Swipe Right: Dating in the Digital Age

in their near future. I'm talking about Tender. But first I thought I would start all this off by actually relaying a story to you guys about myself. Now, I have never really used Tinder, because I've been a married man for longer than Tinder has been around. I did download Tinder, and, as I was explaining to my super producer Ramsey just a minute ago, uh, I actually called up my wife as soon as I downloaded it to let her know, Hey, sweetie, I'm doing an episode about Tinder.

So I downloaded Tinder. Please don't get mad or divorce me. I haven't really used it, but I did download it in the interest of, you know, really exploring what this whole topic is about. But I do have a history with technology and falling in love. See when I was in college, nearly two decades before Tinder would become a reality, the Web was just starting to become a thing. At that time. In fact, I was Internet savvy. I was using the Internet on a regular basis, but I had

very little interest in the Web at that time. That was a brand new element to the Internet. And sure, the Web had graphics and could present things in a way that didn't make it look like it was just big blocks of text, which is the way most other Internet tools presented information. Wasn't very attractive. It was really data heavy and probably appealed more to computer scientists than anyone else. But that's how I got used to the Internet. And the Web was also kind of slow and cumbersome.

It took a really long time for pictures to download on the Web at that point, so to me, it just seemed like it was a waste of time. You're you're waiting a minute and a half for something to load. Nope, give me a good tell net client. Any day of the week, I would log onto tell net based chat rooms and there I would tell jokes to people. I'd get into debates, and occasionally I would feed the trolls because I was young and stupid. Things are very different

now because now I'm old and stupid. But anyway, I guess it would be good to explain what telling it is, just in case you are not familiar with it. It is a network protocol, and a protocol just means it's really a set of rules that a technology follows in order for things to work, so that this particular protocol allows you to log onto another computer that is connected to the same network your computer is on. So it doesn't have to be the Internet, it can be an intranet.

The Internet's construction, however, meant that any computer connected to it could act as a tell net server if you wanted it to, and users on their computers would be called clients in this relationship, and the clients would log onto servers through tell net. That's was That was the set of rules that would connect the two, and the computers would run software that turned them into virtual terminals

for that server. So it's like you're accessing this distant computer using your actual physical computer right in front of you. So your your physical computer is a window into this distant computer. And you could do a lot of different stuff this way, So it's not just like it was used for games or chat rooms, but that's what I was using it for. I was using it to access chat rooms and games and games like multi user dungeons,

things like that. The chat room would be hosted on one of those server computers, and by using telling that I could remotely log into that computer under a user

account and chat away. Now, typically the way this works is you would log in and you would choose a handle, and some of the chat rooms would even allow you to password protect the handle, so that way you could register a handle so that it was only yours and anytime you saw someone with that name popping up in a chat room, you knew who that belonged to, or

at least you knew the personality that belonged to. Uh. Some chat rooms didn't have that, which meant that you might show up and find out that your handle has already taken. If it was something that was really popular, I didn't tend to go to those, and one day I found myself on one of these chat rooms chatting with a young woman who had charmed me right away because she recognized that the handle I was using was

a reference to classic literature. Specifically, there was a reference to one of Victor Hugo's novels, of course, the infamous Les Miserable. And it turned out this particular young woman had studied French extensively and even worked at the French embassy in Washington, d C. We started chatting for a while, and we found ourselves really enjoying each other's virtual company.

And this continued for quite some time, and eventually our chat room conversations gave way to long distance phone calls, because back in those days, long distance was still a thing. You had to have actually paid to have a phone call that was long distance. And eventually this culminated with the young woman taking a big chance, and she took a train ride down the Eastern seaboard in order to visit me. And I was smitten, and for some reason, so was she. And that's how I met my wife,

and we've been married for twenty years now. In fact, this fall, it will be twenty one years now. I tell that story to illustrate how technology can foster connections between people who otherwise might never have had the chance to even know that the other person existed. Let alone fall in love. But in our case, the tech was just a conduit for conversations. It wasn't intended specifically to

create these sort of relationships. So what about a technology that has been built to do that From the ground up. It was all meant to get Cupid's arrow to do the whammy on a couple of would be lovers. And that's why we're gonna talk about the story of Tender. Now.

I wish I could say the story I'm going to tell you is just filled with sweetness and flowers and chocolates and be dovey stuff, But it's also filled with some really complicated corporate relationships, a lot of controversy, some allegations of sexual harassment, and some weird maneuvers at the executive leadership level that can get a bit confusing at times.

