in general, you know, we've never kept a lot of cash on our balance sheet

• 43:43Speaker 00

  and I don't think we're gonna choose to keep a lot of cash for no reason.

• 43:46Harry Stebbings?

  Can I finish with a bit of a story time? The business is this unbelievable kind of story. It's gone public. It was owned by a Chinese company, I think it was. I I used to love story time at school, you know, when there's like, hey, kids, sit around.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:01Harry Stebbings?

  Can we just do a bit of that, which is like, it was bootstrapped by one person who built it to being owned by Chi? What happened?

• 44:09Speaker 00

  So, by the way, Joel Simkai, who founded Grindr, like, what an incredible story, right? Like, this guy is not an engineer, has this idea, built this company into something massive and a global brand. So he wanted to create liquidity for himself after having building the build this business, ran a process. I think had a bunch of offers, but best offer came from a company called Kunlun, which is a Chinese conglomerate. And he took that offer. Offer was in two parts. They bought forty nine percent first and then had the right to buy majority later. And then as soon as they were able to exercise that right, they exercised it and then they fired him. And so he was out of the business. But right away, when they had fifty percent plus control, CFIUS, which is the US government committee that manages international investments, came and said, whoa, you never cleared this transaction with CFIUS.

• 44:53Speaker 00

  And we don't believe it's okay for a Chinese company to own a company with this much important data. And they were a hundred percent right. Kudos to US government for doing what they did. It was a a great move. And so they forced a divestiture and was like the first CFIUS forced divestiture and definitely the most prominent one that had ever happened. So Kunlun knew that they couldn't own Grindr for the long haul. Unfortunately, significantly disinvested in Grindr during that period of time in terms of product investments, business investments. And in twenty twenty, ran a process to sell Grindr. There were a bunch of bidders, but the winning bid came from these three individuals that came together into an organization called San Vicente.

• 45:34Speaker 00

  They kind of oftentimes described as like a private equity and there's some private equity there, but they were not really kind of private equity people. And they bought Grindr from from Kunlun in the middle of COVID, signed the term sheet before COVID lockdowns happened and closed the transaction in June twenty twenty. Pretty remarkable when you think about it. And even more crazy, the entire engineering team, which was at this Point was in Taiwan, quit when the transaction happened. And Grindr's codebase on the backend was all a monolith at this point. So like, one mistake could shut down the whole product. So it was a very precarious period. Super impressive that these guys then said, okay, we're gonna really focus on Grindr for the long term. Brought in a temporary management, which hired lots of engineers.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  And a lot of work was done to increase the stability of the product, make the codebase a lot better, dramatically invest in kind of this technical debt improvements that need to be done. And then they went looking for long-term management and public company management. And that's how they recruited me and then went public. So the individuals who bought Grindr from Chinese own ownership really saved this company in a pretty big way and was a really remarkable refilm. I think in, you know, one of your questions, you were kind of asking like, was it a distressed asset when they bought it? No, not at all, because the product was still actually growing, user base was growing, revenue was growing. There was like very little investment happening in the company, but it was not a distressed asset at all. It was actually a very successful business.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  It just was made into even more successful business over the last, you know, four years.

• 47:04Harry Stebbings?

  What an amazing story, huh?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is a really incredible story.

• 47:08Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for the quick fire. What would it take for Grindr to be a $30 billion company?

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Hopefully us being really good at execution and building out these new use cases, the what we call Gablehood expansion use cases, healthcare and wellness, travel. I think there are others that we are thinking about. I think networking and jobs is another really big opportunity, building those out and becoming successful in them. And then it's just math, right? Like if we continue growing our revenue and maintain really good EBITDA, market cap will kind of take care of itself.

• 47:38Harry Stebbings?

  George, I've absolutely loved this. I'd love to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Is that okay?

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Will do my best.

• 47:45Harry Stebbings?

  The heaviest things in life are not iron or gold, but unmade decisions. What unmade decision weighs on you most, George?

