Okay, I think this is on, and we're gonna keep going with our last conversation of the day. I'm excited to host the team from Grindr as part of the conversations here at the Communicopia Technology Conference. George Arison, CEO. George, great to have you here and been looking forward to the conversation. Thanks for having me, and I'm looking forward to it as well. It's been a really good conference with us today. Oh, great. Thank you, so for those in the audience who might be less familiar with you as a company, why don't you talk a little bit about the platform you built, how it's evolved, and what some of those key milestones that you've achieved are? Yeah, sure. Well, I didn't build it. This was built before me, and I'm very fortunate to be running this really beautiful product and beautiful asset. Grindr is the primary way in which gay and bi men around the world connect and meet each other. And so we have 14 million monthly active users, or thereabout, in 190 countries around the world. So we're basically in almost every country, with a few exceptions. And people use Grindr for many different things. It started out as a casual dating product. That was kind of the very first thing that Grindr was used for back in 2009, 2010. It was the first real kind of location-based product on the iPhone, which really helped it take off. And then over time, as more and more people joined, it's become a lot more, kind of turning into more of a social network for the gay community. So now people use it, yes, for casual dating and for long-term relationships and for building friendships, for obtaining information, for what might be happening in a given community at any given time, or even health information. Frankly, in like 40, 50 countries around the world, we are the primary source of health information for a lot of people, now ordering HIV tests to be delivered to their home, and that is the way the opportunity for us lies as well, where we have all these different use cases that are the product is already used for. Now we can productize those and turn it into a, you know, more of a product than what we have at hand today. Okay, there's a lot in there. I want to go a little bit deeper on all of them, but maybe let's take a step back before we take a step forward. You recently hosted your first Investor Day in June. You laid out sort of the platform's vision and some of your key strategic priorities. For those who didn't listen to that event or weren't at it, maybe why don't you refresh people what some of the takeaways from that investor event were? Sure. Yeah, I do encourage people to go see it on our website because it is very detailed in terms of the product roadmap, so it might be helpful to see. But, what we said is that we believe there is a huge opportunity in product development across two buckets of product. One bucket is kind of the core product around connections and making that be a more awesome, better user experience, and I'll talk about that in a second. And then secondly, around these gayborhood extension opportunities, where we say that we're the gayborhood on your phone, so we wanna expand into different things you could get in the gayborhood. And so I'll talk about both, for a minute. In the core product, we believe that we can make, first, the immediate casual connection experience a lot better through a product we are calling Right Now. That's already in test in Australia, and we're gonna be testing it in more places soon. We think it's having a really positive response from users and will be very impactful. Secondly, by building a whole set of features for dating and long-term relationships, things that were not as important to people in the community, say 15 ago or 20 years ago, are a lot more important now. A lot more people wanna settle down and be in a long-term relationship, and Grindr is the primary way in which people meet each other for long-term relationships in the U.S., but we think we can do that a lot better. Then by implementing AI across the entire product to make the user experience a lot better through AI features, and by building a bunch of à la cartes, five in total, that will make our product a lot better and obviously drive monetization as well. So that's kind of bucket one of our focus over the next three years, that is, on the core product. And then we believe there's a bunch of expansion opportunities outside of the core. The two that we've mentioned publicly so far is one in health and wellness and another in travel and local discovery. You know, an example of health and wellness would be something like, we know that a lot of our users use various types of medications that are, I would say, let's call them more cosmetic medications, versus like you absolutely need to take them to be alive. There are many different places where you could buy those, but what if we made it a lot easier for people to buy those products from directly from us? I'm not saying we're getting into the business of fulfilling those medications. We can do that through a partnership, but we can be a really interesting distribution engine for that. In terms of travel, you know, gay men love to go on big experiential events. Coachella, which is obviously a very big event in the spring every year, you know, a huge percentage of attendees are gay. What if we were able to work with Coachella and build a unique experience for our users while they're there? Whether it's, "Hey, let's be able to say on your profile that you're going to Coachella this year," so connect everybody who's gonna be going before they go, to then creating special experiences for them at the event. We think that's a huge opportunity as well. So those is a taste of what we can do in health and wellness and what we can do in local discovery and travel, that I think can be a really big opportunity. On the latter point, in particular, you know, one in four of our