Pod Insights Decoder Hinge CEO Justin McLeod says dating AI chatbots is 'playing with fire' About this episode Today, I’m talking with Hinge founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States — it’s rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.
Justin and I dug into that here, and we also explored some of the thorny issues around AI and dating, Hinge’s monetization, and data privacy in the second Trump administration. This is a fun one, with a whole lot going on. I think you’ll like it.
Read the full interview transcript here on The Verge.
Links:
How We Do Things | Hinge
Hinge’s First Gen Z Report | Hinge
Hinge’s new AI feature judges your prompt responses | TechCrunch
When Cupid Is a prying journalist | NYT / Modern Love
Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno to step down in July | CNBC
Match Group CEO Rascoff to lead struggling Tinder app | WSJ
Replika CEO says it’s okay if we end up marrying AI chatbots | Decoder
Apple ordered to keep web links in the App Store | Verge
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 12,693 words · 11 speakers
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1:28 Speaker 04 Hello, welcome to Decoder. I'm Eli Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Hinge co-founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States. It's rivaled only by Tinder. And both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem. Fair warning here, I've never actually used a dating app. The algorithm that matched my wife to me was the university housing lottery that put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000. And my wife is now a divorce lawyer, so playing around with these apps, even for research, seems a little bit risky. So I always end up approaching conversations about dating and dating apps at a little bit of a remove. And actually, I asked Justin what it's like to be the married
2:12 Speaker 04 CEO of a dating app company who doesn't use his own product anymore, especially as Justin's own personal romantic journey is very intertwined with Hinge. The entire idea for the company and how it's evolved over the years has a connection to Justin's personal life and his decision to reconnect with his college girlfriend just a month before she was to marry someone else. It's a wild story. In fact, it's such a good story that it was turned into an episode of Netflix's Modern Love. You'll hear Justin talk about that experience and how it's connected to his vision for what Hinge is really for and the company's values and culture, and how all of that is geared towards helping people find lasting connections. Hinge bills itself as, quote, "the app that's designed to be deleted," an idea that's in deep tension with how mobile apps and services
2:56 Speaker 04 traditionally grow users and revenue. Of course, Justin and I also talked about AI. Hinge is part of Match Group, is using AI both internally and within its product, just as Tinder and other competitors are. There's AI coaching features to help you improve your profile, pick better photos, and even catch inappropriate messages before they get sent. But pull the string on all these ideas, and you get to a place where people might be talking to AI all the time, even falling in love with it, or having AIs date each other before meeting in person. Justin has some pretty strong feelings here about the importance of real human connection and encouraging people to put their phones down and go out on dates in the real world. Justin also called the idea of AI companionship, quote, "playing with fire," and compared those kinds of relationships to junk food. There's a lot more in this conversation. We also talked about the Trump
3:41 Speaker 04 administration and how seriously Hinge is taking the data privacy of its users during an unprecedented crackdown on queer rights. We also talked briefly about Apple and the App Store and what happens now that companies like Epic Games and Match Group are free to send people to the web to process in-app transactions. Hinge has some plans here. You'll hear Justin talk about them near the end. It's a little bit of a scoop. There's a lot going on this one. You might even fall in love. All right, Hinge CEO Justin McCladdick. Here we go.
4:23 Speaker 04 Justin McLeod, you're the founder and CEO of Hinge. Welcome to Decoder.
4:26 Speaker 05 Thank you. Thanks for having me.
4:27 Speaker 04 I'm excited to talk to you. I gotta tell you, this is one where I kinda feel like Jane Goodall, or a sociologist of some kind. Like, I'm old, I'm married to a divorce lawyer. I can't even download this app. It's like, too risky, you know? So like, I'm watching through the looking glass here a little bit. I asked my younger staff for their Hinge feature requests. Don't worry, I got a million of those.
4:47 Speaker 05 Great. Excited to hear those.
4:48 Speaker 04 Like, when TaskRabbit's on, I'm like, I booked a TaskRabbit. This is like, very different. When was the last time you actually used Hinge as a user?
4:55 Speaker 05 Uh, over a decade ago.
4:57 Speaker 04 Wow.
4:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:59 Speaker 04 What's that like? What's that like, trying to run this team? Is it all just data-driven for you? Because there's a real element of dog fooding here.
5:05 Speaker 05 Yes, definitely. We have a lot of single people on our, on our team at Hinge, so there's a lot of internal dog fooding, for sure, and a lot of opinions. Yeah, the relationship is different. So I started the company in 2011. I was single at the time, and I was single for the first four years of Hinge. And then, long story, but I got back together with my college girlfriend, and we've been together for the last 10, married and kids and all
5:26 Speaker 04 Did you get back together on Hinge?
5:28 Speaker 05 No, it's such a, there's, we were together, I tried to get her back, she said no. I started Hinge in response to that, and then someone who met on Hinge inspired me to go back and, like, she was about to get married to someone else, she was living in Switzerland. I flew over a month before the wedding, she, like, called off her wedding and moved back to New York. Led to the whole reboot of Hinge. There's like, the whole story is very interconnected. You can...
5:53 Speaker 04 I feel like I should throw up my questions. Yeah, we should just do an episode of, like, Call Her Daddy right now, or something. That sounds very complicated.
6:00 Speaker 05 It's been a ride. And an incredible ride. And very intertwined with Hinge. But, back to your question, we can overweight our own personal experience, I think, a bit, when we're, especially as the CEO of the company. And what I've found over time is that people have a wide array of very diverse experiences. And to some extent, I think it actually helps that I'm not in there overweighting my own niche feature requests that would matter to me and not to the whole population. So, it's evolved. It's more about helping others than it is about helping myself, which was probably the original... Idea of Hinge?
6:33 Speaker 04 How do you think about, you know, the connection between what the data is telling you, the data about what Gen Z daters are doing versus millennial daters, which is the cohort you started with, versus the very emotional experiences people have on this platform that are sort of out of your control, right? Like, eventually, you just, you gotta take the meat sack to the bar and look at the other person and not fuck it up, right? And like, Hinge can't solve that problem, but that's like the heart of the whole enterprise. How do you connect those two in your brain?
7:03 Speaker 05 This is a very complex, nuanced industry. I think sometimes people look at their Hinge feed and they're like, why doesn't this understand my taste as well as my TikTok feed? And people don't really quite understand that, like, people aren't products, they're not infinite copies of everyone, they don't always behave the same, your videos on TikTok don't have to like you back, there's just a lot of nuance to getting this right. And, and you're right, I mean, a fair amount of this is, it comes down to the, the people on the platform. And so what we're trying to do is obviously like build a great product, but also build a environment and a community where people are encouraged to be intentional and authentic
7:48 Speaker 05 and attract users who are looking, really looking to find their person. That's definitely the art and the nuance of, of trying to build a dating app like we've built it.