But let's begin at the beginning. And the story behind Tinder is actually a bit murky because there were a lot of people involved early on with the project, some of whom would later be acknowledged as co founders of the company and some of whom would not be, and in at least one case, that contributed to some major problems for Tinder. Further down, the road. Now, one person who was certainly a co founder was Sean Rad. Rad

grew up in Los Angeles. He attended private high school where his path would cross with another person who would become important to Tinder. That would be Justin Matine. And then Sean Rad would go on to enroll at the University of Southern California. Really he was studying business development,

essentially a course in how to be an entrepreneur. While at USC, Rad ended up running into Justin Mateen again, the same guy he had kind of crossed paths within high school, and they took a math class in two thousand four and it was in that class where they hit it off. They became best friends. Now, while Goal going to college, Rad and Matteen would work on projects outside of its side gigs. They would have these side businesses they were trying to develop partly as part of

their studies. And by projects i'm talking about like real startup companies. Rad's first business was one called or gou O r g o O. It was a communications platform that combined elements of email and instant messaging into a single service. And it didn't exactly just burst out of the gate. In two thousand four, they got a lot of interest. There were more than a million people who had signed up to be notified when the service would go online, and by two thousand and eight it was

still in pre release mode. Ultimately, according to Rad in an article in Business Insider, it got quote wrapped up in some IP issues with another company and unfortunately had to shut down end quote. But the idea itself wasn't at fault necessarily. Now, both Rad and Mattine continued to work on projects as they attended USC In two thousand and seven, Rad convinced Matine to give up his beloved

BlackBerry phone and switched to an iPhone. Remember, the iPhone was brand new in that time, but Rad saw that the iPhone was going to usher in a new era of computing, computing, and and and a little bit later, he became convinced that mobile devices would be the evolution of computing and more people wouldn't be moving away from

classic desktop and laptop machines. In fact, he went so far as to say that mobile devices would completely eradicate traditional computers, which hasn't happened yet, but we certainly have seen the mobile devices have heavily impacted things like web traffic, and more and more of a website's traffic tends to come from mobile devices than from your traditional laptops and desktops. In September two eight, at the beginning of his senior

year at USC, Rad dropped out of college. He was going to focus completely on developing business ideas, and the following year he launched a new service called ad dot l Y or Addlee. Now, this was a platform upon which celebrities could endorse products and services in return for a fee. So the idea was that addle could connect brands with celebrities. So let's say that you've got a deodorant and you want Bruce Campbell to be the guy talking about your deodorant, you might use a service like

ad Lee in order to get that connection. So, in other words, Rad was all about connecting influencers with brands, and it took a couple of years to really get moving. And at that time, Rad was kind of fed up with dealing with two things that I think would try anyone's patients, and those two things would be celebrities and advertisers. He decided he would sell his stake and then free himself up to go do something else, and he would get hired on at an incubator company towards the end

of two thousand eleven beginning of two thousand twelve. And in case you're curious, an incubator company is essentially an organization that exists to give people the opportunity to develop and launch startup businesses. In return, typically the incubator company has a portion of ownership in whatever businesses are launched

out of it. This particular incubator company was called Hatch Labs, and hatch Labs is one small part of an enormous empire overseen by a company called Interactive Core, which is better known as I a C. And let's just talk about I a C for a moment. I a C started off as a shell corporation, which means it didn't have any business operations of its own or real assets. So this is a company that doesn't have office space,

it doesn't have office supplies, doesn't have employees. Instead, shell corporations can be used to do stuff like act in place of another entity for the purposes of large business transactions, which sometimes can be shady, But there are lots of legal uses for shell corporations, so it's not just something that is done to move money around. Sometimes there are real legitimate purposes for it. For example, a startup might

use a shell corporation in order to raise funds. So you might have a startup that has a fun quirky name, but it might be a fun quirky name that isn't really the best to get investors on board. So you have a shell corporation that's really handling the fundraising aspect of things, and all that money ends up going to the startup company. In this case, this particular startup company

was created on behalf of the Home Shopping Network. It was called Silver King Broadcasting Company and it was used to purchase regional television stations in the nineteen eighties in an effort to expand the Home Shopping networks viewer base. Now that shell corporation began to buy up other properties, and at first it was local TV stations, but then it was a majority stake in the Home Shopping Network itself and at that point it changed its name to

