Grindr: Joel Simkhai

On the premise that a smartphone could vastly improve his love life, Joel Simkhai built one of the most popular dating apps in the world. In 2008 he was living in LA and looking for an easy way to meet other gay men. He saw the early potential of the GPS-enabled iPhone, and a year later, launched Grindr: an app where users could determine if a potential date - or a quick hookup - was down the block or ten miles away. With no background in coding or app design, Joel bootstrapped Grindr into a global phenomenon –all the while dealing with technical meltdowns, safety issues, and criticism about toxicity on the app. Grindr was eventually sold, and Joel moved on; but last year launched another queer hookup app “for today” - called Motto. This episode was produced by Casey Herman, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Katherine Sypher. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

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• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:10Guy Raz?

  Hey, before we start the show, a question for you. Do you ever get nervous when performing or speaking in front of an audience? Because I definitely do, and I have to stand in front of a lot of big audiences. Well, I recently interviewed Ellie Goulding about being shy onstage. And even though she's a music superstar who's performed at Coachella and a royal wedding, she told me that she finds ways to break through the anxiety and be present in the moment. You can hear my conversation with Ellie Goulding on my other podcast. It's called The Great Creators. Just search for The Great Creators with Guy Raz wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to thegreatcreators.com. And now, on to today's show.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  I remember people always telling me, hey, Joel, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free.

• 6:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  And no one's going to ever pay for an app. And I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm essentially a dating business. And people have been paying for dating for centuries.

• 6:14Guy Raz?

  You're a matchmaker.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  I'm a matchmaker. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it because we're providing a lot of value. Unfortunately, I was right.

• 6:27Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:41Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Joel Simkhai wanted an easy way to meet other gay men. So he built Grindr and helped it grow into one of the most popular dating apps in the world.

• 6:59Guy Raz?

  Grindr changed the way people meet. If you don't know it, it was started as a dating app, mainly for gay men. And today, it's used by around 12 million people a month. In 2009, when it launched, there was no Tinder. There was no Bumble. Yes, there was internet dating, but Grindr was different. First of all, its founder, Joel Simkhai, was unapologetic. He called it a hookup app, plain and simple. But secondly, and most importantly, Grindr was the first dating app to use geolocation. It meant you could see how close another Grindr user was in real time on the app.

• 7:41Guy Raz?

  But what's probably most remarkable about the rise of Grindr is that Joel didn't really know what he was doing, at least at first. He wasn't a programmer or a software engineer. He wasn't an expert in marketing. But he was a gay man who knew how hard it could be to meet other gay men. And he wanted to fix that problem. The answer came to him in 2008. That year, Steve Jobs made the iPhone open to third-party apps. And in the iPhone and the App Store, Joel saw an opportunity. Grinder would go on to become one of the most successful, but also one of the most polarizing dating apps ever created.

• 8:22Guy Raz?

  Sometimes it even put its users in danger, but we'll get there. Joel Simkhai was born in the mid 1970s in Israel, but his family moved to New York when he was three. And as long as he could remember, he struggled to fit in at school.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I was mostly friends with girls and I wasn't very athletic. I was a small kid. I played tennis and I, you know, my parents, you know, were very good in giving me opportunities and, you know, encouraging me to do things. But I was not very good at sports. I was not, my hand-eye coordination remains to this day not very good. And so it wasn't something that I excelled at at all.

• 9:03Guy Raz?

  When did you start to feel like, you know, like maybe, when did you start to feel different from other boys? I mean, you mentioned the sports thing, but did you get teased as a kid?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  I did get bullied. You know, luckily I had a, you know, great family and my cousins. And so that was really who I connected with as a child. I didn't quite connect as much with people at school. I knew I had these feelings, but I didn't quite understand them. And I vividly remember once I was part of the swim team in high school and I was teased and someone called me a faggot. And then I said, no, I'm not. I'm not gay. I'm not gay. And for the first time, I said to myself, wait a minute, what if I am? Maybe I am. And so, you know, it took me several years to realize that I was gay. One of the things that was very helpful for me was online.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So these were the days of CompuServe and AOL chat rooms. And so I was able to connect with people online.

• 10:08Guy Raz?

  So, all right, so you are kind of exploring your own identity. You go off to college. You went to Tufts in Boston. And while you were there, did you start to feel more comfortable coming out? Or were you still quiet about it?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  So I was pretty quiet about it still in college. I had a girlfriend or had several girlfriends. But I also started to kind of date guys. And all of this was kind of secret. This was kind of my, you know, I would go on AOL and, you know, meet guys in Boston. And then I would, over the summer, and I was back home, that allowed me a little bit more freedom where I was going to bars and going to clubs and leading more of a gay life when I was back home in New York.

• 10:56Guy Raz?

  When you finished college, I read that you worked, very briefly, in investment banking. And then, and I guess you worked at a dot com startup, like, right before the dot com crash in the early 2000s.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right.

• 11:09Guy Raz?

  And I know that, like, after 9/11, you ended up working in media at NBC for a couple of years, doing some translation work. So, OK, so at the time, you were living in New York. And I guess it seems like you didn't quite know, like, what you wanted to do next. But I guess you'd figured out that you didn't want to work in, like, a corporate environment. Like, that wasn't going to work for you, right?

• 11:32Speaker 01

  No, not at all.

• 11:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And by the way, in terms of your personal life, you know, this is still early internet era, but, you know, internet dating is starting to gain traction. And, I mean, how was your sort of social life in New York? Were you dating? Was it, were you having fun? Was it exciting? Was it easy to meet people?

• 11:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, New York, you know, right after college, I remember just a great time. You know, this is, I'd just come out, and now, you know, everyone essentially knew I was gay, maybe not at work, you know, not something I advertised at work. And so I just, you know, would go out. I would go to clubs, bars, restaurants, and would still use online. You know, Craigslist became very popular, personal ads on Craigslist. There was another website called Connection, which was more dating-based for gay people. And I met one of my first boyfriends on that. But I kind of had a healthy mix of online and meeting people offline and, you know, being quite social.

• 12:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Did you always in your mind think that you would start a business? I mean, your dad had a business. He sold diamonds. And so, you know, maybe it's in your DNA. But did you see yourself as like somebody who could hang up a shingle and start something?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I always thought that I would want to do something of my own. I remember my dad would always say to me, people out there have become very, very successful in selling shirt buttons.

• 13:02Guy Raz?

  Selling shirt buttons?

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he'd point to the buttons on my shirt.

• 13:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  And say that there's millionaires who made their wealth by selling buttons. And it might not be glamorous, but it's a great business for a bunch of people. And so that ethos was always very much part of my upbringing. You know, we were not the be a lawyer or a doctor kind of family. We were a go find your own success. But I had started selling magazine subscriptions online. And so I started, you know, a website that sold subscriptions.