weekly active users is traveling, which is really remarkable. Sort of makes sense, given that a lot of them are single, they have high amount of disposable income, and they wanna do things with that income. But obviously, that creates a ton of opportunity for us. I wanna come back to some of those themes you introduced there, George. You know, when you look at the industry writ large, there's a lot of debate out there around the dating apps, the dating industry. You've demonstrated a lot of platform differentiation and growth dynamics. So can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing from your user base in terms of engagement, how that might compare to the industry writ large, and anything you're pointing people to in terms of why there might be a divergence in your trends relative to the rest of the industry? Totally. So look, our users are extremely engaged. Last year, in 2023, we generated 121 billion chats during the course of the year. That's on 14 million MAU, or I think it was 13 million MAU last year. Like, it's a huge number of chats. People spend over an hour in the app a day, and those numbers are not going down, they're going up, right? So we're doing very well in both of those metrics, now. So we are not seeing any sort of drop-off in engagement, whether it's overall or within the Gen Z segment, which is where people kind of focus on a lot. One of the reasons, I think, is because as people, you know, become eighteen, come out, whether it's before they're eighteen or after, but like, kind of start to figure out who they are, it's actually very common for them to want to be around older people who can help them figure out what it's like to be gay. And Grindr is able to offer them that community, and that's why we have a gayborhood on the phone. For me, that was move to D.C. and live in Dupont Circle and kinda gain that experience from that. Because obviously, that was before products like Grindr existed. But, you know, not everyone gets a chance to do that, and we can offer them the same experience through the mobile device, which I think is very valuable. And a big reason why I think people come back to us all the time. Secondly, I actually think that a lot of this is an excuse rather than reality, that Gen Z does not wanna be doing things online. You know, look at how well Hinge is doing, and that's obviously an online product as well, right? The difference is that Hinge is innovating versus others have not innovated, and just drove monetization for the last half a decade or so. And that's something that we are very careful about. We could be driving monetization just by making the product be less good on the free side, and basically getting more people to pay for it because they are losing the free experience. We don't think that's the right approach. We think the way to preserve the asset as a really positive product for people is by building a lot more features for them on the positive end, things that they wanna use. And then, because they're seeing value in the features we're building, getting them to pay for those features. And I think that's a really big difference in kinda our approach, versus what some of our peers have done, you know, five to 10 years ago, and how they drove monetization. Okay, understood. Very clear, so you talked a little bit about where you wanna take product and platform long term. Maybe just drill down a little bit more in terms of which products you're most excited about when you think about your roadmap in the years ahead. Obviously, you know, we laid out a very robust roadmap at Investor Day. We wanted people to understand that there is a lot of investment going on in technology to create it all. You know, when Grindr was bought out of China's ownership, the company was very hollowed out, both in terms of people and also in technology investments. There was a lot of technical debt and a lot of effort was put in and continues to be put in, in solving that technical debt. So for the first couple of years, it was really impossible to build new product because we had so much technical debt to deal with. I don't think we're fully past that, but we've kinda addressed a lot of it so far. And so, frankly, the people who bought Grindr from the Chinese ownership really saved the company, and they deserve a lot of compliments for that. Now we are in this place where we can build a lot of cool products. I'm super psyched about what we can do with dating and relationships. You know, when I think about my own life, I really wanted to find a long-term partner and be in a relationship and have children. That was not very common for gay men and, you know, men of my generation, but that was something that meant a lot to me. And I actually picked myself up from D.C., where I had been living for a decade, and moved to San Francisco, in part because I felt like I could find a long-term partner here, and I couldn't do that in D.C. And that's not an uncommon story that you will hear in the community. And one of the drivers of that is that there is not enough critical mass of people in any given geography for you to potentially date. So if Grindr, but we have users everywhere, obviously, and we have 14 million of them. So if we could break down geographic barriers to dating, that would be really valuable. So what I'm psyched about is a world where through AI, we can actually understand each of our users a lot better, and then provide them with transparent matching around, "Hey, you as an individual, here are 10 or 20 people around the world that are really good potential partners for you, and for these open reasons why." Obviously, fully with user consent, with them being okay with us doing that. Doesn't matter where they really are, because if you can get really good data on why this is a good match, you probably would be open to meeting them anywhere, based on what we know about our users. So