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