7:58 Speaker 04 One of my big criticisms of, of social media apps generally right now in 2025 is that they've all become marketing platforms in some way.
8:06 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:06 Speaker 04 At, at the end of the rainbow, Mr. Beast is trying to sell you an energy bar, like that, that's what they're for. And, you know, smaller creators are trying to get their first brand deals or whatever it is, but there, there's a real organization around just marketing. And the platform's trying to encourage people to create content for a whole number of reasons, but their, the reason for being is advertising spend. And then a lot of the content creation on the platform happens for marketing purposes. You can just see it, how it goes.
8:34 Speaker 04 Hinge and other dating apps are kind of different, right? You're trying to incentivize content creation. You're trying to get people to talk about themselves, talk to each other. And the goal is kind of to market yourself. Like, how do you divorce that from the actual thing you're trying to do? Which is have people like fall in love and into stable relationships.
8:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, well, it's very much about, yeah, what are you optimizing for? And you're right, social media is optimizing for ultimately engagement, retention, time in app. Like, that is the lifeblood of their company. So how much time can they get you sucked in? And that is their objective function. And so everything is built around that. And we've seen what the consequences of that is. They're pretty dire. And yeah, I think Hinge is almost the exact polar opposite. We're trying to get you to spend less time on your phone and more time out in real life on dates. You know, it's interesting, when I started Hinge back in 2011, people very much, as VCs looked at our business, they kind of asked those questions around engagement and retention.
9:35 Speaker 05 They're kind of looking at social media and they're like, what's your daily over monthly? How much people are time spending in app? How many sessions per day? And we were kind of optimizing for those things because that's what VCs are asking about. And that's how we were raising money. And then Hinge did a pretty big pivot in 2015, right? Like, let go of half the company, rebooted from scratch. Because we felt like we really lost our way. We'd become more of a piece of entertainment that was about getting people just more matches and more activity and getting them back every day. And it had lost sight of what we were trying to do, which was people came to us to find a relationship. And we weren't really optimized around that anymore.
10:13 Speaker 05 And when we did that pivot back in 2015, the biggest change that we made was we stopped focusing on the competition. We started focusing on the customer and we made our North Star metric. Actual great dates. We introduced the We Met Survey where we asked people if we suspect they went on a date, if they went on a date, and if it was good. And everything became around optimizing towards that. And it ended up creating a very, very different experience. And that actually became the primary differentiator of Hinge, because a lot of the other apps in the industry were based on that, based on engagement and retention, and just getting people back. And there were more entertainment platforms. And Hinge became a utility. And we started growing through word of mouth. And now, today, we're the fastest growing,
10:56 Speaker 05 in fact, only growing, major dating app. We were growing 40% last year, and other dating apps are shrinking, because I think we've built a very sustainable business model that actually delivers on the value. And the lifeblood of our company is getting more users out on dates, so they tell their friends, and then those people come and join Hinge.
11:18 Speaker 04 The interesting thing about that business model, it's in the tagline of the company. I always laugh when you all put out a press release, because it says Hinge is the app designed to be deleted. And then there's a little trademark logo every time you say it, which is just very funny. I appreciate that you have to do it, but it just makes me laugh every time. That sort of means you're trying to graduate users, right? You're a utility, you pay until you're done, and then you're out.
11:40 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:41 Speaker 04 And that means you constantly have to find new users. Like, you have a different kind of churn problem, basically. How do you think about that lifecycle?
11:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, we think about it in terms of good churn. We want people churning off the app for the right reason. We don't want people churning off the app because they gave up too early, or because they don't like Hinge. We want people churning off the app because they found someone, ideally on Hinge. And...
12:02 Speaker 04 What does it mean to find somebody on Hinge? Like, you're married, you've gone on three dates?
12:08 Speaker 05 It's different for different people. Like, when I started, you know, when we did the reboot, it was, our core market was definitely like 25 to 35, and very much people who were, I would say, like, looking to... Find their person and get off the app for most people. Now, our fastest growing segment has been like 18 to 25. And they're at a different phase in their life. And it was pretty interesting because that segment started growing almost by surprise to us. But I think what they were attracted to wasn't so much the focus on like long term relationship, like find your marriage partner today. But it was very much about just the authenticity and vulnerability and intimacy on the platform and moving away from kind of a platform that felt very gamified and very flat
12:52 Speaker 05 to something that felt very human and intentional, authentic. And so we think about our daters as having a like a journey mindset. Like they're headed in a direction. They're on a journey of self exploration. They don't want to waste their time on bad dates, but they don't necessarily are like are looking for their marriage partner today. And that's totally fine. We're just looking to help people get off the app, out on great dates and forming intimate connection in real life.
13:20 Speaker 04 But there's difference between get off the app and go on great dates and delete this thing.
13:24 Speaker 05 Forever, yes.
13:25 Speaker 04 There's some exit ramp that's like very different than the other exit ramp. Not to keep comparing it to social media, but again, I feel like I'm just like viewing this from the outside. So it's all metaphor for me. You know, Mark Zuckerberg is terrified that young audience will just abandon his core, whatever the core social media dynamic is of the time. This is why he bought Instagram. You can read his emails over the course of these trials. He's like, there's another mechanic. I need to buy it before they overtake us. And he keeps going down the line, whether that's stories or reels or whatever the next thing is. You have the same problem, only you don't get to keep the old users on the old mechanic. Right? You don't get to run Facebook and buy Instagram. How do you think about reinventing the app for that new, younger cohort that has different dynamics on the internet?
14:07 Speaker 05 We're just always staying in tune with where culture is going. I think that it's, it's just imperative on us because you're right. We can't rely on just like a legacy user base. So we have to stay on top of culture where it's going continually evolving the app, whether it is.
14:26 Speaker 05 Right now, a big focus is on AI and how we just generally increase the effectiveness of the app in a couple of different dimensions. And we're actually finding, for example, right now, how much coaching is becoming really, really important. I think people, especially during the pandemic, a lot of atrophy happened in social skills and people feeling comfortable meeting up with people in real life and how to have those interactions. So helping people create their profiles, write their prompts, things like that. So we're, you know, another big thing that came out during the pandemic actually was more of a focus on voice and adding voice prompts, which I think was, again, moving where culture goes. So we're always making these kinds of tweaks to continually keep the app fresh.