• 13:38Guy Raz?

  Wait, just let me, let me, so, so how did you even find out? Was this like a, like a multi-level marketing thing?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I remember I was, I went to go buy a subscription to something.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  And I went online on eBay and I saw that it was like really cheap, cheaper than you would get it if you went and bought the magazine directly.

• 14:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 14:02Speaker 01

  And so I said, huh, how do these people sell these magazines so cheap? And then I found out that you could buy these subscriptions through these clearinghouses. The mechanics of the business is these, these magazines are eager for subscribers because that's how they get their advertising base. And so they often would sell it, the subscription at a discount, just to get the subscriber. And so I set up a website, contacted some clearinghouses and started selling magazines.

• 14:30Guy Raz?

  And you would sell subscriptions to which magazines?

• 14:33Speaker 01

  All kinds of magazines, almost all of them.

• 14:36Guy Raz?

  Time, Newsweek?

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:38Guy Raz?

  Whatever, The New Yorker?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so the business grew. I mean, it was, you know, I don't remember how big it grew to, but this was my main business for a number of years. And, you know, it grew to a point where I actually couldn't handle it anymore.

• 14:55Guy Raz?

  Because it was just you, right?

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I know. I actually had other people. There were, you know, there's a marketing component into it. So we had people helping with the marketing and then people, some people helping with the customer service and the operations. So it wasn't a very complex business, but, you know, I was able to work from home and run my own business.

• 15:17Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're doing this magazine subscription website. But I guess, from what I understand, the business kind of plateaued around 2008. And you decided to close it down and make a major move to Los Angeles. Why LA? What were you going to do when you got there?

• 15:37Speaker 01

  I had no idea. But I remember at this point, you know, I had, I had for a number of years been kind of trying to think about how can I meet guys in a more efficient manner? And how can I use technology? And I remember the founders of Foursquare, before they started Foursquare, they started a company called Dodgeball, I think. And it allowed you to connect with people using SMS. And so I remember I reached out to them and I said, hey, can I use your platform? And I thought this would be a great way to meet guys.

• 16:12Guy Raz?

  This was something that you'd been thinking about, like, while you were doing the magazine subscription business. You were thinking, I have a hard time meeting other guys. Because presumably, like, you know, you might meet somebody or see somebody and you wouldn't know if they were gay. They might be gay. You wouldn't necessarily know. You wouldn't know if you could approach them or talk to them, right? I mean, there are probably things like that, too.

• 16:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, that's I think every queer person walks into a room and wonders who else is just like them in the room. And so that's our big challenge. I think for straight people.

• 16:47Guy Raz?

  You just assume that, right?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Exactly. You just assume. And so this nagging problem was always there. And then right, a few months after I'd moved to LA, Steve Jobs announces the second generation iPhone.

• 17:01Guy Raz?

  And remind me, what made the second generation of iPhones special?

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yes, so this iPhone now would have three things. One was the App Store. And so now developers could develop third-party apps. Secondly, they could distribute those apps in the App Store. And third was that they would add GPS to the iPhone. In some ways, I felt like Jobs had built this phone for me, because it was exactly what I needed. There was no hesitation in my mind. This was the moment I was waiting for.

• 17:35Guy Raz?

  Almost immediately, you think, this is a platform that I can build something, some kind of dating or meetup app on?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  It wasn't almost immediately. It was immediately. The second he said this, I said, I need to build an app that lets me meet guys on it.

• 17:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  So I had this idea. The big problem is I had no skills to make this happen.

• 17:55Guy Raz?

  You were not a coder. You did not study computer science?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Not a coder. And I don't have any design skills. I don't know how to build. I don't know technology. And back then, there was no ecosystem for iPhone developers.

• 18:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Not clued in to the tech community. I wasn't clued in to development and anything like that. So what I did was I went to, the first generation iPhone had a jailbroken App Store, where third parties would develop software for the iPhone. And this was sanctioned by Apple.

• 18:33Guy Raz?

  And just to clarify, these were apps that people developed for the first generation of iPhones. But I guess the phones had to be, as you say, jailbroken. They had to be like internally hacked in order to run these applications?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:47Guy Raz?

  Okay. And you knew that there was a website where you could download these apps?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Yes. So there was an App Store, the jailbroken App Store, I think it's called, or was called Sidia. And they had a number of different apps that you could download.

• 19:04Guy Raz?

  What did they have? What do you remember?

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Well, the ones I remembered were some mapping apps. This was, again, before any Apple Maps or Google Maps.

• 19:14Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  And so I reached out to each of those developers. And I said, hey, I'd like to develop an app myself. And I was wondering, you know, would like to hire you to build this app for me. I think I said it was an app for, you know, dating. I think I probably had said it's a dating app. But I was a little bit cagey about what it was because I didn't want them to steal my idea.

• 19:34Guy Raz?

  And how long did it take before you got a response?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  I don't remember how long, but I didn't get many responses. So a gentleman out of Denmark, Morten, got back to me. And I think we had gone on the phone. And I kind of pitched him my idea. And he was all very excited and, you know, he-

• 19:56Guy Raz?

  What did you tell him on the phone?

• 19:58Speaker 01

  Well, at first I was kind of, I didn't mention the gay part right away. But eventually, when I told him, you know, I want to build an app where I can meet people using location, I want to see, you know, who's nearby. By the way, you know, I'm gay, and I think this would work really well for the gay community. And so I'd like this to, at least initially, focus on helping me find other gay people.

• 20:24Guy Raz?

  And what'd he say?

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Great, that sounds perfect. And he was, you know, very excited by it. And he's thought that that made a lot of sense. And he thought it would be a great market to launch us at.

• 20:36Guy Raz?

  All right. So let's, just for some perspective here, we're 2008. You get in touch with this Danish guy, Morten, who knows how to build an app. First of all, how are you going to pay him? Did you have any money to pay him?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  No. And so that was the other part I said to him. And by the way, I don't have a lot of money. And he said, OK, well, we'll figure it out. This sounds like a very good idea to me. I think it's going to do well. We'll figure it out.

• 21:04Guy Raz?

  Did you design what you wanted it to look like? Or did you like, what kind of direction did you give this coder in Denmark?

• 21:12Speaker 01

  So the other thing I did at this point was ask a lot of my friends for help. I said, you know, I needed a name. I needed, you know, I needed a logo. I needed to design this app. I needed, there's a lot that needed to happen. And I reached out to my friend Scott Llewellyn, and he was a graphic designer. And he, you know, we were friends. He had a full-time job. I asked him to help me, and he was excited by the opportunity. And the three of us worked on this app. And I remember, you know, one day looking at my photo album on my phone. And I said, hey, wouldn't it be great if these were the guys around me? And so that was really the inspiration for the user interface of Grindr. And it still remains today. It's a grid of people.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  The first person would be me. And then the next profile to the right would be the closest person nearby. And then the next person to their right would be a little bit further away. And that's how we would display all these profiles of the people nearby.