h s N Incorporated. The company continued buying up other properties, mostly media companies, including a movie studio called Savoy Pictures and that owned four Fox affiliate TV stations, and then in the late nineties, the company bought Ticketmaster Group. Hs N bought the TV side of Universal Studios all of their television assets for about four billion dollars a suite

sum I would say. At that point, a company's name changed to USA Networks Incorporated, and in the two thousand's the company would end up selling off many of its traditional TV production and broadcast companies and instead start to invest in online acquisitions, web based acquisitions, and app based acquisitions. And that brings our story in connection with some companies I've talked about in recent episodes of Tech stuff like the Vendi Universal Entertainment that was the company that ended

up taking over some of those divested TV properties. USA Network purchased Expedia and a few other websites and online companies and change its name a couple more times, ending with Interactive Core in two thousand three and I a C in two thousand four. Now I a C kept acquiring other companies, including stuff like Hotwire, dot Com, lending Tree, ask Jeeves, trip Advisor, College, Humor Dictionary, dot Com, Urban Spoon,

and more. So. It's almost like a shark. It was made to eat other companies, or at least bring them under the fold. Now, one of the properties I a C owned was Match dot Com, which as a leading online dating service, and that would also become the centerpiece of a division within I a C. Called Match Group ended up being kind of spun out as its own thing.

So you have the umbrella company I a C. And a subsidiary company called match Group, which also oversees a bunch of other smaller companies, including Match dot Com, and ultimately this would become the home to Tinder. Tender would become part of match Group, and Match Group would become its own publicly traded company in two thousand fifteen. But that's jumping ahead of the story at this point. The important thing to note is that Rad went to work for hatch Labs, the incubator owned by I a C.

And another company also had steak in hatch Labs. That was Extreme Labs, which would later be acquired by a company called Pivotal in two thousand thirteen. I told you this was going to get complicated. So the reason it's important to talk about all those companies behind hatch Labs is that they had a stake of ownership in the businesses that launched out of the incubator. So it's not just hey, these two big companies own this place and

Tender came out of that place. It's these companies not only gave Tender a place to develop the app, but also they owned part of the business. Now, Rad's first gig over at Hatched Labs was to work on a location based service, an app called Cardify c A R D I F Y that was sort of a customer loyalty program that was location based, kind of like a punch card you would get for buying coffee at that cool place where they draw the cute bird in the phone.

I love that place anyway. Cardify was all about working with smartphones to leverage their ability to tie a person to a general location. Now, this was in two thousand eleven, when location based services were really just starting to take off. So Rad would end up working with a guy named Jonathan Baddeen on this project, and Baden would on to

become another important person in the birth of Tender. Meanwhile, Justin Mattine had co developed a couple of companies called cover Canvas and Site Canvas, so he was busy as well. He was not part of Hatched Labs at this point, but he was still friends with Seawan Rad. In early two thousand twelve, hatch Labs had a hackathon, which is an event in which creators are given time and resources

to put together something you now. Sean Rad was paired with another guy named Joe Munrios, a developer who had been looking at an app that could match people to local businesses that might interest them. So, in other words, if you're walking down the street and you've got a history of buying hats and there's a really cool hat shop, you might get a little notification saying, hey, hats are us is right around the corner. Maybe you should stick your head in there and take it out with a

hat on it. Well, together, Rad and Munio's started to brainstorm what they were gonna do for this hackathon, and they thought they might create a dating app does signed to match people up, and they decided to put together a rough prototype, which was the earliest build of what would eventually become Tender. I'll talk a little bit about what that prototype was and their ideas behind it in just a minute, but first let's take a quick break

to thank our sponsor. Al Right, around this time, the app still didn't have a name, and it certainly wasn't gonna be called Tender. The working name was Matchbox, and according to a presentation deck that Rad and Munio's put together in February twelve, which I found on a lengthy tech Crunch article, it was subtitled The Flirting Game, and the presentation suggested that Matchbox could take the place of the singles experience of going to bars to meet people.

So instead of trying to muster up the courage to approach a stranger in a bar and potentially face rejection right then and there, the app would allow people with then the general area to view profile photos of each other, and at that point you could express interest in the photo or you could choose to dismiss it to pass on it. Though there was no swiping at this stage,

that was not part of the app yet. You just would use a little buttons on the app to indicate whether you were interested or now you're not so interested

in that person. If both parties showed interest in each other, the app would then allow them to send messages back and forth, but if one of the two did not express interest, communication channels would remain closed, and in fact, the person who didn't say anything didn't accept or didn't swipe right, as the case would be later on, would never even know about the second person, So it was meant to only allow communication between people who had jointly

expressed interest in each other. According to the presentation, the app would base location data off of WiFi signals rather than GPS coordinates and thus be hyperlocal, and the app could be designed to narrow searches based off of common interests or friends that both parties might have in common.