15:09 Speaker 04 Do you feel the same sort of existential pressure? I just, the idea that some cohort of people will delete the app, right? The old millennials will be married or tired or whatever it is they're gonna do, and you've gotta go get a bunch of new Gen Z users or Gen Alpha users, which is frankly terrifying. How do you think about, okay, we gotta break the old model because it's existential for us if we don't capture the younger user? Or is it more of a gradation?
15:33 Speaker 05 If you look at the history of this, relatively brief history of this industry, starting in like the 90s, there's only kind of been one major disruption moment, which was 2012, 2013. And so you had the birth of the industry in like the late 90s, 96, 97, where you had Match and eHarmony come on the scene, and then they kind of dominated from 1996 to about 2014. And it was actually a much smaller Nisa industry at the time. It's kind of people that older people used, people who felt like they really struggled to find someone in real life. And then you had the mobile dating apps come on because of a, like a few different technologies that kind of started to come online altogether.
16:15 Speaker 05 One was mobile, one was everyone, the sort of cultural change of everyone having a social media account. One of it was data processing power and moving away from the world of, you know, searching people to a world of like a feed of, you know, relevant people one after another.
16:33 Speaker 05 And that created a pretty big paradigm shift where suddenly technology enabled an entirely new type of experience that it was hard for the old incumbents to mirror. They tried to pivot to mobile, but it would just, they couldn't sort of unseat themselves from their, their way of thinking about the world. It's like very classic disruption problem. I, I think the next opportunity for that kind of disruption is going to be a big technology shift. We haven't seen that up until very recently, right? So I like VR, AR, things like that. I just didn't see like, and not until they're very deeply adopted by 70%, 80% of the population. Is it really going to be something that people start using
17:15 Speaker 05 for dating? AI, I think is a very different story and it's unclear at this point whether it becomes a disruptive force for the current players or whether it becomes a, a more of an evolution. Obviously Hinge has a tremendous amount of data we can use to train AI models. We're seeing huge gains in our ability to match people up more thoughtfully, given the tools. And at the same time, it could introduce very new paradigms for dating.
17:45 Speaker 04 We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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19:15 Speaker 04 We're back with Hinge CEO Justin McCladd. Before the break, we were discussing the ways a dating app like Hinge is and is not like a traditional social network and the different kinds of pressures that exist for those kinds of products. But now I wanted to dig into the decoder questions with Justin. In particular, I wanted to know what it's like being owned by the same parent company as Tinder.
19:35 Speaker 04 I want to talk about AI with you, but you mentioned Match. So I think this is a good time to talk about the decoder questions. You're part of Match Group. You sold to Match Group. Match Group owns all of the dating apps minus one, which is a little contentious. They don't own Bumble. There's a lawsuit. We can set that aside. What's it like being part of Match Group? You mean, you sold your company. What was that decision like for you?
19:54 Speaker 05 Honestly, at the time, we were in a tough position as a company. I'd done the reboot and we were about a year into that reboot experience and we had not really cracked the code yet. Like there were green shoots there that made me believe and made, I would say, the trained eye believe that there was really something there. But to VCs, they just saw that like, oh, we were popular and then we tore down our, our business and we restarted and now we started to rebuild again. There wasn't a lot of juice there. So going with a strategic who could recognize the value of what we were seeing, which was massive increases in effectiveness, women coming to the platform, you know, at a much higher proportion than they were using other dating apps. And so that was very interesting to them.
20:37 Speaker 05 And so they, we received a strategic investment from Match Group. That was in 2017 and they bought the rest of the company and that gave them a path to buy the rest of the company, which they did at the end of 2018.
20:48 Speaker 04 What's that structure like inside a match group now?
20:50 Speaker 05 It's evolving. There's a brand new CEO, Spencer, who just started. I think he's taking a fresh look at some of that. But up until very recently, the company has, and still today, really, the company operates pretty independently. Like Hinge, we're in New York. We pretty much have our own space. We have our own product teams, our own engineering teams, our own marketing teams that operate very independently. We share learnings across the platform. We use shared services like accounting and legal and things like that. But for the most part, the company has its own independent culture, has its own independent mission, product roadmaps, marketing strategies, all of that.
21:33 Speaker 04 You said you shared some central services like accounting and finance. Is there any product or data that you're sharing?
21:40 Speaker 05 We certainly share learnings, right? Like especially on things that we don't really want to compete on, like safety or monetization or things like that. So there's certainly that. There's sharing for safety purposes. That's the main ways that we share.
22:00 Speaker 04 So if you're like a young and carefree single on Tinder and you graduate to Hinge, you don't get to just bring your date along for the ride?
22:06 Speaker 05 No.
22:08 Speaker 04 All right. Again, I'm just looking from the outside. Tinder is interesting, right? The CEO of Tinder just stepped down. Your new CEO at Match, Spencer, stepped in to run Tinder for a minute. In any normal circumstance, you would be on the attack, right? If Tinder wasn't part of the same company as you, this would be a moment to say, okay, there's some strategic weakness over there. We're going to go get them. We're going to put the screws. Are you allowed to do that inside a match group?
22:33 Speaker 05 So first of all, I'll just say that we don't really think too much about Tinder as Hinge's competition. We think about them in very different psychographic mindsets. Like Hinge, you come because you want to really take your time, be intentional, be thoughtful, find your person. Tinder has been much more casual, younger, like anything can happen kind of mentality. And so that was like a very intentional portfolio strategy decision that Match made back when they acquired us back in 2017, 2018. So no, we don't think about it like that.
23:07 Speaker 04 I mean, that's why I asked about the data and the lifecycle question, right? There's a time in your life where you might use Tinder. There's a time in your life where you might use Hinge. It seems from the overall umbrella company perspective, you want to move that user around your family of apps, but it doesn't seem like that is actually happening at the top level.
23:25 Speaker 05 Yes, from the outside, that would make sense. It's a bit nuanced because there's very different brand reputations. You know, we like to think of Hinge pretty independently, and I think so do our users.
23:35 Speaker 04 So there's no pop up in Tinder that's like, maybe it's time to cool it and download Hinge?
23:39 Speaker 05 There's not.
23:41 Speaker 04 Feature request for you. What's your org chart like? How is Hinge structured?