• 22:14Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're in LA. And the plan is to launch this app. And like, did you think of this as a fun project? Or did you think of this as a potential, like, significant business opportunity?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  I thought of this as something that I needed in my life. And that put me at the center. And I remember many times talking to people online. And they would say, yeah, I'm gonna, you know, you'd hit off and say, okay, great. When can you meet? And they'd say, oh, yeah, I'll be in town in a few weeks. And with the power of GPS, I wanted to meet the guys who were nearby.

• 22:52Guy Raz?

  All right. So you're working on this idea. And the name, you come up with this name, Grindr. So tell me about, about that name.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  So we came up with the name, you know, kind of brainstorming various names. And

• 23:08Speaker 01

  We didn't want it to be something that was all about being gay or queer, but we wanted to be something distinctive. We wanted it to be something that was unique. And Grindr was one that we liked. We also looked at Mixer and Blender. And we really liked this idea of mixing people together. We chose Grindr because, one, I liked that it was edgier. And I also liked kind of these, it wasn't quite sex, but it was sexual. And I thought it was unique and masculine also.

• 23:44Guy Raz?

  So was this all you were doing? Was it like your entire focus? Or were there other things you were doing? Were you like doing a day job, for example?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  I didn't have a day job. We were just working on this. There was a lot to be done. To me, this was a race, a race to launch first because I thought to myself, if I have this idea, I'm sure there's lots of other people who have this idea. I don't remember quite, because the iPhone was announced in June. I don't quite know when the App Store and the distribution started. But it was starting already and people were starting to get these new iPhones. And so I realized it was just a matter of time before someone else would do this. And so, but the challenge was, Morton and Scott were both had full-time jobs. And that made things go very slowly, at least in my mind.

• 24:36Guy Raz?

  And even things like, even though Morton was working for very little money, but even things like filing for a trademark and looking for a lawyer to help you do that. And that still costs money, not that much, but it still costs money. How were you financing that? I mean, did you have savings?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had a little bit of money.

• 24:59Guy Raz?

  I see.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I think we'd only spent a few thousand dollars.

• 25:03Guy Raz?

  And you, and we say we, it's me and you and Scott.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:06Guy Raz?

  And do you remember feeling stressed out at that time, at the pace of things?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was very frustrated with the pace because Morton was working part-time. And I, or actually, he had a full-time job and understandably not his first priority. And I wasn't really paying him that much, so I wasn't in the position to be very demanding. But fortunately, there were no other apps that I would remember I would check off and to see, you know, I would type in gay into the app store to see what would come up. And I remember at the time also, before we launched, I reached out to some of our competitors. I said to myself, how am I going to get this? And how am I going to distribute this? How am I going to get people to know about this?

• 25:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  I don't have the money to do a marketing campaign. I just don't know how to do that. And so my idea was, you know, why don't you go work with the incumbents and private label, what Grindr was?

• 25:57Guy Raz?

  Like white label it for match.com or one of these other, who was out there? Do you remember?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  So Manhunt was the big incumbent. They were the dominant player in the United States, a multimillion dollar business. You know, that's the website that gay men would use. And I remember I went to them and they called me, actually, the day we launched and said, we're not interested in doing partnerships, but we're interested in buying you.

• 26:23Guy Raz?

  So this was March 20, I think you launched March 25, 2009.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:28Guy Raz?

  The day you launched, you got an acquisition offer. Was it a significant offer?

• 26:31Speaker 01

  $25,000.

• 26:33Guy Raz?

  And so that wasn't going to happen?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  And, and just to be- Well, it was a lot more than I had. It was a lot more than I had spent. I'd spent probably a few thousand dollars. So it would have been a decent return. And I remember him calling and saying, Manhunt calling and saying, you know, we just commissioned a study, you know, we spent a few hundred thousand dollars on this study. And we asked our users and location was not at the top of their list of importance. But we're still interested in, you know, buying you. We think it's interesting. Let me call you back tomorrow. I want to talk to the boss. And called me the next day and said, you know, we'll pay you, actually, they said $25,000 to $35,000. And I said, you know, listen, I think that's, you know,

• 27:15Speaker 01

  very nice of you, but I'm going to turn you down. And I, many years later, I told them, you know, hey, had you offered me the $200,000 that you had paid for this study of yours, I would have taken your offer.

• 27:30Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, why Grindr began to blow up, even though it was prone to crash and kept getting one star reviews. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 27:51Guy Raz?

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• 28:36Guy Raz?

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• 29:21Guy Raz?

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• 30:05Guy Raz?

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• 30:22Speaker 02

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• 31:07Speaker 03

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• 31:22Guy Raz?

  One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And it's totally free.

• 31:39Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's March of 2009. Joel has just launched Grindr. He's turned down a bargain basement offer to sell it. And he's now anxiously watching the App Store to see how it's doing.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  I remember I was alone in my house at that point. I had no marketing plan. I had no budget. I had, there was no launch party. There was no celebration. There was no champagne. It was almost just like any other day, except for this phone call I got.

• 32:09Guy Raz?

  So before you hit the launch button, or whatever, the proverbial launch button, and it went live, what was the plan on how it would make money? Was there a plan?

• 32:20Speaker 01

  So we added ads. There was the provider AdMob, which would serve ads.

• 32:25Guy Raz?

  And then it would just suck in whatever ad the algorithm pulled in? And you would get pennies on that ad or something like that?

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 32:33Guy Raz?

  So initially, when you opened the app on March 25, 2009, tell me what you would see. What could you do? I open it up and then what's the first step?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and to get onto the app. So we didn't even require an email address, no phone number, nothing. It was just, we had used the device ID. You could log on, and you didn't have to even create an account, which later became a problem. But initially, you could just log on, and photos were not required. They were optional.

• 33:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  And so the idea here was two things. One is that not all gay people are going to be comfortable, so let's not make a lot of requirements. Number two, let's make this as frictionless as possible and very, very simple and straightforward.

• 33:23Guy Raz?

  And it was just going to be free? There was no paid model initially, right?

• 33:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it was just like, you know, grid, just like your photo album. The first photo essentially was the closest person. You would look at their profile, and it would say, so and so is 500 feet away,

• 33:39Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  five miles away, whatever the distance was. And then you could chat with them. And so you would hit the chat button, send them a message. I think at the time, you might have been able to exchange photos. I can't quite remember if we launched with that or not. But eventually, you'd be able to exchange photos and chat.

• 33:57Guy Raz?

