Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news Look. It's June Pride
Speaker 1: month here in New York and around the world, and
Speaker 1: Grinder is the world's largest network for LGBTQ people. The
Speaker 1: app is now evolving into what it's calling a global
Speaker 1: Gaghborhood Integrating AI, or as the CEO calls it, gay
Speaker 1: I that's right, and looking into expanding its product line
Speaker 1: beyond just the dating app.
Speaker 2: Well that includes live events like a pop up concert
Speaker 2: with Madonna took place Thursday night in Times Square and
Speaker 2: the past year, Grinder's revenue is up thirty eight percent,
Speaker 2: while at share prices dropped by half for c Sweet Saturday.
Speaker 2: We spoke to CEO George Arson, But the future of
Speaker 2: the company.
Speaker 3: I can't control what the stock does. The stock's going
Speaker 3: to do its own thing, and I think that over
Speaker 3: the long term the market is pretty efficient. Over the
Speaker 3: short term, it's not sometimes, and I think Grinder does
Speaker 3: have some complexity for people to understand. But we do
Speaker 3: have an incredible business. I mean, the company's grown twenty
Speaker 3: five plus sent every year over the last four years
Speaker 3: since I've been around, even longer, it's been growing at
Speaker 3: that pace or higher. But it has also been getting better.
Speaker 3: We did more ybit last year than we did revenue
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty two, which I think that's the number
Speaker 3: I really like, and it's going to continue going up.
Speaker 3: And I don't see anything that in the next three
Speaker 3: four years is going to slow us down. Like we
Speaker 3: have a very strong plan and execution is really really strong.
Speaker 3: The team, you know, is doing everything that needs to
Speaker 3: be done to make the business work really well. So
Speaker 3: I think my job from the investor perspectives to keep
Speaker 3: beating with people and telling them our story, and I
Speaker 3: think over time it'll take care of itself. You know,
Speaker 3: we had some challenging things happen last fall when one
Speaker 3: of our shaholders had issues with his pledge shares and
Speaker 3: that led to a squeeze on him and resulted with
Speaker 3: shippers coming down quite a bit. So I think there's
Speaker 3: some recovery that needs to happen from that, and that
Speaker 3: does take time. I mean it's only been three quarters,
Speaker 3: so we'll we'll keep kind of plugging along. And what
Speaker 3: I do tell the team is to not focus on
Speaker 3: the share price because that'll be distracting. We should focus
Speaker 3: on execution, and ultimately the market is pretty Ushient.
Speaker 1: You did a story last year and you found that
Speaker 1: one in three gay relationships started on Grinder. And that's
Speaker 1: been kind of an evolution because I think when I
Speaker 1: first started learning about it was a sort of as
Speaker 1: a hookup app. But now several, actually most of my
Speaker 1: friends who've gotten married in that community met on Grinder.
Speaker 1: What does that do to your business model and how
Speaker 1: is the dynamics of what people using the app for change?
Speaker 3: Yeah, the action number is fifty percent, so it's even high.
Speaker 3: Ooh okay, yeah, it's pretty it's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: Every wedding I've been to, it's how did jimmy Grinder
Speaker 1: from me?
Speaker 3: One of the most cool kind of moments when I
Speaker 3: was just getting start actually wasn't Coeo yet, but I
Speaker 3: was doing the road show for us going public and
Speaker 3: we met with this one investor and he's like, let
Speaker 3: me show you this picture, and he pulls out his
Speaker 3: picture from his brother's wedding where the brother and his
Speaker 3: husband had met on Grinder and they had this like
Speaker 3: little Grinder logo where you could take a photo in
Speaker 3: for every guest the wedding. Yeah, so people decided and
Speaker 3: I'm like, goll thisek is going to probably go well
Speaker 3: because I don't have to like explain to him what
Speaker 3: we do. I think. Look in the gay world, in
Speaker 3: gay culture, things are pretty fluid, right, so casual, they
Speaker 3: eate sort hookups leading to long term relationship is actually
Speaker 3: very common. Internally. We tend to joke that if you know,
Speaker 3: a gay couple hooks up three times and then doesn't
Speaker 3: go in a date, probably will never go to date,
Speaker 3: whereas a straight couple, if it doesn't go in three
Speaker 3: days prior to a hookup, that relationship probably won't.
Speaker 1: It's just a different three date rule.
Speaker 3: So it so it's you know, that's just how the
Speaker 3: culture is. But the reality is that a lot more
Speaker 3: gay men today want to be in long term relationships
Speaker 3: than was the case that when I was in my twenties,
Speaker 3: and you know Andrew Sullivan, who was probably one of
Speaker 3: the primary architects of the case for gay marriage over
Speaker 3: the years, you know, he would make this argument that
Speaker 3: if we allow gay marriage, then gay men will move
Speaker 3: more in the direction of what street people do, which
Speaker 3: is getting married and having stable, long term relationships. And
Speaker 3: I think that's very much happening because if you survey
Speaker 3: men under thirty five, you know over half of them
Speaker 3: say that they want to be in a long term relationship,
Speaker 3: and a quarter of them say they want to have children.
