February 14, 2018 • 51 mins
Happy Valentine's Day! Today, we look at the apps and services meant to connect people to one another. What's the story behind the romance?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Text with Technology with tech Stuff from hastaff works dot com.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Jonathan Strickland, wishing you a happy Valentine's Day. That's when
this episode is originally airing February eighteen, and because it's
(00:25):
publishing on Valentine's Day, and because I love tech, this
is my Valentine to Tech. Although, to be more specific,
I thought it would be fun to look at an
app designed to connect people with the possibility of romance
in their near future. I'm talking about Tender. But first
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:35):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:25):
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.
(04:47):
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
(05:10):
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.
(05:31):
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
(05:53):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:59):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:45):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:30):
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
(08:51):
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
(09:12):
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
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:39):
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.
(11:00):
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
(11:23):
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,
(11:44):
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.
(12:07):
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
(12:30):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:11):
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,
(13:33):
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
(13:57):
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.
(14:17):
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
(14:37):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:03):
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
(16:25):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:09):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:54):
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
(18:16):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:21):
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
(19:43):
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
(20:05):
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
(20:26):
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
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
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
(21:30):
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
(21:53):
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
(22:13):
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
(22:37):
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.
(22:58):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:40):
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
(24:03):
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,
(24:26):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:09):
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.
(25:33):
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
(25:55):
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
(26:16):
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
(26:38):
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.
(26:59):
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
(27:22):
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
(27:45):
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
(28:06):
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
(28:26):
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
(28:49):
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
(29:11):
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,
(29:33):
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,
(29:55):
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
(30:16):
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,
(30:37):
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
(31:00):
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
(31:23):
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
(31:44):
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.
(32:04):
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
(32:25):
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
(32:47):
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
(33:09):
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.
(33:29):
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
(33:51):
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,
(34:12):
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
(34:34):
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
(34:56):
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,
(35:18):
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.
(35:39):
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
(36:03):
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
(36:25):
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
(36:47):
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
(37:09):
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
(37:31):
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
(37:54):
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
(38:17):
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
(38:39):
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.
(39:01):
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,
(39:22):
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
(39:45):
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
(40:06):
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
(40:28):
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
(40:50):
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
(41:11):
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
(41:33):
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.
(41:54):
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
(42:17):
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
(42:39):
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
(43:00):
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
(43:21):
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
(43:43):
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
(44:04):
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
(44:24):
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
(44:46):
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
(45:07):
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
(45:28):
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
(45:51):
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,
(46:12):
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,
(46:36):
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
(47:01):
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
(47:23):
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
(47:43):
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
(48:07):
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
(48:30):
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
(48:50):
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
(49:14):
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
(49:36):
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
(49:58):
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
(50:21):
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
(50:43):
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.
(51:05):
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
Text with Technology with tech Stuff from hastaff works dot com.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Jonathan Strickland, wishing you a happy Valentine's Day. That's when
this episode is originally airing February eighteen, and because it's
(00:25):
publishing on Valentine's Day, and because I love tech, this
is my Valentine to Tech. Although, to be more specific,
I thought it would be fun to look at an
app designed to connect people with the possibility of romance
in their near future. I'm talking about Tender. But first
(00:46):
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
(01:07):
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
(01:29):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:35):
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
(02:55):
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
(03:20):
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
(03:41):
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
(04:02):
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
(04:25):
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.
(04:47):
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
(05:10):
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.
(05:31):
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
(05:53):
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
(06:16):
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
(06:37):
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
(06:59):
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
(07:21):
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
(07:45):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:30):
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
(08:51):
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
(09:12):
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
(09:33):
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
(09:56):
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
(10:18):
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
(10:39):
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.
(11:00):
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
(11:23):
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,
(11:44):
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.
(12:07):
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
(12:30):
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
(12:50):
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
(13:11):
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,
(13:33):
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
(13:57):
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.
(14:17):
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
(14:37):
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
(15:00):
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
(15:20):
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
(15:41):
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
(16:03):
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
(16:25):
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
(16:47):
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
(17:09):
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
(17:31):
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
(17:54):
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
(18:16):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:21):
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
(19:43):
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
(20:05):
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
(20:26):
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
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
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
(21:30):
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
(21:53):
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
(22:13):
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
(22:37):
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.
(22:58):
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
(23:18):
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
(23:40):
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
(24:03):
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,
(24:26):
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
(24:47):
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
(25:09):
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.
(25:33):
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
(25:55):
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
(26:16):
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
(26:38):
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.
(26:59):
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
(27:22):
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
(27:45):
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
(28:06):
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
(28:26):
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
(28:49):
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
(29:11):
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,
(29:33):
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,
(29:55):
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
(30:16):
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,
(30:37):
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
(31:00):
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
(31:23):
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
(31:44):
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.
(32:04):
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
(32:25):
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
(32:47):
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
(33:09):
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.
(33:29):
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
(33:51):
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,
(34:12):
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
(34:34):
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
(34:56):
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,
(35:18):
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.
(35:39):
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
(36:03):
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
(36:25):
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
(36:47):
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
(37:09):
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
(37:31):
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
(37:54):
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
(38:17):
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
(38:39):
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.
(39:01):
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,
(39:22):
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
(39:45):
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
(40:06):
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
(40:28):
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
(40:50):
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
(41:11):
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
(41:33):
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.
(41:54):
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
(42:17):
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
(42:39):
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
(43:00):
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
(43:21):
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
(43:43):
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
(44:04):
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
(44:24):
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
(44:46):
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
(45:07):
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
(45:28):
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
(45:51):
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,
(46:12):
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,
(46:36):
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
(47:01):
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
(47:23):
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
(47:43):
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
(48:07):
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
(48:30):
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
(48:50):
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
(49:14):
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
(49:36):
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
(49:58):
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
(50:21):
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
(50:43):
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.
(51:05):
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
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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