  So when you launched the app, I mean, this is a time where there were probably only like 10,000 apps in the App Store total. So discovery was just much easier. And was it just discovered? I mean, was it pretty soon after you launched it? Did people start to find it? Because there weren't many, first of all, gay hookup apps, if any, and probably not even that many dating apps yet.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  There was a few other apps. But certainly, if you would type in gay into the App Store, you wouldn't come up with much. You know, what we decided to do was to have parties and we would go to local gay bars in LA and, you know, throw Grindr parties. June was, you know, Pride Month. I remember we went to different Prides and I remember going to San Francisco Pride. And what we would do is we would hand out little business cards, you know, download Grindr. And the reaction was very, very positive. Anytime someone at that time heard that there was an app for gay people, they were really excited. It was a free app. And so we would got probably about 1,000 downloads a day.

• 34:54Guy Raz?

  At what point, though, did you have to figure out a way to get money? I mean, every 1,000 downloads a day, even in the first month, like a certain point, you've got to build out a team to support that. So, did you get a loan? Did you go to a bank? Did you ask family, friends? Like, what did you do?

• 35:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I got a loan, about $100,000 from my parents. You know, fortunately, I wasn't paying Scott. He was working for Equity. Morton was getting... Eventually, what would the deal I had with Morton was a rev share on the ads that would come in. So, he would get paid as ads would come through. And it was just the three of us, really. So, the costs weren't that high, other than... And the serving costs were not that much at first.

• 35:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  But quickly, the complexity kicks in and we needed to find ways to monetize.

• 35:45Guy Raz?

  So, how did you... I mean, so I hear this idea of Grindr, okay? And my instant reaction to this is, what a brilliant idea, you know? Gay men have a hard time meeting other gay men and you're going to come up with a solution to it. But I have to imagine that a lot... Even me in 2009, if you would have told me this, I might have said, "Ah, I don't see how this is going to work." You know, from the vantage point of 2023, it looks like a brilliant idea. But did you have other people say to you, "You know, I just don't think people are really going to use this. I don't see this working."

• 36:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was met with a lot of doubt. And I asked a lot of people to help me. I mean, I asked some friends, "Hey, would you come work with me on this?" A lot of people turned me down. You know, when we were launching this and I was looking for beta testers. I had reached out to my friends and I said, hey, can you help me beta test? A lot of people didn't respond to me.

• 36:34Guy Raz?

  What was the pushback, do you remember, that people gave you? What was a reason for why this wouldn't work?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, some of the responses that I got from the competitors that the iPhone wouldn't take off, that, you know, now we understand how important location is. But back then, that was not the assumption. There was no Uber, there was no Foursquare, there was nothing like that. And so our minds at the time were not oriented around location.

• 37:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  My mind was oriented around location because I was a guy who would go online and would have to talk to people who were nearby.

• 37:08Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  And so for me, my struggle was all about location largely. Now you realize, hey, I want to order some food. Of course, I want to order food to exactly where I am. I want to order a car, but none of that existed at the time and none of that was done through your phone.

• 37:23Guy Raz?

  The other question I have for you, Joel, and I'm, one of the things that is so hard about starting a business, right, or having an idea, is hearing no. You tell somebody your idea and they poke holes in it, or they tell you this is why it won't work. And just in our interaction, like, you don't come across as like a hustler, like a wheeler-dealer type. But are you, would you consider yourself to be confident and good at kind of presenting and selling?

• 37:53Speaker 01

  Um, you know, what I do know is that I have one skill, really. I don't know how to program, I don't know how to design, I don't really have any hard skills. The only skill I have is to figure it out and to know that everything has, every problem has a solution, especially with technology. And so surprisingly, to me, that's always been my greatest skill. And the way I'm able to do that is being able to work with people and leverage people and to get people to, to execute kind of my vision.

• 38:26Guy Raz?

  All right, so it's clear, after you launched this app, right, that, that you're getting some traction, people are downloading it, right?

• 38:32Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 38:33Guy Raz?

  And, and like you said before, I mean, there weren't a lot of people out there at the time who, who even knew how to make iPhone apps. So, so this guy you were working with, this guy Morton, I mean, he just kind of figured out on his own how to create this and, and make it all work?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, the beautiful thing is he's a hacker. And so he essentially figured this out. But Morton was a developer, an iPhone developer, on the front end. What he wasn't was a developer on the back end. Those skill sets of front end and back end are very, very different. And so that was, you know, soon after launch became our big challenge was, how do we scale and how do we deal with all this traffic? Him and me, and none of us expected the scale we would get. I remember when I had this server before, I would go on once a day and I'd have to restart the server to kind of flesh out. I don't remember exactly why, but it was not built for scale at all.

• 39:32Guy Raz?

  And I mean, I have to imagine that the, I mean, at a certain point, like early on, did the ads start to generate some revenue to keep you afloat?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's how we funded the business was through ads. Maybe a few thousand dollars the first month. And I'd imagine the first year, we probably made a few hundred thousand dollars in ads.

• 39:54Guy Raz?

  And you weren't, you didn't have like an ad sales team. It was just like whatever would come in through this server, ad server.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was no cost to us. It's just a check, a wire or a deposit into your account once a month.

• 40:05Guy Raz?

  Couple pennies every time there was a little ad. And it could be an ad for whatever. I mean, this is probably still early days when it came to like targeted ads. So not necessarily like ads that would be targeting gay men.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, this was in the early days. So these were very general ads. And most of them, I don't think even were location based ads at the time.

• 40:25Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  These were just very, you know, ads for other apps too, right? Uber at one point was a big advertiser. So other apps would advertise.

• 40:33Guy Raz?

  And Joel, you were very clear. This was not a dating app. If people met somebody and they dated, great. But this was really, you described it as a hookup app.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, various times I thought of it in different ways. But yeah, essentially I see it as a hookup app. And I, but even, you know, if you peel it a little bit more, I just thought this is a way to meet someone, right? This is just a way for you to meet someone nearby. And whether you go have sex or you go, whatever you want to go do, the whole point is to go meet. And that was something that was not really happening on iPhone at the time.

• 41:06Guy Raz?

  So it was probably super viral right away, right? Because once you're on it, you're telling your friends about it. And then that's how it spread.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so our strategy was twofold. One was these grinder parties and the other was press and to reaching out to the press. And so, you know, I didn't have a PR firm. I would just pitch them and just send them a short email.

• 41:27Guy Raz?

  You would just write to the reporter yourself?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would just look up who was covering the space or who was, I don't know, and find any reporter I could, email them.

• 41:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 41:37Speaker 01

  Said, hey, I'm just launch this app. And that's how, you know, we got the word out.

• 41:41Guy Raz?

  So at a certain point, Apple, they enable you to sell the app, right? And that's, that essentially allowed you to create two tiers, a free tier and a paid version. And what did that, what was the difference between those two options?