• 47:53Speaker 00

  I make decisions all the time, like that's my entire job, right? And I do that at home all the time too. So I actually don't have a lot of decisions I've not made, because guess what? If you don't make a decision, that's still making a decision. One of my team members said, yeah, sometimes like I'll ask you three questions and you answer only two. And I've learned that that means that you're like thinking about something. I'm like, yeah, but I also realize that you need an answer. And when I don't give you that answer, that's basically telling you no. Most unmade decisions are no's. And so I don't really have that many that I can kind of like speak to.

• 48:22Harry Stebbings?

  I get you. It reminds me of actually kind of a statement that those who know they can and those who know they can't are both probably right.

• 48:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 48:29Harry Stebbings?

  What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 48:32Speaker 00

  So I believe that AI is going to be more at an infrastructure level layer as a solution rather than at a product level, if that makes any sense. Like, I think application layer companies and products ultimately are going to be overtaken by an infrastructure solution because there's going to be a universal AI that does a lot of things for you. But in terms of how you think about the product, and then I'm not changing my mind on that. I think I've had that point of view for a while. But how we get there is going to require small pieces of AI to come into our lives at various points in our product experiences, all over products that we use. Because we are not going to quite get to that ultimate goal for quite some time. And I think I've adopted how quickly I believe we'll be getting there.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  And that building these like small experiences makes more sense than trying to kind of have one big AI that does a lot of things all at once for a user.

• 49:23Harry Stebbings?

  Got you. So just so I understand, you don't think that infrastructure models, basically you open AI to anthropics, will subsume the application layer?

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Long term, I don't think you're going to need an Asana with AI. You're going to just have an AI, TBD how you engage with it, that's going to tell every many other AIs what to do, right? So like you can have a lot of agents that are specific, and there's going to be one agent that's kind of telling all the other agents what to do, and you're going to be talking to that one agent. But it's going to take a while to get there. My initial perspective was, oh, like, we'll be able to get to like that one agent quickly and like, and let's go work on that. But actually, I think you're going to need these like smaller agents first that are more narrow in their nature before we can go to the one big agent. So as an example of kind of how to think about this from a finer perspective, we're going to have more success building a feature like that summarizes your chat history with somebody and gives you a really nice summary, like you've talked to this guy for six months

• 50:17Speaker 00

  and here are all the things you learned about him that are helpful for you to have as a summary versus a bot that is able to talk to a person for you. It's going to take a lot more time to get the latter done versus the former. And and there's a lot of benefit of kind of launching these smaller features that will be benefiting users with AI while we work on kind of the more transformative AI features that will take longer.

• 50:41Harry Stebbings?

  What's your favorite consumer brand and why?

• 50:45Speaker 00

  You know, I kind of like stick to things I I I like and and don't and don't change. And then I discover something I like and I will stick to that for a long time. So I discovered Vori about three and a half years ago. Actually, I didn't discover it. My husband discovered Vori about three and a half years ago. Now all my pants, except for one pair of jeans are Vori. Even like when I wear suits, I like a black forty pants that I wear because they're so much better. And the reason is because they're so comfortable on your hips and your waist. Because all these other pants are not as comfortable there because they're not as stretchy. And these guys are, and I like really love that.

• 51:19Harry Stebbings?

  You can be CEO of any other company for a day. Which company do you choose?

• 51:22Speaker 00

  I believe that impossible things are possible. And I have really, really believe that like it's like my core mission. I've got a core like value statement in in life is do impossible things. It's a thing I've taught my kids from the very beginning. And so when like my son who loves Legos, you know, he like he built this Lego behind me, even though he's only five and that's like a eighteen eighteen year old Lego. You're like, he does them and sometimes like, oh, can't do this. Can you help me? I'm like, no, man, what's our motto? It's like, nothing is impossible and they kind of go do it. So whenever I think like when I think about that question, like if I say this, like, what's the company actually would want to go after and like be a CEO of? And and and I don't know. So I'm going to answer the one that's actually impossible, which is I would probably be want to be president of the United States for a day. And that's actually impossible because I was not born in the United States.

• 52:06Harry Stebbings?