23:47 Speaker 05 That's also been evolving over time. And we're still relatively, by the way, a small company with about 350 employees. And we moved from, if I think about the evolution of Hinge, growing from, you know, one person to the first like 100, 150 people. Originally, it was very centrally run. There was a lot of like very tight coordination, a lot of, you know, a lot of direction coming directly from me and my executive team. And then as we started to, you know, go beyond 100 people, and I would say a lot of the, you know, the technology was relatively stable, like social, mobile, big data. How do we keep optimizing and iterating around this? And we became a pretty decentralized organization
24:32 Speaker 05 where we had principles around like pushing decision making down to the lowest levels possible, keeping it really on the front lines. We had pretty independent, cross-functional product teams that would work on their individual little missions or surfaces. We kind of oscillated back and forth between that. People were felt like, you know, autonomous, like feeling like they had a lot of autonomy and a lot of, was kind of the the main ethos of the company.
25:02 Speaker 05 And then I think with AI over the last couple of years and feeling like, whoa, like, we really need to make a pretty big shift. Like I said, risk of disruption is high, very big opportunities to shift the product experience in a new direction. It requires now pulling decision making back in towards the center a bit and giving a lot clearer strategic direction to the team so that we're all working together in concert towards one thing together because the whole app really has to move together. Different parts of the app have to talk to each other in ways that when we weren't going through much change, they just, it wasn't as essential. That said, we still have very highly cross-functional product teams where, you know, product managers
25:46 Speaker 05 sit with dedicated designer, researcher, data scientist, tech lead to attack very like mission-oriented problems.
25:57 Speaker 04 And when you said surfaces and missions, is that expressed as just the tabs at the bottom of the app? Is that how it's broken down or is it actually like user journey missions?
26:06 Speaker 05 That's what I mean. Surfaces versus missions. Like, I think we've sort of gone in different directions. There's never, it's never really a clear line, one versus the other. Do you own the discover tab where you're discovering people or is your job to help people find the right person? And then you have to think sort of more cohesively about operating across different surfaces or parts of the app. And now we have, we think about our teams operating less as individual surface units and more as like part of a cohesive like dating outcomes team where people feel a bit more flexible moving around to different surfaces.
26:41 Speaker 04 How do you think about assigning product managers to those teams? Because, you know, like product managers, at least in my experience, they're like, I own this square and I will mess with this square to make this number go up as much as I can. But I can mess with all the squares is really hard, right?
26:55 Speaker 05 Yes. That's why we have strong kind of director VP levels who oversee an overall mission, like a head of dating outcomes or a head of growth who's coordinating a set of PMs. And again, we ask our PMs, their primary identity is as a dating outcomes PM, not as a discover PM or a profile PM or something like that. And while day to day, most of their work may focus on like the profile and identity work, they see themselves as very much operating as part of this team.
27:30 Speaker 04 That feels like something you evolved to. You also, you know, you're a relatively young founder. I think you founded right out of Harvard Business School. How is your decision-making framework evolved? How do you make decisions?
27:39 Speaker 05 That's also hugely evolved. I mean, everything I've learned, right, I've learned through doing all the wrong ways first and then eventually getting to the right way. When you're a founder and you have a small team of 10, 20, 30 people, you're kind of just making decisions by the seat of your pants, like what feels good, what feels right. You're just using your own gut. As we started to get towards 100 people or so, what I noticed was I would be making different decisions on different days that weren't always consistent. And it was kind of based on my like mood that day, or whatever data was in front of me, or what I just last read, or whatever. And I was just finding that I was getting pretty inconsistent. And so what I started trying to do is write down my whole management algorithm. So I started putting it in a Google Doc, like, here's how I make decisions.
28:23 Speaker 05 Here's what I believe is true. I started publishing that to the whole company so everyone could just read it. So we would just be very transparent about how we made decisions. It was around that time that I think I read Ray Dalio's book Principles. And the idea of just like getting super dialed on like, how do we make decisions? What are our principles? What do we believe is true? And then I opened it up for everyone to just comment on. So we would have long debates in the margins of comments, you know, comment margins of a Google Doc forum to think about everything from our like product strategy principles to whether Hinge should have like a dress code, like, you know, just like literally like anything, like it was all just there so that everyone could debate it. And we
29:07 Speaker 05 had hundreds of principles. And then as the company got even bigger and we got to like 300, 400 people, it was very hard for everyone to, one, you just can't have like these endless debates in Google and like Google Docs anymore. And also what happened is that the principles started to stabilize. There wasn't as much debate and churn anymore. And then it actually became an exercise in distilling down
29:27 Speaker 05 Like what is the most essential things to communicate about what our culture is? And then I worked a couple of years ago to actually write an internal book called, How We Do Things, which distilled down to like four or five principles. Like what are like the most fundamental things to understand about how we make decisions here? And then individual teams and individual projects will then write their own principles that are more specific to like what they're doing at any given time. But we do have, and one of our meta-principles of our four now is decide with principles, meaning that like we don't want decisions getting made based on some random person's opinion that if tomorrow this person leaves the company, we rehire someone else, they're
30:10 Speaker 05 gonna come with a completely different set of ideas about how to do something. We really try to maintain that like we define our principles first, we agree on those, and then we see how our work maps to those principles. So that is the, and I'm happy to talk about what the other three principles are if you want, but that's the kind of framework that we use to make decisions now.
30:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, talk on them a little bit. There, there's like a beautiful website, we'll link to it, and it says like scrawly telling, it's, it's, it's well done, but tell, tell people what the other three principles are.
30:40 Speaker 05 The next one is love the problem, meaning that, you know, what I would notice is we would get an inclination around a user problem, maybe not even validate a hundred percent, then we'd start getting feature ideas, and we'd be very attached to a feature. And sometimes the feature would even drift and not even be solving the original problem that we were trying to solve. And, and what I found is that if you spend much more time with the problem, really understanding like what's the why behind the why behind the why, like what's really going on here? Can we really get deep into our users, into the data, into our user experiences? And if you want to build breakthrough innovation, product features and products, you have
31:24 Speaker 05 to go to that level to get insight that just isn't available at the surface. And then stay really committed to that problem. And that's what, again, allows innovation, like I think a lot of Silicon Valley and other people I notice will kind of, the strategy is just to throw feature ideas against a wall and kind of see what sticks, and let's see if this works. Oh, it doesn't work, like throw that out, let's try something else. When you have a lot of deep conviction around a user problem, and you really know you want to solve it, then you have the resilience to try and try and try again to solve that problem, even if your first or second iteration doesn't make it. And so, like, one of the most foundational is love the problem. Like, fall in love with the problem, don't fall in love with the solution, and be willing to give up the solution at any given time
32:09 Speaker 05 if it's not solving the core problem that we're trying to solve. So that is love the problem. Next is keep it simple. Meaning that I think the best solutions are always the most elegant solutions. That overall, we want to keep the product very simplistic and minimal. Like, our colors are black and white. If you look at the Hinge product today, it's just like, it's very clean, it's very simple. We're always stripping away features that don't make sense. And there's just recognizing that there's complexity, there's like, cost of complexity every time you add a feature. So even if you add a feature, if it's only marginally beneficial, the cost of the complexity and maintenance of maintaining that feature versus the marginal benefit it adds will end up gunking up the app over time and slowing you down over time. Which is a hard conversation to have with product managers,
32:55 Speaker 05 because they'll work for months on a feature and they'll ship it, and they'll be like, "Yeah, and it didn't harm the user base, and it like, we like it, and, you know, oh, it even moved this metric over here by 2%." And you're like, "Well, you know, the cost of complexity is high, and so, like, that's, we need to, we need to focus on things that are actually gonna have major impact."