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the paid version, you could see more people, you could block more people. Because remember, every time we would show you a new profile, that was a call to our server. And, you know, we were, our architecture was not very good. And so there was an added expense for each new profile you saw. So we essentially started charging for that.

• 42:14Guy Raz?

  And did you find a lot of people paying for it?

• 42:17Speaker 01

  We got a good amount. And I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free.

• 42:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  And no one's going to ever pay for an app. And I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm a, essentially a dating business and people have been paying for dating for centuries.

• 42:34Guy Raz?

  You're a matchmaker.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  I'm a matchmaker. I'm not an app. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it because we're providing a lot of value. And fortunately, I was right.

• 42:44Guy Raz?

  Okay, what about, let's go back to the sort of the technology side. I mean, getting a thousand downloads a day and then just the virality of it. Well, that's putting more and more pressure on the backend. So from what I've read, the user experience in the first couple of years sucked. Like it would crash all the time.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Horrible.

• 43:05Guy Raz?

  Right? Like what was going on?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, our App Store ratings were, you know, one star. We had horrible reviews and.

• 43:12Guy Raz?

  But it doesn't seem like it affected downloads.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  No, and user time. I mean, people were using the app for hours.

• 43:19Guy Raz?

  But giving you one star reviews?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 43:21Guy Raz?

  And why were they giving you one star reviews? What would happen?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  The app would crash. You would have to wait for the profiles to load. You know, it just wasn't a very, it wasn't very good software.

• 43:32Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 43:32Speaker 01

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

• 44:10Guy Raz?

  You outsourced the maintenance of the app to this group of code developers in Costa Rica?

• 44:17Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 44:18Guy Raz?

  Wow. So that was very efficient. But did you ever think, you know, I just got to get an office. I got to get everyone in this office. I got to have all these people here, staff, employees. Or was it just, did it make more sense to you to just kind of do patchwork? Like, we'll outsource this, we'll outsource that, we'll, you know, just patch these holes like that?

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, for, you know, I was very reluctant to get an office. I was working from home. I was very happy. I would, you know, I remember I had maybe eight people. They would come to my house. I had a very small house. The neighbors would complain with all the people parking on our small street.

• 44:54Guy Raz?

  And how were you as, even with a small team? I mean, how were you finding yourself as a boss? I mean, did managing people and projects come easily to you?

• 45:03Speaker 01

  No, I was not very excited about managing. But at some point, it became a business.

• 45:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  And I was kind of reluctant for it to become a business in some ways. I really kind of loved it as a small project, something that was, that I could kind of do from home. I remember at this point, we were getting people interested in investing because we had been getting quite a bit of attention. And they wanted to see my financials. And so we didn't, I said, well, financials, I don't have financials. I don't have projections. I don't know what, who knows?

• 45:33Guy Raz?

  You had investors coming in wanting to like, look at your data room.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I said, data? What are you talking about? I don't have a business model. I don't have a business plan. I don't have a marketing plan. I don't have a data, nothing. You know?

• 45:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  You see, what you see is what you get.

• 45:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  And, you know, my college hood friend, her husband was, wasn't working at the time. And so Carter McJunkin, who ended up being our COO later on, he came in and he helped me put my projections together. And so he would consult and I said, how much do you want? He said, a hundred dollars an hour. And I almost fell off my chair.

• 46:06Guy Raz?

  Because you thought that's crazy expensive.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  That's a lot of money.

• 46:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And then so a few months into the project with Carter, I think he understood that this was going to take off. And he called me and said, listen, I need to move from, he was out in Maryland at the time, I need to move to Los Angeles. I need to work on this full time and we need to build a business here. You could tell that this was on a good, very good trajectory. I remember when, I went to San Francisco Pride in June, three months after we launched. I was out and handing out cards and someone said to me, Joel, Stephen Fry mentioned you on Top Gear.

• 46:41Guy Raz?

  Stephen Fry, the great, obviously British comedian.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I went back to my hotel room and we got 10,000 downloads.

• 46:51Guy Raz?

  Stephen Fry was on Top Gear, but obviously the racing show on BBC. And he talked about how he had Grindr on his phone.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Stephen Fry went on Top Gear, which at the time was the number one show on the BBC.

• 47:03Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  And, you know, Stephen Fry is a bit of a tech geek or tech, you know, tech lover.

• 47:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  And so Jeremy says to him, oh, you know, do you have any favorite apps? And he says, yeah, I have two apps. And one is this app where you can play music on it. And the other app is this app called Grindr. It's a gay cruising app. And they pan to the audience and you can see their reactions.

• 47:28Guy Raz?

  Like clutching their pearls.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  And he then goes out and takes out the app and he basically gives a demo.

• 47:35Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  And so that was a huge moment for us where everyone in the UK at this point knew about Grindr.

• 47:41Guy Raz?

  And this was, and it was possible to download it in the UK too, like the location service would work just the same?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So we launched, we launched around the world and it was available everywhere.

• 47:52Guy Raz?

  One of the things about, one of the early criticisms that you got was critics writing, oh, this is so superficial. It's just like torso shots of guys with six packs and, you know, bulging muscles. And it really is all about looks. And, and your response to that was, yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, that's right. I mean, I think the way I had always thought of it was, you know, you walk into a bar and what is it that you first see is you first see that person. You walk into any situation. And so that is actually mimics real life in some ways.

• 48:32Guy Raz?

  That humans are superficial initially. We do just look for looks.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  Well, that's what you see.

• 48:38Guy Raz?

  That's you see. Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  You don't know anything about the person before you meet them.

• 48:41Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  All you know is what you see. And so for me, this was not very inconsistent with how we meet people normally.

• 48:50Guy Raz?

  Now, one of the things that the app did not have was like any kind of sexually explicit photos. Like the photos were, if they were real, but there were no, they could not put any, no one could put like a sexually explicit photo up there.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Well, so the way I viewed this was, what I tried to do with Grindr was I tried to mimic real life as much as possible. And so what we thought about is that there is a public space and there's a private space. And so with Grindr, there's the public profile and in your public profile, you have to keep it PG 13. In your chat, which is a private chat, you can discuss whatever you'd like and you could exchange whatever photos you'd like, as long as it's legal, because those are private. And so that's how, if you wanted to exchange explicit photos, you could. And that was a very, very popular feature. And that was in our private space and that was in compliance with Apple and Google's guidelines. And that's what people did.

• 49:51Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, it sounds like you guys started to bring in revenue, maybe even profit, even if it was small, from ads, pretty soon after you launched in 2009.

• 50:02Speaker 01

  We didn't bring in profit. I don't think we were profitable maybe till year, maybe three or four.

• 50:08Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  But revenue did come in. Maybe 2010, we probably maybe did a few million dollars in revenue. But it was break even and trying to grow the team and pay for the servers. Those were our two big costs. And we ended up using Google App Engine. And at one point, this is later on, they increased their pricing and it almost killed the business.