  Well, it's a good answer then. Final one. What question are you not often or ever asked that you think you should be asked?

• 52:14Speaker 00

  It's surprising to me how little people talk to me about my upbringing in the Soviet Union. I learned this when I was first starting to raise money for companies, kind of talking to VCs. I saw this bifurcation ten plus years ago. And so VCs were were like older and kind of were young adults in the nineteen eighties, had a very different thought about my background versus VCs who are younger. Younger VCs never lived in a world where there was a real tyranny that they were like confronted with. There are real tyrannies in the world. China is a complete and utter tyranny, obviously. But we don't think of it that way because it pretends to have free market economics, which it really doesn't, but people think it does. But people who are kind of Who are older and who like saw the Soviet Union and remember it, realize what

• 52:59Speaker 00

  real tyranny is like. And so they have, I think, a different appreciation for people who like grew up in that environment and both like what it means to have left that environment and be in a free place now and what it takes to do that, but also just like how it shapes your brain and the choices that you make. So that's the piece where like, it's a really big part of who I am and how I make decisions. But a lot of people, I think, don't fully get and don't ask me as many questions as they probably should.

• 53:22Harry Stebbings?

  What specifically about it do you think they should know?

• 53:25Speaker 00

  I think when you grow up in fear of a risk of what you might say really hurts you, you have a very different perception for how important freedoms are. I come from to everything from like, okay, we gotta be protective of freedom point of view versus like not, right? And that's not instinctually, I think, how everyone else thinks.

• 53:45Harry Stebbings?

  George, I've so enjoyed this. I think you can tell from my kind of wavering around the schedule that we had prepared. Thank you so much for being such a fantastic guest, and I've just loved having you on the show.

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, and I had a lot of fun, too. It was a really good conversation.

• 54:01Harry Stebbings?

  Now, if you want to watch that full conversation on YouTube, you can find it by searching for 20VC, that's two zero VC on YouTube for more there. But before we leave you today, one of the easiest investment decisions I have made over the last three years is investing in 11X. Their digital workers don't just automate tasks, they transform your business. With 24/7 operations, multilingual capabilities, and human-like intelligence, they're revolutionizing how work gets done. From prospecting to closing, 11X is the all-in-one platform that allows you to reduce costs, increase pipeline, and boost conversion rates. And that's why companies like Pleo, Handshake, Sourcegolf, and more

• 54:40Harry Stebbings?

  are customers and lovers of 11X. Check them out today at 11x.ai. You will not regret it. And speaking of incredible products, I want to share something interesting about the private market. Let me share one more exciting development from Hive, the Hive 50. It's the first live index of large-cap private securities generated directly by customer orders and transactions on the platform. Over 70% of the US-based Decacorns have traded on Hive and the Hive 50 ranks the 50 most liquid securities in its marketplace based on transaction volume and liquidity. The index equally weighs the top 50 stocks, effectively acting as a barometer for the market's direction and momentum in private tech company investments.

• 55:22Harry Stebbings?

  Go check it out at hive.com/hive50, that's Hive with two I's, to see how they're shaping the future of private market investing. Hive Markets Limited is a broker-dealer and member of FINRA/SIPC. Investments in private stocks are risky, only accredited investors may buy through Hive. And just like Hive transforms liquidity, Tegus transforms how we gather insights for investing. When I invest in software today, I think software is valuable when it saves time and makes something easier. But when it enables the user to do something they simply could not do without it, then it's insanely powerful and valuable. That's the case with Tegus. I literally could not live without them.

• 56:02Harry Stebbings?

  When I'm investing in a company, Tegus lets me see the most incredible reference calls with experts in a space who work at a competitive company or incumbents. These calls and data provide the most incredible insight that really shapes my opinions and thoughts and investment decisions. And I can then share snippets from calls with team members. This is a tool that will change how you work. Honestly, you cannot imagine life without it, once you've experienced how powerful it is. And you can check them out today by heading over to tegus.com.

• 56:30Speaker 00

  As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode coming this Friday.