Matchbox would become a project at Hatch Labs, although Sean Rad was still officially working on Cardify, he just found himself spending a lot of time thinking about this pet project, then really focusing on Cardify, which he felt at that point had pretty much gone as far as he could

take it before it would end up becoming an official app. Also, they were really concerned with making this a gamified experience, having this this sensation of playing a game where you're choosing yes or no. This is kind of based off of a website called hot or Not where you would rate people's appearance based on a photo that was uploaded to the site, and it gives you that really quick feeling of I don't know pleasure for being able to judge someone really on on the spot, just based upon

their appearance primarily, and they thought that by gamifying this it would it would end up inspiring more engagement, and if you were able to monetize that, whether by serving ads up against it or some other method, then you could make money off of this. So in March two thousand twelve, Jonathan Baden and Chris Golsinski would join Hatch Labs and begin working on the design for Cardify, and

by extension, they joined the Matchbox team. They used a workspace that was owned by Justin Mateen, and that's because the Hatch Labs office that was in Los Angeles had limited resources. Hatch Labs has a couple of different locations. The one in New York was reportedly really really well decked out, but the one in l A not so much. So they decided to use a space that Justin Matteen had.

Even though Matine at this point was not still not part of Hatch Labs, he was just Sean Rad's really good friend, and so he let them have use of the space as sort of a favor to two Sean. Now. In May of two thousand twelve, Whitney Wolf would join Hatch Labs and at some point between May and September two thousand twelve, she would begin to work with the Cardify and Matchbox teams, starting with Cardify and then transitioning over to Matchbox. As it turns out, she would play

a significant role in tenders history now. Sean Rad presented Cardify to an event called tech Crunch Disrupt in New York City, which is an event that helps fledgling startups get more attention potentially investment support. Rad was hoping to find some partners for the app and entice shop owners to join the service because again, Cardify was a shop loyalty program, so he needed the buy in of merchants

and vendors to create value for users. Otherwise, if you're a user and you're signing up for the service and no shopkeepers are on board, there's nothing to be loyal too. So they also submitted Cardify to the iPhone app Store. It was ready to go. Now is at this point that they hit a little bit of a snarl. Apple's app approval process is something that has always been to

some extent shrouded in mystery. Apple executives always say they want to make sure that the apps in the iPhone Store provide a good experience and are of value to iPhone owners. App developers sometimes have a different point of view on this. There have been complaints that sometimes work can be rejected for seemingly arbitrary reasons, or sometimes without any real reasoning at all, and it could be infuriating. Sometimes it feels like it just depends on what time

of day Apple is reviewing your app. Cardify was stuck in an approvals process that was dragging on for a few weeks and that was a bit too long for Rad and his team. They wanted to get to work on something else, so while they were waiting on Apple's approval, they got to work seriously developing the matchbox app into

a working product. Around this same time, Hatch still needed someone to help market Cardify to shop owners, and Hatch would end up hiring two people as sales reps for Cardify, and those two people were Whitney Wolf and Alexa Mattein. Now Alexa is Justin Mattein's sister, and she was also

really good friends with Whitney Wolf. So depending upon whose story you believe, because there are conflicting reports about all this, Justin Matteine introduced both Whitney wolf and Alexa Matine to his buddy Sean and suggested that maybe these women would be great sales reps for Cardify. Now keep in mind that at this time Justin was still not working in any official capacity with the company. He was just really

good friends with Sean Rad. So Rad hires these two women and they start hitting the road to land agreements, either for Cardify or for Tender, depending upon which story you're looking at. Rad ended up rejoining his team to actually build out Matchbox, which of course evolves into Tender. Now. Windy Wolfe later said that her time was really spent marketing Matchbox, not Cardify, that she was going to these different places and trying to talk up the app that

was still in development. Other accounts dispute that and say there wasn't anything to market yet, that she was actually still working on Cardify. But whatever the truth is, and I don't I don't know what it is, I wasn't there. One thing is certain, and that is that Matchbox was going to need a name change because I a C. Executives felt it was too close to their other property, match dot Com. Remember that was like the jewel of the match group. So it's a matchbox sounds too much