33:14 Speaker 04 Are you all the way at, you know, two features out for every feature in? Do you think about it that way? I know some founders do.
33:20 Speaker 05 I haven't heard that before. I don't necessarily think that way. But I do just think in constantly reevaluating, like, what's in the app? What needs to stay? And having a high bar for when you build a new feature, does it actually accomplish what we need it to accomplish? And is it worth the complexity cost? So that's the... Third one now, and then the fourth, the last one is tend to trust. I just find that like, trust is the lifeblood of an organization. You have to do a lot of work to proactively cultivate and tend trust by creating strong interpersonal relationships, by creating lots of opportunity for transparency at the organization. Like, we have always been very, very transparent about where the organization is.
34:02 Speaker 05 So much so, in fact, that we had to make all Hinge employees match group insiders so they couldn't trade match group stock except in trading windows because we would be so transparent about where we were, what our financial position was. Like, everyone should know that, all the way down to any position at the company. So, that trust building that you create, both interpersonally and from leadership down to the rest of the organization, I think is absolutely essential and just saves you a lot of headache when it comes to internal politics and all those types of things.
34:35 Speaker 04 Let's put this into practice. You, you obviously made a big decision to refocus on AI. How did that come about? Did you wake up one day and say, oh, boy, it's, it's happening? Was it, Match Group put out a press release with OpenAI saying, we're gonna work together. Did you read that and say, I gotta, I gotta figure this out? How did this come about?
34:51 Speaker 05 Certainly, the release of like, whatever that version of ChatGPT that kind of like, sent shockwave through the world was, was a pretty big wake-up call. I mean, obviously, we'd already been using machine learning and things like that, and trust and safety, and our recommendation algorithms. But I think it was the sort of shot across the bow that came from the release of the, of ChatGPT's, whatever it was, 3.0, that really woke us up to the, to the potential capabilities here and realizing that, like, this could be a major disruptive force in a way that we hadn't seen really since we started Hinge. It took a bit for us to get our strategy clear about like, what our thesis is on how this is gonna affect matching and dating in the future.
35:35 Speaker 05 It wasn't immediately apparent, but I think we have a pretty clear thesis now. We started to organize the company around that thesis.
35:41 Speaker 02 What's the thesis?
35:42 Speaker 05 That there's two main vectors that AI is going to impact dating and matchmaking. And it's essentially, I think the big story is it's going to move much closer to the experience of working with a personal matchmaking service and much less an experience of feeling like you are joining a social platform on your own, you know, kind of trying to find your person. So what does that mean? Two big pieces. One is personalized matching and the other is effective coaching. So the personalized matching front is we should be able to move much further beyond the world we are in today, which is our users speaking to us in essentially Morse code with their likes and passes, trying to communicate to us what they like and what they don't
36:27 Speaker 05 like. The idea that they would be able to speak much more directly to us about like, here's what I'm looking for, here are my values, here's my personality, here are my interests. Us being able to listen to them and their preferences and even integrate things like relationship science to understand what types of people are compatible and what types of people are not long-term compatible and introduce you to a much more curated, higher-quality, less-quantity list of people where you have much more trust that if you're introducing me to this person, then this is probably something, someone that I want to go out with. We've already seen big gains, by the way, just by using the power of LLMs to drive more of our recommendation systems using the data we already have.
37:10 Speaker 05 But we just released a new algorithm a couple of months ago that increased matches and dates by like 15%. That's just using the same data. But now we can start to use much more of that unstructured nuanced data, people talking to us in their own voices about who they are and what they want, that we can use very effectively. So that's the whole personalized matching front. And then there's the effective coaching front, which is a lot of our users struggle to get out on that first date and they often don't know why. And I've got
37:42 Speaker 05 You know, even I have friends that are incredible people and they'll ask me to take a look at their Hinge profile and I'm like flabbergasted. Like this is their attempt at like putting themselves out there. So we're starting with pretty basic things. You know, Hinge has these prompts, which are short questions designed to get you in a conversation. You put them on your profile and a lot of people write great responses to prompts, but a whole lot of people write not so great, often just like one word responses to these prompts that don't work. And we found it's incredibly effective to have trained a model on good prompt responses and give people feedback to ask them to, it's mostly like, can you say more about that?
38:22 Speaker 04 Yeah. Don't just put no in this field.
38:24 Speaker 05 Be a little bit more specific and tell a little bit of the story and find and help, you know, good answers, kind of invite another question back or get a conversation going. And so we can give people those nudges so they write good prompts so that they choose good photos. If we notice, you know, we have a team called Hinge Labs, which is always looking at why some people succeed, why some people don't on the app. Some of it is, again, building product features that helps solve those problems. But part of it is just giving, you know, guidance and notes to people about how they can be using the product better. And we traditionally have published those in date reports, we publish into the press, we put them in the help center, but people just, for the most part, don't read those. But the idea that we could take this body of knowledge we have about how to succeed
39:08 Speaker 05 on Hinge and then look at how our users are using Hinge and then deliver the right piece of advice at the right time to the right user, I think is going to be pretty transformative for a lot of people.
39:18 Speaker 04 There's a pretty fine line between that and what I see lots of people doing all day long already, which is just chalking at ChatGPT, just hanging out. We have the CEO of Replica on the show, Eugenia. She was like, my plan is, you know, people are going to date AI bots. That will coach them up into being fully formed people, then we'll release them into the dating pool and they will have confidence and self-assuredness. Again, a fine line between we're prompting them and coaching them inside of Hinge and we're coaching them a different way in a more self-contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on virtual girlfriend inside of Hinge?