• 50:31Guy Raz?

  What's a Google App Engine? Sorry.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Google App Engine was our hosting provider. It was the Google Web Plaid Services, essentially.

• 50:39Guy Raz?

  Oh, and they raised their prices and you did not? And that almost killed the business?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Well, because our costs went up dramatically and we simply couldn't afford what they were going to charge us. Eventually, we went on, we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive. But largely because we had implemented them in not a very efficient way. So we weren't profitable for a number of years, but we were fortunately making revenue.

• 51:04Guy Raz?

  So that could float the business for a while?

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Our ability, we were able to achieve everything we were able to achieve because our marketing costs were virtually zero. We had a number of people who helped with these Grindr parties. But our marketing spend was essentially zero. So our cost to acquire new users was essentially zero. I mean, that's what allowed us to grow. If I had to spend money acquiring users, we would not have been able to achieve what we achieved.

• 51:31Guy Raz?

  You were spending no money on user acquisition?

• 51:34Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 51:34Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's like a dream business.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And initially, I think ads were 80% of our revenue and the subscriptions were 20. And eventually, it would flip to the opposite, where most of the money came from subscriptions. And we had a lot of users. And for me, this is a network product. And so from my perspective, we wanted to have a lot of free users because we wanted the network. And that's the power of the app. You go on and you see someone nearby. And so if we had to charge everyone, it simply wouldn't have worked.

• 52:08Guy Raz?

  I have to imagine that not that long after you launched it, there were competing apps that would pop up.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, absolutely.

• 52:16Guy Raz?

  How did you kind of create the moat around Grindr, given that the user experience was so bad in the first year or so? If other competitors were coming on board, I have to assume that some of them might even have had a better app. How did you guys?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  They all had a better app.

• 52:33Guy Raz?

  So how did you manage to compete against them? What was the reason?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  It's the size of the network.

• 52:38Guy Raz?

  Just because you were there early? You were in there first?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Yes, size matters. I think that even was our tagline for a while. And for a location-based service, when you're meeting people, it's really all about you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. And so we had the first mover's advantage. We had the network. And we were growing very quickly. And so that was fortunate for us, that we had the network and that was our moat.

• 53:08Guy Raz?

  And in that sort of year, first year, year and a half, I mean, you know, you come across as a very kind of quiet and even keeled guy. Do you get stressed? Did you get angry? Would you like, you know, with the team around you? Would you like, we gotta, we gotta fix this? Would you ever panic? I mean, tell me a little bit about, just kind of step outside of yourself for a moment. And who was, who was Joel at that time?

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Well, I remember the first phase of the first year was actually quite a lonely time, you know, starting for the development until maybe after launch, until I actually had invited people to come work, you know, physically at my place. It was a very lonely time because A, I was so busy working on it. So my social life had become essentially nothing. And this is going to sound very cheesy, but I remember I was so, so lonely. And I was so depressed. And I said to myself, you know what, Joel? I had a conversation with my future self and I had my future self tell me, Joel, keep on going. You need to persevere and you need to just keep on the hard work, keep on the perspective and keep on going.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  And that was very helpful for me. And, and you know, I still have conversations with my future self. You know, what is, what advice does, does he have for me? What is, what perspective does seven year old Joel have for current Joel? The other beautiful thing about it is that you can't really argue with your future self because it's yourself. And so it's hard to say, ah, he doesn't know what he's talking about, or that kind of thing. And so that's kind of a mechanism that I've, I've employed in my life.

• 54:43Guy Raz?

  So, all right. So one of the things that I think was a really interesting break, or probably, probably the first time that I think I can remember hearing about Grindr was, because I think by, by September of 2011, you had like two and a half million users all around the world, which is quite amazing. I think it was 2012, right? Summer of 2012. You had the Olympics in London. And basically, for some reason, the app crashed at around that time. Somehow, a rumor started that this coincided with the arrival of athletes in London at the Olympic Village.

• 55:28Guy Raz?

  Tell me the story. Did you plant that story? Did somebody plant that story? Because it's a great story, but what do you remember about that?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was right before the Olympics had started and the athletes had just arrived at the Olympic Village. And we got an email from one of the tabloids in the UK. They said to us, hey, we noticed that Grindr went down right around the time the Olympians had arrived. Is there any correlation? And I remember I turned to the head of marketing and I said, don't respond. And they ran with the story without comment from us that Grindr had crashed because gay Olympians has essentially crashed the servers.

• 56:14Guy Raz?

  And so the company had no comment, no response?

• 56:17Speaker 01

  No response. And it was ridiculous, right? How many Olympians are there? A few, a few thousand? How many of them are gay? Maybe a few dozen or a few hundred. For them to be able to crash our servers when we had hundreds of thousands of users and maybe daily active users and millions monthly was simply ridiculous. But that became part of the urban legend, I guess.

• 56:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  And one of the things I realized also is that our outages, actually, we had a lot of outages. And we would actually see that anytime we would have an outage, our traffic would go up afterwards. And anytime we would have a negative news article about outages, our traffic would go up and we'd get more downloads. And so one of the things I realized here was that even bad press, quote unquote, bad press, might be good.

• 57:05Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Grindr starts to get even more attention for all the other problems it has, from uncontrollable spam to critical concerns over privacy. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This.

• 57:33Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2013, four years after launch, and Grindr has about 5 million total users. And at this point, Joel starts getting calls from people who want to invest in the app, but he says, no, he's not interested.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  I don't like to answer other people. And I felt that if I would take venture backing, I would essentially become a monkey to them and that I would need to essentially work for them. And a lot of them were, you know, straight men who I felt like didn't understand my business and, you know, I didn't want to answer to straight corporate America.

• 58:14Guy Raz?

  And also, I mean, your revenue started to become significant. I think by 2013, it was $25 million. That was a combination of subscribers and ad revenue.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had the financial, you know, we could support ourselves. So there were certainly points where we could have used the money, but I was very stubborn about this, that I didn't want... And I also didn't... The other thing is I didn't want someone to push me to an exit. I just said to myself, hey, I don't know when we're going to exit and what... That's not what it's about. This is about building the business. And I think the other part of it is, you know, I'm a person who doesn't look for external validation. And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with...

• 58:56Guy Raz?

  Valuations.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Valuations, headcount. And to me, those were vanity metrics. Those were not metrics that were important. The only metric that was really important to me was my daily active users and how many, you know, messages people sent.

• 59:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  And what impact were we making? That's what mattered to me.

• 59:15Guy Raz?

  Has the app gotten more and more popular? You also get scammers.

• 59:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:21Guy Raz?

  People who are trying to get... Credit card information or, you know, and, and, and all kinds of scams. When you found out about that, how did you handle that?