like match dot com. People are gonna think the two things are connected, and really they're not. So it became a hatch Labs project, an overall project for the entire incubator company to come up with a new name for Matchbox Now. Chris Golzinski had created a flame logo for Matchbox,

and everyone wanted to keep that. They liked the logo, so they started spitballing ideas for names, and again there's some disagreement about who originally proposed Tinder, but no matter who was responsible for that name, it is what the team chose as the new name for the service. And one of the other key elements of Tinder, the thing that people probably associate with it the most, is that swipe right or swipe left gesture you would use when

looking at potential matches. So, in case you've never used the app or heard how it works, when you open it and you're browsing photos for people who are in your area, you can choose to indicate your interest in a person, or you can dismiss that option, and one way to do that is with gestures of swiping so if you swipe left, the person's photo is dismissed into the ether and never seen again by you. Anyway, a swipe to the right means, hey, this person interests me.

I wouldn't mind getting a chance to talk to them. And if that person swipes right on your photo, then you can message one another. That's when the communication channels open up. Now, where did that notion come from to use gestures instead of just controls on a screen? Again, this is a matter of some disagreement, like a lot of things with tenders past. Jonathan Badeen says he thought of incorporating the gesture after he got all the shower

one morning and it was all steamed. His mirror was all steamed up, and so he wiped his mirror in one direction to clear away some steam. Then he looked at himself, and then he wiped in the other direction, and he thought eureka. But Chris Golzinski said that Bedean really took the concept from another app that he had

worked on before joining the Matchbox team. That was a flash cards app for a company called CHEG c H E G G. Golzenski said he had suggested swiping should be a gesture after he watched friends try to use the app and those friends were just naturally trying to swipe on the photo. Was unprompted and thought maybe we should incorporate that into the actual service, But no matter who came up with it, because again we don't know

the actual truth. The gesture ended up being one of the sticky elements of Tender figuratively speaking, figuratively sticky, hopefully not literally sticky, but it was a satisfying way to interact with the service. Some people likinged it to Lauren

brick Ter's invention of pull to refresh. You know, where you put your finger on the screen, you pull it downward and it helps refresh the window that can be found in numerous apps today, but it was It was a revelation and user interface design, and people point to that as being one of the really brilliant ideas in UI, and it helped again increase the gamification of the experience. It made it really fun to go through profiles. It was effortless, it was quick, and it was satisfying to

find someone and then swipe right on their profile. It's almost like looking at potential dates. Had an addictive element to it something like Civilization Player might call just one More Turn. Well. By August, the app had a soft launch in the iPhone App Store, so It's pretty quiet wasn't really lauded or anything, because they needed to try and find a way to build up the user base

enough to really get the ball rolling. So Sean rad at that point reached out to Justin Matein to lead the marketing efforts for the app for the first couple of months, and matteen joined the team first as a contractor before becoming an official employee uh and when he did,

he would become the chief marketing officer for Tinder. According to most stories I could find, one of Justin Mattine's first moves was to send out text messages to his contact list of friends and acquaintances asking them to download the app, and he did the same with several other members of the team. He said, hey, send out these messages. We want to get people downloading this as soon as possible, and then established the first few hundred people on Tinder.

Apparently he blasted or text blasted about three to five hundred folks on that first night, and Justin Matine felt that they should really target college populations with their app because college students are interested in dating, and he thought, if we can win them over, because they're gonna be pretty discerning with experience, as if the experience isn't fun, well know, because college students won't use it. But if they do use it, we know that we've got something

that's going to appeal to a broad population. So he brought Whitney Wolf and Alexi Matine over to the Tender side over from Cardify again depending upon which account you read, and at some point Justin Matine and Whitney Wolf began dating. Wolf was hierarchically speaking, Matins subordinates, so this was problematic from the beginning if a boss is dating an employee, and that relationship would end up being the focus of

an extremely public and ugly battle in Tender's history. But before all of that blew up, Mattine and his marketing team worked on getting college students on board. Matein was able to work with his younger brother to convince a college student that her birthday party really should be converted into a Tender promotional party, and she agreed because they were gonna pour money into the party, and they also

threw a big party at Mateen's family home. They actually bust students from USC to Mateen's parents house and they had a big pool party with an inflatable slide and all sorts of stuff and a big Tinder logo mounted on the house itself. Entry to the party had one requirement, you had to prove that you had downloaded the Tender app to your smartphone. And the parties were a huge success. Mateine had been throwing big parties for profits since his

college days. He had done this as sort of a promotional thing, and he was really good at it, and it got buzz going for the app, and the user base grew as a result. Matteine would repeat this process with other college campuses. Contacting fraternity and sorority houses is an early point of entry and then encouraging adoption from there. So he believed that if he could get influential members of a community on board, he could more easily grow the user base, and it turned out that this was true.