Speaker 3: So I have kids. I've always wanted kids, But when
Speaker 3: I would say that I wanted kids in my twenties,
Speaker 3: I was literally like the artism all out WI one hundred.
Speaker 3: So society is changing dramatically in part because of the
Speaker 3: recognition of marriage, and that's really positive. And obviously Grinderer
Speaker 3: is in an awesome place to help with that because
Speaker 3: that is where people meet, and we have the critical
Speaker 3: mass of people to meet each other.
Speaker 1: We want to ask you about AI and I understand you.
Speaker 1: You know you something you've coined gay I through the app.
Speaker 2: I see what you did there, all right, tell us.
Speaker 1: What it is, how it works, and if it's been
Speaker 1: worth the investment, because one of the things we're looking at,
Speaker 1: especially right now is the ROI on these AI investments
Speaker 1: and whether or not they're the juices worth the squeeze
Speaker 1: for some of these things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I so we we've been way ahead of the
Speaker 3: curve on AI. I had built an AI company in
Speaker 3: twenty eighteen, not on gen Ai because Genai models were
Speaker 3: out back then, but having done that, and that company
Speaker 3: has done very well and was very good for everybody involved.
Speaker 3: I knew that AI was going to be huge four
Speaker 3: Grinder because we have so much data and that creates
Speaker 3: unique opportunities. So we both have invested a ton into
Speaker 3: building AI products for users and those are going really
Speaker 3: well where you know, have a lot of them are
Speaker 3: already out in the product and the feedback from users
Speaker 3: very positive. We're building a new AI tier which is
Speaker 3: a more premium tier that is powered with GAI that
Speaker 3: it will he's already in beta with a bunch of
Speaker 3: users and will be live towards What does it do?
Speaker 1: It is just really hypertailor do you give zero.
Speaker 3: A lot more information about people you're talking to and
Speaker 3: creates transparency for both parties about why that connection might
Speaker 3: make sense. Then we've also done a ton of investment
Speaker 3: in how we work and grinders really like I actually
Speaker 3: call it terraforming, not transforming, because the change is so massive.
Speaker 3: Engineering team, you know, started adopting AI coding much earlier
Speaker 3: than most people, and today eighty percent of the code
Speaker 3: that's written a grinder is not written by humans and
Speaker 3: the engineer. It's all AA generated and engineer's job is
Speaker 3: fundamentally changing. It's no longer writing code, it's actually architecting
Speaker 3: the code and managing synthetics that are writing the code.
Speaker 3: So every engineering new is becoming an engineering manager. In effect,
Speaker 3: organizations are going to become flatter as a result overall.
Speaker 3: And you know, in March, when we were planning for
Speaker 3: Q two, each team came to the planning meeting and
Speaker 3: said that they don't have enough work and we need
Speaker 3: more projects. I've been building software for twenty years and
Speaker 3: I've never had anything like that happen to me. And
Speaker 3: don't get me wrong, like our team works extremely hard.
Speaker 3: We're very hardcore culture. We're not like SpaceX, but in
Speaker 3: the layer of where do you fall in the hardcore,
Speaker 3: we're very much closer to SpaceX than we are to
Speaker 3: an average company. So these are not people who are
Speaker 3: not working so hard. But we still had like more
Speaker 3: capacity because of what AI is doing to how productive
Speaker 3: we are. I don't care how much money we spent
Speaker 3: on tokens, honestly, because every dollar that's spent on tokens
Speaker 3: is way more output than you'd ever expect. I think
Speaker 3: companies that are worried about the spending are actually not
Speaker 3: well managed, because then probably people are running around doing
Speaker 3: things that don't need to us to be done. But
Speaker 3: I don't want to give numbers out because these were
Speaker 3: companition numbers that were shared with me. But one of
Speaker 3: the very large tech companies that recently was in the
Speaker 3: press a lot being worried about, you know, token spend.
Speaker 3: I did a rough I heard what the total number
Speaker 3: of that concern was, and by on our order as
Speaker 3: a magnitude basis, like they were saying twenty k per engineer,
Speaker 3: and we are roughly running like fifty k per engineer
Speaker 3: in token usage. But I'm happy if that became one
Speaker 3: hundred well, because I know for a fact already that
Speaker 3: what we're getting on the other side is way more
Speaker 3: valuable than that.
Speaker 2: So let me ask you lastly just about out politics,
Speaker 2: and I'll confess we were both in Washington for the
Speaker 2: White House Correspondent Association dinner and alas, neither of us
Speaker 2: got the invite to the party that you threw, and
Speaker 2: we'll run up to that. But it was a popular party,
Speaker 2: and I think popular because there were so many people
Speaker 2: there from both sides of the aisle, attracted a broadswath
Speaker 2: of people. How do you view engagement with politics with Washington.