that is a product that I think can have really tremendous value for our users, and can also be a huge driver of revenue growth as well, and I'm super psyched about that as a feature. Now, that's not gonna come in 2025. That's a longer term thing that we are working on today, and we'll continue to work on in 2025, and then we'll see benefits from in the future. And then I'm also psyched about these extension opportunities outside of the core product, like health analysis, that we are working on, because I do want us to be able to, you know, offer more to our users besides the core that we're offering to them today. Okay, understood. We're sitting at a technology conference. Can't sit very long at a technology conference without talking about artificial intelligence. I would love to understand better your worldview of how AI can impact the dating landscape, and in particular, can be rolled out and deployed on your platform? Yeah. So I'm spending a lot of time on AI, like, many hours a week. I even hired a very early AI engineer out of Stripe to be an AI tutor for me. So I meet with him twice a week to, like, talk through what's happening and kind of how to deploy the tech for us in a good way. And that's been really valuable to me to better understand what is possible and what's not possible, and when. So where I kind of feel we have tremendous opportunity in AI, like, and well, it's almost like too many opportunities, and we have to prioritize what's possible. I would love to be able to, you know, soon, within a year, launch a Wingman that our users can use to make their app experience a lot better. Whether it's through suggestive text of what they should message to somebody, or suggested people that they should talk to based on their interests, or suggestions around, "Hey, I'm seeing that you're about to go to dinner with this person. Here are recommendations for a restaurant where you can meet." I think that can all make the user experience a lot better and can be very engaging. I want us to launch AI features initially that are not over the top and that users can experiment with, and then through their experimentation, tell us how they want to use them more, and then add on to those features. You know, eventually, I can see a world where I have a replica of myself in the app through AI, and other users have their own replica, and it's the two synthetics that are talking to each other to establish a connection and then provide us with a really detailed kind of view of, "Hey, these are all the things we talked about, and this is why we think it's worth for you guys to meet in the future." That would be, like, really interesting. Obviously, not for everybody, but for a lot of people, I think that would be a really interesting product. Okay, interesting. You talked about the global expansion. You even talked about one or two markets. How do you plan on scaling internationally? What do you think the opportunity set is internationally when you compare it to the opportunity set here in the U.S.? We are in 190 countries around the world. Basically, we're everywhere. And we're usually the number one product in most of those countries. That said, our brand recognition, which is very high in the U.S., you know, it's 90% unaided in the U.S., isn't as high abroad. We've not obviously tested every country, but we've tested a few, and it comes out nearly at about 60% unaided awareness, which is still really good, right? Like, most companies would actually kill for that. But that's not 90%. And we do know that if people know us in these places, they use us, but if they don't know us, they can't use us. A lot of what we wanna do internationally is actually gain better brand awareness, without really spending too much money on that. We think that by narrowcasting to our community, through social media and other tools like that, we can do a lot to create more engagement and more virality by getting people to know us more, and then through that, use us. We've seen really tremendous positive results in user growth in Latin America, for example, and we wanna replicate that in Asia next, 'cause obviously, that's the next frontier. One of the things that's happening abroad is in places where five or 10 years ago, acceptance was not very positive, right? Like, for example, in India, a decade ago, it was illegal to be gay. We're seeing tremendous change in the society, and that's obviously a huge tailwind for us in terms of being successful in growing in these countries, and so that's, like, a really big kind of focus for us in terms of what we wanna do. Secondly, you know, we are very successful in a lot of these countries, almost in spite of how we've approached things. We have very little localization in the product. We primarily use, like, English everywhere. We use Western imagery in every country, in our app store imagery or inside the app itself as well. That doesn't make a lot of sense. We need to localize our product a lot more. We just started to do that, and that's actually having a really positive initial set of results. So that's a huge opportunity also. And then lastly, from a monetization perspective around pricing. We have never really gone through an exercise of what prices should be abroad versus what they are in the U.S. Yes, we charge different prices abroad, but it's not very kind of scientific, and we think there's a ton of opportunity there as well to potentially, you know, change pricing, and through that, increase monetization. So maybe stick with that theme of monetization. You talked earlier in an answer about, you know, not wanting to rush monetization, sort of, create a sense of community, have a lot of value in the free tier. How do you think about monetization, though, evolving longer term? What's the right balance to strike between user growth, user engagement, against extracting price and value where you think you're delivering