It also meant that for its first year, Tender was almost exclusively used by college students. According to multiple sources, nine of users in that first year were between the ages of eighteen and twenty four. Tender incorporated in April two thousand thirteen, and by then it was clear the app was going to be a huge success. It would be a couple more years before they introduced any sort

of paid content to the app. They were generating revenue mostly just through ads they were sharing, serving up ads along with the experience, and that was how they would supplement the uh the revenue for Tender or actually generate the revenue for Tender at that point, and at this stage, the focus was really mostly on bill ending out that user base as much as possible before incorporating some other

methods to make money. So if you make Tinder a buzzworthy term and get as many people on it as the service could handle, and you get them addicted, then you can figure out how to really leverage that. I'll talk about how they did that in just a minute, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, let's go back to Tinder. At this time, behind the scenes, the rocky romance between Justin Matene and Whitney Wolf was causing friction. To be gentle about it.

By most accounts, the two had a tumultuous breakup and we're done dating each other. By early two thousand fourteen. Uh, depends on who you ask. Some of them said that things ended in some said by February, but certainly by March things were over. And then Wolf would end up filing a sexual harassment and sexual discrimination lawsuit against Tender, naming Justin Mattine as the perpetrator, and she had some

screen captures of text messages that helps support her case. Now, in addition to her complaints against Matteine, she claimed that she was stripped of co founder status and that she had earned that status at Tinder, which could constitute a demotion and depending upon how the company handled it, it

could be a real legal hazard for them. There was a really long piece on tech Crunch that went into this whole ordeal, and it actually ended up questioning some of her claims and cited anonymous sources that had a different account of what happened. But Wolves attorney would respond to that piece by stating that it was filled with inaccuracies and reliance upon unreliable witnesses. Now, I was not there, and I don't know anyone who was there, so I

really don't feel comfortable commenting on this. Uh, it seems like it's too complicated a case, and I don't know all the particulars, but what I can say is that the content of the messages Mateine sent to Wolf, the ones that she shared in her screen captures, is really upsetting and definitely not appropriate communications between any two people, let alone in the context of a boss subordinate relationship.

So there was definitely bad behavior going on there, at least in those text messages they were They were not good, and you can find them online if you really are curious, but be warned there's some pretty awful stuff in there. Sean Rad and Justin Matteine were friends who went way way back, and still to this day, Rad considers Matine one of his best friends. But these accusations were serious, and Wolf was providing evidence that they were not entirely

without merit. So Tender suspended Justin Matteine and definitely in June two and fourteen. He would later resign from his position in September of two thousand fourteen. As for Wolf, she and Tender settle her lawsuit out of court, and then she went off and co founded a new company called Bumble. Like Tender, Bumble lets you browse profiles and select those that interest you. So again you can swipe on different profiles and say, all right, this person is

attractive to me and this person is not. But unlike Tender, Bumble puts the control into the hands of women who are using the service, which obviously, this particular example I'm going to give applies to heterosexual relationships, and that's where Bumble really has gotten a lot of its focus. So in a heterosexual matchup, the woman in the match has the option to send a message to the man. So the man's already swiped right, but he doesn't know anything

about the rest of that relationship. The woman swipes right, she then has the opportunity to send a message to the man, but the man would remain unaware of any matches unless he saw an incoming message. So in that way, women would have more time to decide whether or not they wanted to act on their initial impression of a

person or if they just wanted to let slip. Bumble would go on to hire a lot of women on the corporate side, so there are many women executives and women engineers over at Bumble, and the company really became an example of one that was working actively to give women opportunities in the tech space as well as in the dating world. Oh In a Chris Golsinski also left Tinder for Bumble, so he joined that team as well.

Back to Tinder, the Matins scandal worried executives at I a C. Who did not want to see their investment crumple in the wake of bad publicity regarding the former chief marketing officer. The app, though, had been doing incredibly well in two thousand and fourteen before the scandal broke. It received a ton of media attention after a snowboarder named Jamie Anderson said that the app was gaining popularity among Olympic competitors during the two thousand fourteen Winter Olympics.

