The Hidden Cash Machine Wall Street Keeps Ignoring | George Arison

**George Arison** (0:00)
$195 million to $540 million with insane margins. And then they add like Grindr discount line to it, and it gets you to a different number. I've had two different investors independently show me models like that.

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:11)
Oh, interesting. So they literally have like a line item baked in which is like the gay discount.

**George Arison** (0:16)
Yes.

**Anthony Pompliano** (0:16)
What's going on, guys? Today we have a very interesting conversation with George Arison. He is the CEO of Grindr. Now, this conversation is interesting to me because Grindr is one of those businesses that everyone discounts, literally. We're gonna talk about something called the gay discount and why so many different investors, they completely ignore this business. But it's actually really, really interesting because they drive a ton of free cash flow. They've been growing very quickly and it may be one of those diamonds in the rough that people are completely missing. But on top of that, this company has also been embracing artificial intelligence in a way that very few public companies have. They're not only using AI inside of the workplace in terms of changing the ways that they actually work on a day-to-day basis, but they're using AI inside the product as well. We're going to get into some of the details that I think you're going to find interesting. And then last but not least is that Grindr, most people think of it as somewhere where people go to connect with each other and try to find hookups. And that is part of the app. But also, they are pushing into health. And this derivative business model is ultimately driving why so much free cash flow is coming from this company. And so in this conversation with the CEO, I think you guys are going to learn a lot. I think it's going to change the way you think about how AI is being adopted by public companies. And frankly, George is fun. There's a couple of good jokes in here. He talked about some graphic content. And for some of you guys, you're going to be quite interested. So here's my conversation with George Arison.
All right, George, you guys run a very, very good business at Grindr. But there's a lot of folks who have zero idea how much AI you use inside of the product and for the employee base in terms of how you guys work. Can you walk me through how Grindr as a business and as a product has changed with the rise of AI?

**George Arison** (1:47)
So I probably took this job because of AI.
Once I was done with my last company, I was going to go and build an AI company because this is 2021 I knew that AI was going to be a big deal. Then when they approached me about this show, I'm like, wow, you have this incredible product that is very profitable and has the very devoted user base at that point. I think it was like 11.5 million monthly octaves. Now we're at 15
There's so much data from them in the product, but there's no AI plan, no AI strategy. And so if you could convert this to be an AI business, that would be super interesting. And so for me, AI in the product was always a big reason why I came here. And I think it's been very good and we can talk about that in a minute. But then I met with a mentor around maybe six months into taking this job. And I said, hey, this is a strategy that I'm going to go after. My hunch is we're going to need like 300 engineers to do this. And he had just left a job as CEO of a very large tech company, where his access to what was coming from a lot of other companies was much ahead of everybody else. And I go, no, you won't. And I'm like, what do you mean, no, I won't? It's like, I had just finished this tour of like Microsoft and OpenAI and Amazon and what is coming down the pike. And you're going to do all that with about 100 people. And I was right and he was right. I'm doing all that with about 100 people. But without AI coding, we would have had to have about 300 people doing the stuff that we're doing. So we've fundamentally transformed how the company is run internally. AI is now in everything that we do. And it's really incredible to watch that change and transformation. And for someone who's been building software for like 20 years, the amount of stuff you can get done in such short amount of time is really incredible.