39:55 Speaker 05 Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about this. I think there's actually quite a clear line between
40:03 Speaker 05 Providing a tool that helps people get better at something or do something that and then there's a line when it becomes this thing is trying to become your friend. It's trying to pretend, like mimic, like it has emotions, it's trying to create emotional connection with you. That, I think, is really playing with fire. I think that we are already in a crisis of loneliness and a loneliness epidemic. And if you look at, it's a complex issue and it's baked into our culture and it goes back before the internet. But if you look at just since 2000, over the last 20 years, the amount of time that
40:44 Speaker 05 people spend together in real life with their friends has dropped by 70% in young people. And it's been almost completely displaced with the time spent staring at screens. And as a result of that, we've seen massive increases in mental health issues, in people's loneliness, in anxiety, in depression. And I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, like, most people don't have enough friends, but you know, we're going to give them AI chatbots that believe that AI chatbots can become your friend. I think that's honestly extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, is like someone being there to say all the right things to you at the right moment. The most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else
41:29 Speaker 05 to risk and be vulnerable, to like actually to share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food, basically, to experience someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it ultimately, just like junk food, will make the people feel, over time, like, less healthy, more drained, and will displace.
41:56 Speaker 05 Human relationships that they should be out cultivating in the real world.
42:00 Speaker 04 How do you compete with that? Because that is the other thing that is happening. It is happening, whether it's good or bad. And you've got to hinge is, you know, you're offering a harder path. And so you, you know, you say like, we got to get people out on dates. Like, I honestly wonder, based on the younger folks I know, sometimes they're just like, I just want to leave the house. Like, I'd rather just talk to this computer, right? Like, I have too much social pressure just leaving the house in this way. That's what Hinge is promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are you marketing that directly?
42:31 Speaker 05 I'm starting to think about it very much about taking it head on. I mean, we want to continue at Hinge to champion
42:37 Speaker 05 human relationships, real human to human, in real life relationships. Because I think they are an essential part of the human experience and they're essential to our mental health. It's not just because I run a dating app and, you know, obviously it's important that people continue to meet. It really is like a deep, personal mission of mine. And it's, I think it's absolutely critical that someone is out there championing this. Because it's always easier to race to the bottom of the brainstem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment, but leave people worse off. That's the entire model that we've seen from what happened with social media. And I think AI chatbots could be frankly, much more dangerous in that respect. So what we can do is to become more and more effective and help support people more and more
43:20 Speaker 05 to make it as easeful as possible to go out and do the harder thing, which is to and the riskier thing, which is to go out and like
43:29 Speaker 05 form real relationships with real people who can let you down and may not always be there for you. Because it ultimately is a much more nourishing and enriching experience for people. And we can also champion and raise awareness as much as we can. I mean, that's like why I'm, another reason why I'm here today talking with you is because I think it's important for people to be putting the counter perspective that we don't just reflexively think AI chatbots can be your friend and not think too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means. We keep going back to junk food, but like, people had to start waking up to the fact that like, this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that like drinking Coca-Cola
44:10 Speaker 05 and eating fast food is like detrimental to your health over the long term. And then people, as people became more aware about that, a whole personal wellness industry started to grow up. And now that's obviously like a huge industry and people spend a lot of time. Focusing on their diet and nutrition and other types of, and their mental health and all these other things. And I think similarly, we need a, like, social wellness needs to become a category. Thinking about not just how do I get this kind of junk social experience of social media where I get fed outraged news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but I actually start, how do I start building a sense of social wellness where I can build enriching intimate connection with important people in my lives?
44:58 Speaker 04 We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
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46:28 Speaker 04 We're back with Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Before the break, we were discussing the role AI is now playing in dating apps and what that role might look like in the future as more people turn to chatbots for companionship. Now, I wanted to ask Justin about some of the ways AI might be misused in online dating and what plans Hinge has to stop it.
46:45 Speaker 04 The connection between the wellness industry and the rise of social media is a whole other podcast and maybe a PhD thesis. There's a whole lot there to unpack. I take your point, though, right, that maybe using our phones in healthier ways is the future. It will make us better and that will be a reaction to the negativity that we see from phones today. Literally, as we speak, I'm sure Elon Musk and Donald Trump are continuing to tweet at each other in an unhealthy way, or maybe the future of the entire planet. But you've got to use AI today, right? You have prompt feedback running in the app today. You're helping people pick better photos. The flip side of that is, well, they might just use AI to generate the content. Can you detect it if your prompt feedback says, hey, that's not a good answer, and someone runs
47:29 Speaker 04 away to Gemini or ChatGPT and comes up with a better answer that doesn't actually reflect them?
47:34 Speaker 05 I think about this kind of like extreme photo filters, which used to be popular in Instagram back in the day, which is that ultimately, you are going to have to go meet up with this person on a real date. And so you want yourself to come through as best that it can, because obviously, like, you're not going to bring ChatGPT on your date with you.
47:55 Speaker 04 I'm worried about this. I want to say that I'm worried about this.
47:58 Speaker 05 And it's not a winning strategy. That said, do people ask advice and little tweaks? They do it today. They ask their friends, like, how should I respond to this text message? Or whatever. So in some sense, I don't see it that differently, because you will have to meet up with this person eventually and show up as the real you.
48:17 Speaker 04 Would you add that kind of feedback instead of Hinge? Hinge obviously has messaging features. Where are you going to add a little coach into the messaging feature to say, hey? Don't, don't be a dick.
48:26 Speaker 05 Well, that's, that already exists. That's called, are you sure? That's AI driven to make sure that people send inappropriate messages. But yeah, again, the right nudge at the right time, because I think if we build the right tools within Hinge that are appropriate for dating, then people will then use it less to like run out to chat GPT to use it in ways that probably are less appropriate. Nudging people to say, hey, you guys have been chatting for a bit. Did you know that most people after they exchange this many messages usually just go on and move to a date? Or, hey, it seems like the conversation has died. Here's like something interesting that you may want, may not have noticed on their profile that you can ask about. Little things like that, certainly.
49:02 Speaker 04 One of the interesting dynamics here is you'll add more and more AI to the digital experience people have with each other to make them perform better or act better or be more interesting, whatever it is. And then they'll go on a date and then they might leave your platform, right? They might switch to iMessage or call each other on the phone. I don't, I don't think Gen Z is calling each other. They'll do something else. They'll go on Discord. How do you bring that experience along for the ride? To say, we're going to continue to stay here and help mediate you and coach you through this relationship.
