Grindr CEO Talks AI Features and Politics

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

**Christina Ruffini** (0:07)
Look, it's June, Pride Month here in New York and around the world, and Grindr is the world's largest network for LGBTQ people. The app is now evolving into what it's calling a global gayborhood integrating AI, or as the CEO calls it, gay eye, that's right, and looking into expanding its product line beyond just the dating app.

**David Gura** (0:27)
Well, that includes live events, the pop-up concert with Madonna took place Thursday night in Times Square. In the past year, Grindr's revenue was up 38 percent, while its share price has dropped by half. For C-Suite Saturday, we spoke to CEO George Arison about the future of the company.

**George Arison** (0:43)
I can't control what the stock does. The stock is going to do its own thing, and I think that over the long term, the market is pretty efficient, over the short term it's not, sometimes. And I think Grindr does have some complexity for people to understand, but we do have an incredible business. I mean, the company's grown 25 plus percent every year over the last four years. Since I've been around even longer, it's been growing at that pace or higher. EBITDA has also been getting better. We did more EBITDA last year than we did revenue in 2022, which I think that's the number I really like, and it's going to continue going up. And I don't see anything that in the next three, four years is going to slow us down. Like we have a very strong plan and execution is really, really strong.
Our team is doing everything that needs to be done to make the business work really well. So I think my job from the investor perspective is to keep meeting with people and telling them our story. And I think over time it will take care of itself. We had some challenging things happen last fall when one of our shareholders had issues with his pledged shares, and that led to a squeeze on him and resulted with share price coming down quite a bit. So I think there's some recovery that needs to happen from that, and that does take time. I mean, it's only been three quarters.
So we'll keep kind of plugging along, and what I do tell the team is to not focus on the share price because that'll be distracting. We should focus on execution, and ultimately the market is pretty hushed.

**Christina Ruffini** (2:10)
You did a survey last year and you found that one in three gay relationships started on Grindr. And that's been kind of an evolution because I think when I first started learning about it, it was thought of as a hookup app, but now several, actually most of my friends who got married in that community met on Grindr. What does that do to your business model and how is the dynamics of what people are using the app for change?

**George Arison** (2:30)
Yeah, the actual number is 50%, so it's even higher.

**Christina Ruffini** (2:33)
Wow, okay.

**George Arison** (2:33)
So yeah, it's pretty incredible.

**Christina Ruffini** (2:36)
Every wedding I've been to, it's how did you meet Grindr?

**George Arison** (2:38)
I mean, for me, one of the most cool kind of moments when I was just getting started, actually wasn't CEO yet, but I was doing the road show for us going public, and we met with this one investor and he's like, let me show you this picture. And he pulls out his picture from his brother's wedding where brother and his husband had met on Grindr and they had this little Grindr logo where you could take a photo in for every guest.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:58)
At the wedding?

**George Arison** (2:59)
Yeah, at the wedding. So he pulls this out, and I'm like, this is going to probably go well, because I don't have to explain to him what we do.
I think, look, in the gay world and gay culture, things are pretty fluid, right? So casual dates or hookups leading to long-term relationships are actually very common. Internally, we tend to joke that if a gay couple hooks up three times and then doesn't go on a date, probably will never go on a date. Whereas a straight couple, if it doesn't go on three days prior to a hookup, that relationship probably won't go anywhere.

**Christina Ruffini** (3:27)
It's just a different predate rule.

**George Arison** (3:29)
So that's just how the culture is.
But the reality is that a lot more gay men today want to be in long-term relationships than was the case when I was in my 20s.
And Andrew Sullivan, who was probably one of the primary architects of the case for gay marriage over the years, you know, he would make this argument that if we allow gay marriage, then gay men will move more in the direction of what straight people do, which is getting married and having stable long-term relationships. And I think that's very much happening. Because if you survey men under 35, you know, over half of them say that they want to be in a long-term relationship, and a quarter of them say they want to have children. So I have kids, I've always wanted kids. But when I would say that I wanted kids in my 20s, I was literally like the oddest ball out, one in 100 So society is changing dramatically in part because of the recognition of marriage. And that's really positive. And obviously Grindr is an awesome place to help with that because that is where people meet, and we have the critical mass of people to meet each other.