• 59:31Speaker 01

  I don't know that we had a lot of, in terms of credit card hacking and, you know, Apple would process our payments, so we didn't have any of those types of problems. But we had spam. You know, spam was, you know, visit my website, go download this, go download that.

• 59:45Guy Raz?

  You had spam profiles being set up?

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, absolutely. And so going back to the initial founding of the app, we didn't have accounts. Essentially, anyone could message anyone. And that was because I wanted to, you know, make it very easy for someone to be able to use our service. That made it a perfect opportunity for a spammer to be able to spam our users. And so you would go on and you would start talking to someone and they would send you a marketing message. And it was very hard for us to solve this because we didn't have accounts. And so this was one of our moments where I thought I could lose the business.

• 1:00:25Guy Raz?

  Because, because you weren't clear how many accounts were fake?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Well, no, you, the customer experience was horrible. You would go on and people would spam you. Imagine getting your inbox without the spam filter. It's just impossible to communicate. And so we had to, to fight the spammers.

• 1:00:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So how did you do it?

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's, you know, it's, you know, creating accounts. So everyone has to have an account. You have to verify your email address. So at some point, if you didn't sign into your email, you would lose access, which wasn't a problem because people would do essentially anything. You know, they had put up with so much. Giving an email address was not going to be a challenge.

• 1:01:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  But, you know, you also go through messages and you do message detection where you look for keywords that people are, you know, the spammers and you shut down the spammers. So it's quite a, an effort to combat spam.

• 1:01:14Guy Raz?

  How long did it take?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Years. I mean, it took us, you know, a few months to really, you know, solve the crisis. But, you know, it's an ongoing battle. It's a whack-a-mole with spammers to fight them.

• 1:01:29Guy Raz?

  So, there are obviously always unintended consequences to any technology, right? This is normal. And one of those unintended consequences was that the app did put some people in danger, right? Particularly gay men in countries where homosexuality is illegal. Afghanistan and, you know, Ghana, Iraq. I don't know if it is today still in Saudi Arabia, where it's punished. Egypt. And allegedly, in Egypt, the state authorities use the app to track and even arrest gay men. I don't know exactly.

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  It's not alleged. It happened.

• 1:02:08Guy Raz?

  It happened. So, yeah. I mean, on the one hand, it was probably this incredible opportunity for these very closeted, fearful men to meet other men. On the other hand, it put them at risk. What could you do to fix that or to mitigate that? Anything?

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, a couple of things we did. One was we had messaged our users and told them not to put their faces in their profile, not to publicly declare who they were. The other thing is, you know, Grindr is all about location, so you see how far away you are from someone. Well, using that data, the police are able to find where you are. So, in Egypt, we turned off that ability, so you couldn't see how far you were from one another. You know, it's a tough call when you think about these places and you say to yourself, should we make this service not available? And from my perspective, what I realized is that this was the only kind of gay bar for a lot of people in a lot of

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  places. And to take that away from them, I thought, would be the wrong decision. Because for them, that's largely their access to other queer people.

• 1:03:19Guy Raz?

  And as this became more and more successful, I mean, your market was gay men, which is a big market, a lot of dollars. But did you think, I mean, I know that there were people coming at you saying, hey, this is exclusionary. It's only... For gay men, what about gay women? What about non-binary folks, trans folks, et cetera? I mean, just from a business perspective, and I hope this doesn't come across as cynical, from a business perspective, it might have been a good opportunity to just expand the user base, right?

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, beyond that, we had straight people. I mean, a lot of people-

• 1:03:51Guy Raz?

  Asking to get on it, yeah.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, hey, this is, you know, before Tinder. Hey, why can't I meet someone on my phone? We need a better way. And yeah, so we got that feedback from all corners.

• 1:04:02Guy Raz?

  And so, one of the ways you addressed this was with another app called Blender that you created.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:04:08Guy Raz?

  And was, I mean, to kind of spoiler alert here, but Blender did not do quite as well as Grindr by any stretch. Was it already too late when it came out? Was Tinder already kind of the dominant app?

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  No, we predated Tinder by quite some time.

• 1:04:23Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:05:07Guy Raz?

  How did you cope with the occasional criticism, or more than occasional criticism you would get? You know, media stories about underage boys going on and signing up, stories about men endangering themselves in countries where it was illegal, or, you know, like, how did you personally deal with that? Did you just, was it just for you, it's just the price of doing business? Or did it ever get to you?

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, each of those are different.

• 1:05:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  But I think on the bigger picture, I think the answer is that- With every technology that there is negatives. You know, one of the good things we had was we had the location of these users. So if someone committed a crime, we would, you know, turn over to the law enforcement, say, you know, here's where you can find them. But, you know, this was one of my, I think, my challenges at Grindr was not taking maybe seriously enough some of the other issues that we could have dealt with, that we could have helped. You know, people spend an hour a day on Grindr. That's a long time. That's not very good for you. And so, thinking through how could we have better, you know, helped without all these negative things, without the racism, without the transphobia, without all these other negative

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  aspects and aspects of the community.

• 1:06:21Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should mention that there was quite a bit of that on the site, too. There were, right, I mean, there are men who were saying, I don't date this kind of person, I don't date that kind of person. Or they were even, even in chats, quite explicit in their racism.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. That was, that was a problem. I think it remains to be a problem. And, you know, after leaving, I think I now have a different perspective on that. I think we should have had been a lot more involved and guiding of our users and letting them know that certain behaviors was just unacceptable.

• 1:06:55Guy Raz?

  In 2016, you announced that you had sold a 60% stake in the company. This is after many years of many suitors and investors coming at you and you turning them down. This was a Chinese video game developer called Kunlun, Kunlun Tech Company, and they took a 60% stake and that deal valued Grindr at $155 million. So you, you guys got $93 million at that point. What was the reason? What changed? Like, why then did you say, you know what, let's bring it on now?

• 1:07:32Speaker 01

  I think there were two main things that were going on at this point. One was the technology, we were still struggling. We were still just dealing with our scaling issues. We were not shipping updates. We were not releasing new features. And so, I just realized I was essentially a firefighter and our team was, we were just firefighting. We were fighting fire after fire and we just didn't have the expertise that we needed. And so, I thought, you know, what if I can find a partner who can help me scale this and grow this and someone who really understands technology? So that was one part of it. The other part was I had no idea what my business was worth. So I said to myself, why don't we go out there and find out what the business is worth? And then we got to the point where, hey, this is a lot of money and this is life-changing

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  amount of money. So we found Kunlun, who they had a lot of experience with mobile gaming in China. And also China at the time, we wanted to break into China, so they would be the perfect partner to help us with China. And this partner is going to help us where we're weak and this will finally be kind of this technical co-founder that I've never had.

• 1:08:41Guy Raz?