value to the consumer? Look, I'm a capitalist, right? And I very much believe in our system, and my general view is when you create value for people, they should pay for that value. And people normally do. That's why our system works. So my general view is if we create a lot of value for our users, they will pay for it. Albums, which is something we launched in 2022, is a great example of what's happened. Initially we launched it as a free product. It took off very, very fast, very viral product, right? Because every time someone got an album, they learned that Albums was a product, and then they were asked to send an album as well, and then they would go set up an album. And eventually we said, "Okay, you can send one album for free, but if you wanna have more than one album, you gotta pay for it. Or if you wanna see more than, I think, five albums a day, you have to pay for it." And that started to drive monetization around albums. That, that seemed like a really good approach because we created a lot of user value, and then we started to extract value from that outcome. And I think we have the luxury to be able to do that, you know, over time because we have a lot of monetization opportunity in the product today. And I think that gives us the chance to launch a lot of new things, get clarity around how users are using it, hopefully get a lot of users to use it, and then focus on monetization. So Right Now, for example, which is a product we're launching again in Australia as a test initially, then it's gonna come to be tested in one U.S. market next. You know, for 2025, the focus there is less on monetization and more on getting people to actively engage in it and get as much virality around it as possible, and only then start focusing on monetization. But we also are all very focused on monetization, and so when we build products, before we even build them, we think about like, what is the best way to potentially monetize this product? We build in that capacity into the product, so once we wanna turn on monetization, we can actually do that. Okay, understood. For those away from the opportunity set with payer conversion, how do you think about building an advertising opportunity set for the company over the medium to long term? Unlike other apps like us, we have a fairly high percentage of our revenue coming from advertising. It's 15%. Advertising was definitely one area that suffered from a lot of technical debt and underinvestment. You know, we had one primary ad unit called an MREC in the app, but that's from, like, a decade ago, and since then, a lot more ad units have been created that are better, including video. You know, my thought was, like, this is a huge opportunity for us. We have a user base that is highly engaged, high disposable income, and very valuable to advertisers. We should be able to drive a lot more revenue from this. I think initially the view was, like, revenue is gonna just stay where it is, and as a percentage, it decreased. We didn't want that, and so we said, at minimum, it should keep up at the same pace as the core product, so if the core product is growing, you know, 22.5%-27.5%, is kind of what we guided to over the next three years. At that pace, then we want the ad business growing at that pace as well, and obviously, if it can do better, even better. And we think we can do that. We just hired a new leader for our ad team in March. He comes with, you know, 15 years of advertising business experience in tech, at Google and at Bloomberg, and he is super excited at what he's seeing. For the first time, we have an engineering team focused on advertising, as well, and they're building the ad units that we have to build. They're building the integrations to third-party advertising partners that we need to have on the platform. We are testing higher ad loads, which not only increase our ad revenue, but obviously also have a conversion impact as well, because if people don't like seeing the ads, they can start paying for the product and not see the ads. And that all is gonna be, I think, really beneficial for us and for the product that we are envisioning. You know, eventually you can see a world where maybe for users with.edu account, we offer a lower price tier, right? Like, where, "Hey, get rid of ads for $5.99 a month," or something like that. So that's also another opportunity that can start converting people to being paying customers and over time, getting them to pay more for other things as well. Okay, understood. You talked earlier about the expansion around the gayborhood. Can we talk a little bit more about what can be built around that? You talked about health and wellness. I think you talked about travel, you talked about local discovery. Maybe connect a little bit of what's being built versus how you see the opportunity set evolve in terms of the product back into engagement. Yeah, so we are gonna be very much building this through partnerships. Yeah. Like with, for example, medication example, like, I don't wanna be in the business of running a pharmacy. Sure. All right? There are already online pharmacies that you use to do the fulfillment of that product. But we have a distribution engine that is very powerful. And so that's where we'll put our focus, is like, how do we distribute this product? How do we get people to sign up for it? What is the marketing that happens around it in the app? If you look at a lot of these companies, you know, one of them is public, you'll see that marketing is a huge expense, which obviously we wouldn't have in the app. And so that's where we will kind of focus on, and we'll rely on a partner to do the fulfillment and the customer service and the support kind of on the back end. And that's the approach we're gonna take across all the things we're gonna do in this space. But what we have is unique knowledge of our users and what they need and what they