49:30 Speaker 05 We're not there yet. We still have a lot of work to do just to get people out to the first date. And at the same time, I do think there's actually a lot of opportunity to help coach people through that experience, how to, how to show up on a first date, what to talk about on a first date, how to build intimacy over time, how to ask about the, the right things to determine compatibility. So I think there are definitely opportunities for that. It's not on the 2025 roadmap, but certainly something I'm thinking about.
49:55 Speaker 04 Do you worry that people are gonna just upload like full AI avatars on the hinge and catfish, catfish each other to death?
50:03 Speaker 05 We have a very robust trust and safety team that is thinking two, three steps ahead about how to mitigate things like that.
50:09 Speaker 04 I have spent too much time talking about watermarks and AI and synth ID and there's like lots of episodes of the show that are deep in the AI watermarks game. And it has effectively come to nothing so far. There's just a lot of problems there. Are you like in it to say, okay, we can detect a, a full AI photo here?
50:29 Speaker 05 There's so many signals when it comes to creating a dating profile from the phone number you use and the email you use, your IP address, all those things like that, that like, we have like a very multifaceted way of determining the authenticity of profiles. I'll say that.
50:45 Speaker 04 Running these models is costly. There's lots and lots of different kinds of models you can run at different costs. Are you using lots of models? Are you sending everything to GPT-4? How does this work for you?
50:55 Speaker 05 We use different models for different things. Sometimes we build them internally completely. As you said, public that we have a relationship with OpenAI. It's just we use different, different things for, and are always balancing cost and performance and ability to build in-house versus not.
51:10 Speaker 04 Do you see that trend shifting over time? I'm very curious about what the frontier models can do versus what the, you know, cheaper, more efficient models can do. Have you seen that shift over time as you've started to deploy these tools?
51:19 Speaker 05 And one, we've seen the, the cost of the frontier models like just declined precipitously, which is pretty interesting to watch. But I'll say that like there are models, even like the prompt feedback model is like a very, very specific and discrete model that we can essentially mostly build kind of internally to understand.
51:35 Speaker 04 Do you run that in your cloud, in your data center? Do you, are you running that on people's phones?
51:39 Speaker 05 I don't actually know. I think that's on our data. That's, that's in the cloud. I'm almost positive that's in the cloud. That one.
51:45 Speaker 04 The reason I'm asking is to, to do any of this well, you need more and more data from people. Right? And you're kind of asking them to generate more and more data. Like, that's not a good answer. Tell me more about yourself is more data. And it's data that you're now storing. It's particularly data about gender, sexuality, dating preferences. That stuff, like the government suddenly has like a very unusual and somewhat threatening interest in. Is that, are you worried about that? That the Trump administration or some future administration would show up and say, tell me all of the transgender people on your platform.
52:15 Speaker 05 Obviously, we have like very, very sensitive data that we have very, very clear protections around. And we haven't seen anything like that.
52:25 Speaker 04 So you haven't had any of those incoming requests yet?
52:28 Speaker 05 No.
52:28 Speaker 04 The Trump administration has also said they're going to start scanning social media profiles for references to Palestine, for comments about Trump himself. When you talk about matching people and values, like those things come up. Has there been any requests for hinge profiles from DHS or ICE or any of these other parts of the Trump administration that are doing this kind of social media scanning?
52:49 Speaker 05 No.
52:50 Speaker 04 The reason I'm asking is you're The amount of data you might collect is very, very personal, seems like a rich target. Have you thought about the planning for how big of a target this might become as you prompt people to input more and more data with AI?
53:03 Speaker 05 Certainly, I think we'll have to handle those things as they come. We're obviously in like a very uncertain time right now, but I will say that like primarily we are a platform about creating intimate one-to-one connection. And so, and that's people's very private lives where they should be able to express themselves in the way that they see fit and describe themselves in their own sexuality and their own gender and the way that they need to do that. I view that as absolutely sacred and fundamental to our mission and people feeling safe to do that is absolutely critical. So those would be our very highest priorities. And I also imagine not top priority for relative to social media, people are posting and blasting thousands, millions of people with, with ideas like this.
53:47 Speaker 05 It's just that our, our platform is not about one-to-many posting and conversation. It's about intimate one-to-one connection and one-to-one conversations.
53:58 Speaker 04 I, I think I would warn you that having a, a data pool of that kind might make you a target. I'm curious how that plays out over time, particularly in this administration. There's some platform dynamics here as well, like iOS and Android exists, they are platforms, they are also themselves rich targets for the government. Overall, there's a push for the platforms to do age verification themselves. There's laws now in, in certain states, there's laws in other countries, the Apples and the Googles of world have pushed back against this in various ways. Do you think they need to do it? Do you think that it's the, at the iOS and Android level that need to do the age verification? Cause this is a core component of bringing people onto Hinge, it's not for children.
54:36 Speaker 05 It's certainly not, yeah, we're 18 plus and we have our own age verification methods. But yeah, we've been pushing for these platforms to do age verification themselves because they have even more robust ways to do it.
54:49 Speaker 04 There are arguments in response, you know, when you listen to Apple and Google push back against these laws is that it would be too hard, they would, it would create some sort of censorship regime that, you know, the app vendors need to be liable for this. Have you seen any movement in that dynamic? I mean, this is- Like at the highest level, this is one of the big dynamics of how we might regulate platforms in the future.
55:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, I'm staying much closer to the product development and the where we're going with AI right now than I am to that.
55:18 Speaker 04 You know, your monetization is obviously hinge premium. I think it's $55 a month. There's another tier that's $45 a month. The big news in platform world is that Apple is no longer allowed to prevent alternative payment systems. Match Group in particular has been leading this fight. It's in all the press releases. Has that changed the dynamics of hinge for you?
55:37 Speaker 05 I don't know if it changes the dynamics, but it's certainly going to.
55:43 Speaker 05 You know, having more flexibility and giving users options to be able to pay different ways, I think is good for everybody for sure.
55:52 Speaker 04 Have you launched an alternative payment service yet?
55:54 Speaker 05 We have not.
55:55 Speaker 04 Are you going to?
55:56 Speaker 05 Yes.
55:57 Speaker 04 How soon?
56:00 Speaker 05 Certainly by the end of the year.
56:01 Speaker 04 Is that going to be a Match Group payment service or a hinge payment service? How do you think about that?
56:06 Speaker 05 These are things that we're figuring out, but most likely hinge.
