George: Yeah, so Grindr's had a lot of lives over the years. It was started by a really impressive founder named Joel Simkai. He built it with zero investor capital. I know at least three different VCs who wanted to do a deal and then their partners blocked them because they couldn't understand what was... Going on to happen at Grindr and it became super viral and exploded. This is like 2009, 2015. Then he sold it to a Chinese conglomerate named Kunlun. Kunlun didn't realize they had to get CFIUS approval to do the transaction. And so after the deal was announced, CFIUS showed up and said, there's no way you're going to own this business correctly because there are lots of people on Grindr that are... Quite important to our security and their identity should not be known to the Chinese. And so then it was divested out and frankly saved by three investors that bought it in 2020. The term sheet to do the deal was signed about two weeks before COVID started and then closed in June of 2020. So you can imagine what that was like. They put a temporary management in place and then they hired me to come in to take the company public in 2022. So I've been there. Almost four years now, coming up in I think a week and a half or something. And a lot of the employees that have been hired at Grindr were from this like 2020 to 2022 period when... Unfortunately, no one really worked. And so, yes, it was a bit of a culture shock for like a capitalist to show up and say, now we're going to go make a lot of money and be very big as a public business. It felt like water and oil a little bit. But I think we're well past that now. It's great. All but 20 employees at Grindr have been hired since I've been there. So in effect, we refounded the business completely and really didn't have a vision when we got there and had to like really come up with a plan for what to do. And the thing that attracted me to Grindr, like I've been using Grindr since it got started. I had this recollection of a friend of mine showing it to me in 2009. I'm like, wow, this is amazing. I've been building an app on BlackBerry and I went and got an iPhone in order to... That is crazy. That is nuts. Casual dating is a huge part of the experience. Long-term relationships are also a huge part of the experience. And then if you survey users, you know, they'll tell you we're here for obviously casual connections, we're here for relationships, we're here for friends. A lot of people have friends that they've met on Grindr that they're very close to. Travel is a really big use case where people use it. More when they travel versus when they're at home. Kind of jokes online, you'll find that like, oh, I show up in Singapore and I found my tour guide on Grindr and then spend all day with him, like, you know, figuring out what happened in Singapore. So there are a bunch of different use cases that people hacked into in the product over time. And what I really found interesting is like, how do we build out the product? Set for these things as we build out the business and obviously make AI be central to it because we have so much data that we can be a very forward thinking AI product at the same time. And there's not a lot of consumer AI, obviously. And so that creates a unique opportunity.
It felt like water and oil a little bit.