  All right. So they come in and they buy 60% stake. And the other side to it is, did part of you want to just eventually get out? Because when they take a 60% stake, eventually they're going to take 100% stake.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and we had a mechanism for that. It was essentially a three-year. At that time, we said ourselves, OK, likely to be out in three years, but maybe not. I think I probably fooled myself in some ways and thought that I would, if I wanted to stay, I could stay. If I wanted to go, I would go. And from an external perspective, you're right. Hey, you sell control, you lose control. But I don't know that I fully understood that.

• 1:09:22Guy Raz?

  All right. So now this Chinese company comes in. And what did that mean? Did that, did everything seem to stay the same more or less? Or did things start to change quickly? I mean, 60%, they own a majority of the company now.

• 1:09:34Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, you know, things, we didn't have the best relationship. The honeymoon was very short. We got hacked soon after the deal closed. And I said, great, you guys are, not great that we got hacked, but like-

• 1:09:50Guy Raz?

  You can solve this.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  You can help me solve this. But they weren't very helpful and they were very focused on us launching in China. And they wanted us to really become the number one app in China because there was another app that was gaining a very significant traction to China.

• 1:10:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  I tried to look at it from their perspective, you know, they're sitting there in Asia. They're seeing that they're, you know, that someone else is becoming the dominant player in Asia. They're worrying about that.

• 1:10:15Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  But I'm sitting here in Los Angeles and I'm saying, you know, that's not the end of the world. Even if we don't get China, you know, we, that's fine. I'd rather, I'd rather lose China than lose, you know, have the business be hacked and lose all our data. And so that became very contentious.

• 1:10:28Guy Raz?

  They exercised their option to buy the rest of the company out about two years later, exactly two years later, bought the rest of the company out for $150 million. And I guess at that point, Scott Chen from Kunlun comes to run, becomes the head of Grindr, and they sort of politely asked you to step aside?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Uh, I'm not quite sure the word polite is the right word.

• 1:10:53Guy Raz?

  Maybe impolitely asked you to step aside?

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, it was, it was very contentious and not the way I wanted to go. But, um, you know, we ended up settling it and, uh, you know, we came to an agreement.

• 1:11:09Guy Raz?

  Joel, let me ask you this question. I mean, and it may sound obvious to some people, may sound just utterly stupid to others, but, you know, you've been grinding away at this, just to, so to speak, since 2009. It's now 2018 and they've asked you to leave in a contentious way and you are not happy about it, but you're going to walk away with 100, 200 million dollars of value. That's a pretty great outcome and, you know, you're walking away from the stress of that business too. So I guess my question is, who cares, right? Like, why, why would it matter to you? And I'm not, I'm not saying who cares, of course it is, but, but why? Why did it matter to you that it was contentious and you had to leave?

• 1:11:54Speaker 01

  This, you know, I think starting a business is a very emotional thing. And I think it is something that I dedicated myself to. And I had many lonely nights. I had many difficult days and nights.

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  You know, it took all of me. And I was helping my community, helping them meet, helping them, you know, find great sex, finding love. You know, there were people who have gotten married because they found someone on Grindr. And so such a tremendous impact. And, you know, something that I love more than anything is matchmaking. And so a combination of all those things, I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me because I made a lot of money. But kind of ironically, a few months before I finally left, I met a guy in New York. And we started dating. And Brendan and I are now, you know, married.

• 1:12:54Speaker 01

  And interestingly, I've asked him, I said, you know, he said, you know, I don't think I would have taken you very seriously if you were still the CEO of Grindr. I don't know that this relationship would have worked. And I think for myself also, I think I was able to prioritize him and my, you know, relationships in general. And that created the space for me to fall in love and get married.

• 1:13:19Guy Raz?

  I know that after you stepped away, Joel, Grindr continued to grow for some time, but it did have some challenges. And I know that the Chinese company that had bought it from you eventually sold it. And then the new owners took it public a few years later. And for a time, the market cap was like, was over like $2 billion. And I think it's dropped quite significantly now.

• 1:13:45Guy Raz?

  But when you saw that, I mean, at the time, right? The thing that you built was valued at $2 billion. I mean, it must have been quite amazing to see that.

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I was very, that's certainly mixed feelings, right? But the main feeling I had was kind of proud of myself for building something that got acceptance from Wall Street to some extent. I was very proud of that, and I was very proud of the queer community, that this was a successful business that served the queer community, and it was a success story of the queer community.

• 1:14:18Guy Raz?

  Around the same time that Grindr went public, you launched a new company, a new app called Motto, a new dating app, which you now is out in the world. Tell me, tell me about it. What is it? And how is it different from everything else out there?

• 1:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Motto is essentially a hookup app for queer people. You have to upload three face photos, and so you see exactly who you're meeting. And we verify every single person, so it's 100% real community. And it's essentially an experience kind of more like Hinge. You get a batch of people every day at 5:00 PM, and you get to react to their profile, and you get to reach out to people. And it's meant to be a lot more straightforward. And a lot of it was built in reaction to the problems of the current hookup apps, not just Grindr, but the other ones as well. But at the end of the day, this is, you know, I think, I had this benefit of sitting there

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  and saying, hey, now, what does a hookup app look like if you build it from scratch? You know, 2009 and 2008 was Grindr, and that was the app for then. And then Motto was, I think, the app for today.

• 1:15:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Joel, when you think about this, your whole story, you know, you're a guy who is not a computer scientist, not, I mean, you're obviously very smart, but like, you studied international relations, and you were not a coder, developer. You had an idea, lots of people do, they go nowhere. But you turned it into a really big business, and you became very wealthy as a result of that, and created something that has had a significant impact on culture, certainly on gay culture, queer culture. How much of that do you think is how much time and grind you put in? And how much do you attribute to luck?

• 1:16:15Speaker 01

  You know, this is a tough one because it's hard to tell, right? I'm not a huge believer in luck. I don't actually really know, understand what that means.

• 1:16:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  I'm also very fortunate and, you know, I grew up to parents who were supportive financially and emotionally and in many, many different ways. You know, I don't know, is that luck in some ways? Sure. But I had a lot of people who come up to me and said, hey, I had that idea too. And my response to all of them is always the same thing. It's like, well, what did you do about it? And the answer always is nothing.

• 1:16:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  I go back to what I said earlier, and that's, you know, I believe in myself. I don't let other people tell me what to do or to validate me. And I figure it out. And just understanding that, you know, I may be right, I might be wrong. But at the end of the day, I'm a happy guy.

• 1:17:10Guy Raz?

  That's Joel Simkhai, founder of Grindr and Motto. Motto, by the way, is still small. Right now, it only works in New York and Miami, but with plans to expand far beyond in the future. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Katherine Cypher. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini,

• 1:17:55Guy Raz?

  and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.