56:10 Speaker 04 That would return somewhere on the order of 15 or 30%, depending on how the billing works for you at your scale and recurring subscriptions and all that. Is that just going to be pure margin? You're just going to get the money back?
56:21 Speaker 05 Oh, I think it changes the equation in many fronts, right? Like it allows us to invest more in the company. It changes how we would price. So no, I think it could result in lower prices. It could result in more investment in the company or it could result in more margin. It's probably some combination of all three of those.
56:36 Speaker 04 Just walk me through the, I mean, Match Group has been doing this fight for a long time and you're already describing how you might change pricing or the lifetime value of customers. The decision gets epic fights this fight for like five years. At the very end, the judge says, I'm very mad at you. You can't do this anymore. Did you immediately start making plans that day or you're like, this is going to get appealed? We have to wait.
56:58 Speaker 05 There's been back and forth and appeals and stays and things like that. I think just a couple of days ago, the the appeal was was denied. So I think that made it pretty real.
57:09 Speaker 04 So and just to put the decision making into practice, did you say that day, we need an alternative payment system?
57:14 Speaker 05 Certainly the day that the original ruling came out, we started to plan.
57:19 Speaker 04 What does that planning look like? Is it, I'm gonna call it Stripe? Like, put us in your shoes. Like, that happens, someone comes to you and you say, okay, we need to start to plan. Walk us through that moment.
57:30 Speaker 05 I mean, just like anything else at Hinge, I think that we're, we stay grounded in our principles, we look at the big picture, we look at the, the teams and the roadmaps and the things they're focused on right now. And we think like, does this new information change? Like, and as we look at our growth team, does it make sense to build the next monetization or expansion feature? Or does it make sense to pivot resources over to this thing? And given, as you said, the 15 to 30% gain that's on the table, it's pretty high priority. Yeah.
57:59 Speaker 04 There's an ecosystem of companies that might be building this stuff more centrally, that might be charging different rates. I'm kind of excited about that. Like, it's wonky and boring, there's a reason we're ending the episode.
58:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, a whole new, a whole new industry, I think, will, will emerge, not an industry, but certainly a suite of services will emerge around this to allow people to manage subscription payments, cancellations, like, you know, it's certainly nuanced.
58:19 Speaker 04 But at the end of that, what you want is rates to come down. Where do you think the rates should be? Because I know, I know no one has ever thought they should be at 15 or 30%. Where do you think they should be with a little more market competition?
58:30 Speaker 05 When you stack the credit card payment processing fees on top of the fees around customer service and all the sort of nuance of managing this, but I do think it comes down to like the 5 to 10% range.
58:46 Speaker 04 When you think about recovering that, you know, up to 20%, are you thinking, okay, can use this to lower prices and grow? Or I have to build many, many more AI features to compete against the coming onslaught of AI chatbots?
59:00 Speaker 05 I think we're very, very focused on innovating for the future. Like I said, it's, it's, it changes the equation, so it's on all three fronts. It's lower prices, it's higher margin, and it's more investment in the company. But it certainly gives us major opportunities to invest in the core product experience at a time when there's massive disruption. So it's in a particularly critical time to be doing that.
59:25 Speaker 04 There's a lot of talk about platform shifts. You've talked about platform shifts here, right? People might be using Hinge differently because they have AI tools, or because AI tools are helping them find one another more efficiently or better. A lot of the platform shift I hear about is, oh, we're going to have new devices. We're going to have new form factors. People are, they are just going to talk to chat GPT in the bar. We are, maybe we'll just have agents that represent us and they'll go on dates for a while and come back and say, you should go on this date with this other person we found unhinged because the agents have fallen in love and now you just have to not screw it up. That kind of takes the screen away. That takes your surfaces and your missions and puts them in a totally different place. How are you thinking about that level of shift? Is it even on your radar?
1:00:07 Speaker 05 Yeah, we're, I'm thinking about it right now. You know, I think we overuse the form factor of our mobile devices right now for all kinds of things that it doesn't need to be used for. And I think a lot of those will be siphoned off into some other form factor, especially, I think, audio and voice is going to be a very big piece of it. But I don't think that means that the form factor completely goes away. There are things that you need visual cues and references for where a screen is still going to be the dominant form factor. And at least a piece of the dating equation is going to be that for sure.
1:00:35 Speaker 04 Do you think we'll get to a place where people's agents are just dating each other and then reporting back?
1:00:39 Speaker 05 No, I don't really think so. Like, I think there are much better.
1:00:44 Speaker 04 Isn't that what's already kind of happening in the matchmaking algorithm? Like, to be in a very reductive ways and that's.
1:00:49 Speaker 05 I think in a very, like, abstractive, reductive way, you could, you could say that. But like, that's not really what's happening. Like, we are not trying to, we're not simulating dates. I think it's like a very expensive and inefficient way to do something that actually is much more straightforward.
1:01:06 Speaker 04 There's just a part of me that says, like, some, you're going to have some competitor that attempts to this to happen and we will all have to contend with it.
1:01:13 Speaker 05 I just think that that's a bit of a red herring for, you know, trying to map someone's psyche and guess how they're going to be. That adds a lot of complexity when actually you can just talk to people very, very directly about who they are and what they're looking for and what matters to them and compare that against someone else and what they describe and actually make a lot of good connections and clear understandings to figure out who should match with who.
1:01:37 Speaker 04 This has been great. Tell people what's next for hands. What should they be looking for?
1:01:41 Speaker 05 It really is the evolution of the product. Like, I think that the, the shift to AI is going to be bigger than the shift to mobile for the industry. I think that we're going to be able to do things that, you know, if you think, if you think big picture about what mobile did, it just made the process more approachable. Faster, more fun, easier, more approachable. But it was still the same fundamental experience of just like cruising for people, trying to find someone that, you know, based on very limited information, matching with them, trying to figure it out, going on a date, realizing this is not your person, trying to find the next date, moving to much closer to a world of really deep understanding of compatibility, being able to zero people in on the right person very quickly. It's going to be a very transformative experience that I think is gonna very much change people's understanding and perception of the industry.
1:02:26 Speaker 05 So I'm really looking forward to the next couple of years because I think that we will see more change than we've seen ever in the industry before.
1:02:33 Speaker 04 We'll have to have you back to check in on how it's going. Thanks so much for being on Decoder.
1:02:36 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, thank you.
1:02:41 Speaker 04 I'd like to thank Justin McLeod for taking time to speak with me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] . We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're both at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you're podcasts. Decoder is production The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Stat. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.
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