Speaker 2: The job of any CEO in this day and age
Speaker 2: is to make that part of the role. You have
Speaker 2: to engage with regulators, with lawmakers.
Speaker 3: So about six months into me studying my job, I
Speaker 3: get this note from the person who was leading Grinder
Speaker 3: for Quality, which is that our public service arm. I'm
Speaker 3: telling me that this horrible situation is developing in Egypt
Speaker 3: where Egyptian police is arresting gay men and then using
Speaker 3: their phones to honeytrap up our gay men. And I'm like, Okay,
Speaker 3: who in DC do we call? Because I know America
Speaker 3: has a lot of influence around what happened, and we
Speaker 3: didn't have a single person to contact because we had
Speaker 3: zero relationship in Washington, which I thought was kind of
Speaker 3: totally unacceptable. And then secondly, it felt to me like
Speaker 3: a lot of the groups that should be advocating on
Speaker 3: behalf of Kate rights and do we're becoming very partisan.
Speaker 3: And I'm of opinion that you canot accomplish stuff in
Speaker 3: DC no matter who's in power, unless you're bipartisan, because
Speaker 3: it takes sixty of us to get anything in the Senate.
Speaker 3: But also for things to stick around, you need both
Speaker 3: sides to be brought into it, and I felt like
Speaker 3: we were uniquely positioned to be able to do it
Speaker 3: because we are a business and we can talk to
Speaker 3: both sides of the aisle, and that's what we've been
Speaker 3: striving to do, and so far we've been very, very happy.
Speaker 3: There are specific things we care about. Decriminalization of homosexuality
Speaker 3: in certain countries where it's illegal, marriage equality, access to
Speaker 3: fertility treatment for gay couples in the US at the
Speaker 3: same in the same way that it's available to others.
Speaker 3: And then access to STD preventative and treatment medications and services,
Speaker 3: which matters to all our users. This is not an
Speaker 3: issue that's like sixty forty Young Grinder. It's in most
Speaker 3: of these issues that are like ninety ten or one
Speaker 3: hundred and zero, and we can make massive headways on
Speaker 3: those if we bring people together to advocate for them.
Speaker 1: Do you think, given your background, you're in a good
Speaker 1: position to try to talk about these issues to a
Speaker 1: more conservative leaning government. I mean, you know, you grew
Speaker 1: up in what was then the USSR is now Georgia.
Speaker 1: That's not a place that's very friendly towards alternative lifestyles.
Speaker 1: Does that give you a way to talk about this
Speaker 1: to people who may have a knee jerk. No, but
Speaker 1: when you talk to them about the human rights aspects
Speaker 1: of it and how it can benefit society as a whole,
Speaker 1: they're more able to have that conversation.
Speaker 3: It certainly helps me better appreciate the challenges that our
Speaker 3: users face in countries like that. I mean, one of
Speaker 3: my first board meetings at Grinder, we were discussing whether
Speaker 3: to enable Grinder and URAN or not, and this was
Speaker 3: like something we had shut down because of your sanctions,
Speaker 3: And we're getting messages from local activists and users saying
Speaker 3: we would prefer for you to be on and take
Speaker 3: the risk of being caught by the government that we
Speaker 3: use in Grinder to not having a way to connect
Speaker 3: with each other because there's no other way to do.
Speaker 1: That's because the risk of having that on your phone
Speaker 1: is really substantial.
Speaker 3: Mass. Yeah, so I'm like you, I'm not a normal
Speaker 3: board discussion of like what you're going to be dealing with.
Speaker 3: Remember going to see the Sectory of Labor about a
Speaker 3: year ago or nine months ago, and we were talking about, hey,
Speaker 3: we want to make sure that if we do things
Speaker 3: on IVF, we should that should be extendable to gay couples,
Speaker 3: because gay couples are not actually re seeking the treatment themselves.
Speaker 3: It's usually survey that the spreceiving treatment, and then like
Speaker 3: you should be able to transfer that service on. And
Speaker 3: her response to me back then was, like the President
Speaker 3: said all families, that includes gay families, and like some
Speaker 3: people might not expect that from this administration. I'm like,
Speaker 3: there's no question about that. And that's actually the kind
Speaker 3: of rule that they issued on IVF and insurance you
Speaker 3: know earlier, this queer too. So that was a really
Speaker 3: good meeting on our end and a very good outcome
Speaker 3: for everyone. And so I think people are generally very
Speaker 3: willing to listen. And that's not to say that there's
Speaker 3: obviously a huge number of people in a Democratic party
Speaker 3: who've been massive champions of gay rights, and they have
Speaker 3: been great at engagement with us, and obviously it's really
Speaker 3: imperative for us to be working very closely with them
Speaker 3: and ensuring that they have the right information to be
Speaker 3: able to do the incredible work that they do on
Speaker 3: behalf of all Grander users