The user base had changed as well. At that point, college students now made up only air quotes fifty percent of the users instead of ninety and in the spring, often tender marked the occasion of making one billion matches, not bad for a company that was embroiled in an

ugly behind the scenes controversy. Also in two thousand fourteen, I a C. Bought off the outstanding stake in Tender that had existed back in the hatch Labs days, and the company moved into a new headquarters located in West Hollywood.

There were about forty employees and ten thousand feet of office space, and while the app hit one billion matches in a soft launch in two thousand twelve to the spring of two thousand fourteen, it only took a couple more months for that number to double, so by the summer of two thousand fourteen they had hit two billion matches.

The app was doing really well, but at the executive level, I a C. Was still very much worried, so by November two thousand fourteen, head Han Shows at I a C made their well known unto Tinder, and Sean Rad was forced to step aside as CEO. He would become the president of Tinder, so he remained with the company,

but he no longer controlled it. This announcement was made before I a C. Had actually found a suitable replacement, so it kind of was effectively under Rad's guidance for a while longer, but eventually I a C. Chose a guy named Chris Payne, who had worked at companies like Amazon and Microsoft. However, Payne ultimately was considered not a good fit for Tender, and in two thousand fifteen they got a new CEO, and by that I mean they got an old CEO, and by that I mean Sean

Rad took over again. Yeah, Rad was removed a CEO, served as president, and then was reinstated as CEO just a few months later. The following year, in two thousand and sixteen, Rad would step down as CEO again, but this time by choice. He became the chairman of the company and Greg Blatt, who had been the chairman of Tinder, would switch places with Rad and become the new CEO.

Blatt was also the CEO of Match Group, which was Tinder's parent company, and you'll remember Match Group was again part of the I A C Empire, So yeah, it's still complicated. Rad's new role over at the company is to run an investment vehicle called Swipe Ventures. Swipe is so important with Tinder. This would be more about acquisitions and partnerships, so he was more about forming relationships and acquiring other companies to make Tinder more robust. So back

to Tinder itself. In two thousand fifteen, the company introduced Tinder Plus, which turned Tinder into a freemium app, which meant it's free to use the basic functions of Tinder it's ad supported, but it's free to use, but if you pay just a little bit more or just a little bit, you get access to some other features. For example, the Tender Plus experience was ad free, and you could

also rewind, so you could reverse a decision. Whether that was that you had dismissed someone and you suddenly thought, oh, wait a minute, they were kind of cute, I would like to swipe right, or you could dismiss someone you had swiped right on and then you suddenly got cold feet or a deep sense of regret that haunts you to this very day. Well, you could reverse that. You could also change your location using a feature called Passport

with Tinder Plus. This was handy if you were planning on traveling somewhere like going on vacation, and you wanted to see what the dating scene was like at that location. Since Tinder is a location based service, typically you're restricted to people who are actually in your same general location, but this would open things up a bit. Maybe you're going to travel in a week or two to some

place like some city. Maybe you're going on a business trip. Also, I know I'm old, and I know I shouldn't put any judgment about any of this, but you sorry, that's maybe that's just the old married man talking there. Your kids with your tender apps and your hookups arranged way in advance. Tinder plus also allowed you to use super

likes at the tune of five per day. So as super like sends the owner of the photo you just fell for a notification that someone has sent a super like on them, and there's a limited number per day, so if you use it, it tells the person on the other side, Hey, this this other person out there thinks you're worth spending a limited super like on you. Uh. This would just allow that person then to look at your profile and choose whether the swipe right or swipe left.

According to Tender, that increases the odds of engagement significantly. So in other words, if you're just going through the app and you're just swiping away, there's no guarantee that the person on the other side of all of your swipe rights will ever even see your photo, not even giving you the chance to make a match. But using

the super like would increase those chances. Uh. Typically you would remain unaware if someone had swiped around your profile until you swiped right on them, but this was a little way to send that notification and giving those more of a chance for reciprocation. Later in two thousand seventeen, Tender would introduce a new tiered kind of payments system

for Tender Gold. This was a kind of a an additional premium service on top of Tender Plus, and included such features like boosting your profile so that your image would be served up more frequently in searches for about half an hour, so for like thirty and It's you would be a star Tender profile and show up on more people's apps as they opened it up, kind of pay to play baby, And it would also let you see anyone who had swiped right on your photo, meaning

