How two straight guys bought Grindr and made $2B

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
The App Store rating, Jeff, was it 1.8?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
1.8. And remember, one star is the minimum, so it's really 0.8 is the rating on the app.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:09)
And how are you doing 100 million of revenue and 45 million of profit with a 1.8 star rating? So we look at this, and we just see opportunities.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
Basically, how we got here was Shaan and I were talking about Grindr, I think, last month, and how there was this amazing story behind it, and we found out that you were the two guys who bought it and took it public and made it this home run. But Shaan is good friends with James Currier. Rick, I've had a bunch of run-ins with you early on in my career, and then same with you, Jeff. And we were like, we gotta get these guys on. Because you guys have been a little bit behind the scenes. You don't talk that much, you're just kinda quietly behind the scenes, but you've had some major successes. And I thought it would be cool to give you a platform and tell the story, because I don't think you guys have told a lot of these stories publicly, maybe ever, have you?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:01)
Not a lot. No, we've done a couple here or there, but no, we have not been out there publicly and talked about what we did at Grindr, but we're happy to today.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:11)
So let's do story time. How did you two guys end up owning Grindr? What is the story of Grindr before you, and then how did you guys get involved and what happened afterwards? I wanna hear the Grindr story.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:21)
Grindr was created, founded by a guy named Joel Simcai about 15 years ago, and Joel is a gay man who wanted the ability to create an app to find other gay men GPS enabled. Kind of like Uber, right? Uber really existed once the iPhone became ubiquitous and people could see where you are. That proximity, it became really tight. So he created Grindr. Grindr took off and he ended up selling it to a Chinese company called Kunlin. And then a few years later, CFIUS, the Committee for Foreign Investment in the US forced the sale of Grindr. So they were worried that the data that Grindr was collecting could be used for negative ways by the Chinese ownership.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:08)
Was that first sale a big sale? Was Grindr considered a big success at the time? Because I know some of the dating apps traded for not that much money early on.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:17)
Yeah, so I believe Sam, I believe, sorry Joel sold it for I want to say $260 million. So it was a great sale and he owned 90% of the company. Very few others had equity, so he did very, very well. And then CFIUS forced the sale, right?

**SPEAKER_3** (2:35)
Was it true? Was the Chinese using it? What was that mean? I think I read the accusation was that they were blackmailing straight men who are on Grindr.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:45)
I think it's hypothetically true that if you have the servers located in China and you're the Chinese government and you wanted to watch, it's sort of like if you know the answer to the question, you can use Grindr backwards. So if you know that you have users in the White House who are gay and using the app, well then you can figure out who those users are and you can track where they are and you can say, oh, the president's about to leave the White House because people on his forward team who happen to use the app are using it and they're doing it. With the Ukraine War, we heard that soldiers on both sides were using the app to meet each other sort of between battles. And people have talked about Olympians being outed in the village and so work was done at Grindr to help avoid these sort of extreme cases. And so I think there is possibility for abuse and there are certainly people who are closeted or not well-discussed in politics, in the military and in high positions who, yeah, hypothetically, if the Chinese government wanted to and they had access to the information, they could exploit that information and potentially use it to blackmail our politicians.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:51)
Okay. So that's like a real, that sounds very reasonable, why a sale was forced.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:56)
So when they force a sale, what does that mean? Like there's an auction one day, how does that play out?

**SPEAKER_2** (4:00)
They give the company one year, you have one year to sell to a US ownership group.