you didn't have to operate in the dark. You could actually go through those swipe rights and be super picky. You could filter through them and not have to go through all the trouble of doing all that exhausting swiping on your own. Um. Of course, this is assuming that you are of an attractive enough nature to have warranted a lot of swipe rights in the first place. I'm glad I'm married, because I am convinced that if I

weren't married and I was using Tinder. I would be very upset at how infrequently people had swiped right on my profile. Maybe that's just my insecurities talking. Luckily I don't have to worry about it. Ha ha. Married Later, the company made the decision to offer this as a t approach based upon user age. Tender Plus would cost nine dollars ninety nine cents a month if you happen

to be thirty years old or younger. But if that little gem on the palm of your hand goes dark, it meant you would need to pay nineteen dollars in ninety nine cents per month for the same service. Also, hit me up if you understand the reference I just made, because I would really be impressed anyway, This pricing struck

some people as being totally wrong. One of those people was a guy named Alan Candelore, who said that by charging two different amounts for the same service based solely on a person's age, it amounted to age discrimination, and he filed a lawsuit in California, which has the Unrust Civil Rights Act and the Unfair Competition Law that protect

against such things. The case originally went to trial, and initially things went in favor for Tender a judge ruled that the practice did not constitute discrimination, but Kendalloure's lawyers appealed this decision, and in an appeals court in two thousand eighteen, like literally hours before I went into the studio, the reaction was different. The appeals court made a very specific conclusion, and I swear I am not making this up.

I'm going to read their conclusion verbatim. It goes like this, no matter what tenders market research may have shown about the younger users relative income and willingness to pay for the service as a group as compared to the older cohort, some individuals will not fit this mold. Some older consumers will be more budget constrained and less willing to pay

than some and the younger group. We conclude the discriminatory pricing model, as alleged, violates the UNREACT and the u c L to the extent it employs an arbitrary class based generalization about older users income as a basis for charging them more than younger users. Because nothing in the complaints suggests that there is a strong public policy that justifies the alleged discriminatory pricing, the trial court aired in sustaining the demurer. Accordingly, we swipe left and reverse. And yes,

a judge actually said we swipe left. I want to fist bump that judge. Tender continues to be an incredibly popular app for those looking for Mr. Or Mrs Wright, or maybe just Mr and Mrs right now. According to Forbes, the company's valuation is at a cool three billion dollars, and according to a site called Business of Apps, it

also boasts the following statistics. The app is available in more than forty languages, and these days it generates around eight hundred million swipes a day and twelve million matches a day. A New York Times article stated the app as close to fifty million and users, with the average

person spending ninety minutes a day on the app. Esquire held a survey with their readers about Tender and they found out that six of the respondents use it as a way to relieve boredom rather than actually looking for a special someone. And of those people are female. Oh, and men swipe right about forty six percent of the time. Women are more picky and only swipe right four percent

of the time. Interesting facts. I think now there's a lot more I can say about tender, and honestly, again, I'm at an age where the whole thing seems like witchcraft to me, But I get its appeal. I get the gamification aspect of it. I get the fact that you can very quickly go through a lot of different potential profiles and express interest. There's definitely part of me that feels like it's a little shallow to judge people simply on photos, especially since photos can be an unrealistic

representation of what a person is all about. But at the same time, I have to admit, in most real world situations, people's appearances end up being the first thing that is a an element of attraction between two folks, at least upon first meeting. It. Maybe that you would more likely find a better, more stable relationship by becoming friends with someone first before trying to segue into a romantic relationship, but there's no guaranteed route of success one

way or the other. So while I am an old fogy and tender still frightens and confuses me, I don't judge anybody for making use of the up and trying to find love in this crazy world. Help you, guys, are able to express your emotions and affections for each other on this day, Valentine's Day, the day that we have been told by giant corporate rations, is the appropriate day for us to at least give a cursory nod of affection to those that mean a lot to us. Man,

I'm getting cynical. I need to go out and buy some flowers from my wife, so I'm gonna go do that. Meanwhile, if you guys have any suggestions for future topics I should cover on this show, let me know. You can send me a message on email. The address I used for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Remember we have an Instagram account

you should follow that. You can learn all sorts of cool stuff and see behind the scenes photos on occasion. And if you want to watch me record one of these live, go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You'll find a schedule there. I record on Wednesdays and Friday's. You can watch me as I stumble through my notes on a daily or twice a week basis, and you can even participate in the chat room. And I'm happy to chat with you guys. I love seeing you show up.

It means a lot to me and I hope you will give it a try and I'll talk to you guys again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics because at how staff works dot com