want, and how to bring it to them in a way that they understand. I think that's the really big opportunity for us, where we are like a place that they can come to for all of their needs. And obviously, we're not gonna go out into something that's like totally not connected to the product. Like, we think the things we're doing do still connect to the product and things that users do normally use us for, so they can kind of understand why we are doing what we're doing. Now, eventually, there might be other areas like I've jokingly said, but it's not totally jokingly, that like, you know, I don't think that gay men are gonna retire in The Villages. Like, that's unrealistic, and there's a huge generation of gay men who haven't really had it as easy as, say, my generation has had, that are coming up on their retirement, and there will be things that you'll need to do to facilitate that, and I think Grindr could be playing a role in that, but that's not in any way a focus, you know, in the next three, four years. That's a much more longer-term thing that's less connected to us at the core, and so it doesn't make as much sense as some of the things we've talked about in travel and local discovery, in health and wellness, and in education, kind of user information. Okay, so we've talked a lot, today. We started with strategic priorities. Yeah. We talked through product. Bring it back to investments, the cadence in which you need to make investments in the business, what your top priorities are to invest a dollar into the business to support this growth. Help me think about the investment cadence and your priorities. Yeah. So Grindr is a very lean team. I'm very proud of the fact that we're a very lean team, and we're much leaner than we were, even, you know, two years ago. At peak, we had 223 employees. Now we're at 141, I believe, at the end of June, right? So it's much less, but we're way more productive, both in grand total and on a per employee basis. And I think we can be even more productive than we are today, over time. So obviously, we need more people eventually. I'm not saying that we're gonna run this, the whole thing with a 141 people, and we do have external contractors right now that we're using to kind of supplement for the team as well, and that's helpful. We will continue to grow the team, but we're gonna grow it in a very deliberate and careful way, because I think if you grow too fast, you lose productivity, and that's not a good thing. But otherwise, our big spending items are paying Apple and Google and AWS costs, right? Like, that's kind of the core three main things we spend money on. As a result, we have a very high EBITDA margin, and I think everyone who's involved with Grindr is very proud of that, and we're gonna continue to keep that to be very high. We guide it to 39%-42% over the next three years, and we feel really good about that number. And, you know, we believe there's a lot of leverage in the business as well, beyond that. Okay, so building on that answer, that talks about sort of investing in the business, driving organic growth. How should we think about other capital allocation priorities, the potential to do M&A in the landscape or the potential to return capital to shareholders and drive maybe some equity returns that way? I mean, right now we have debt, and we've said that we wanna be at a 1.5-2x ratio on EBITDA debt, and we're not quite there yet. We're making our way in that direction quite nicely, but we're not there yet, so that's the first focus, is like, kind of let's get to that, and then we'll, you know, in consultation with the board, we'll figure out what the right answers to that are, but generally speaking, I'm spending very little to no time thinking about M&A, because we have so much opportunity ahead of us in our core business, and frankly, that is much more exciting and appropriate, because we, that's what we know and that's what we should do. Obviously, like, you know, if there's a four-person team of AI experts that kinda is unable to raise a Series A and is looking to find a home, I'm happy to have a conversation with them about that. But, you know, that's not an M&A, obviously, it's more like an acqui-hire. Sure. But otherwise, that's, like, my focus, and so, you know, we will consider returning money to shareholders in the appropriate way, based on what market conditions kind of allow to at the time, in the way that makes the most sense. Okay, very clear. So we only have a few minutes left. We've been ending every conversation with looking forward with folks, so couple of bigger picture questions for you. Can you discuss what the next big milestones or goals you'd like to achieve over the next twelve to eighteen months? And if we were sitting here a year from now, what do you think one of the biggest surprises or themes might be, when you think about how the industry might evolve? The milestone that matters a lot to me, personally, like, it's less external, no one's gonna see it, is what percentage of the code base is written by AI, say, by the end of 2025? Like, I don't know. I don't have a number that I've put out there for the team yet. I want to get there by the end of the year. But like, you know, we already have research data from scientific research that says that at Fortune 100 companies, they tracked 25,000 engineers, and how many tasks they were completing on a regular basis. And with Copilot alone, they saw a 25% increase in tasks completed. And that's with what today is already outdated technology, right? You know, like, I don't know what the number is, but 15%, 20%, 25% of our code base, I would love to be written with AI, because that would show us significant leverage in on what we can do with our engineering team. The kind of eng team adopting the changes that are coming inevitably into engineering, it's just like, how quickly do you adopt them or not. That's, like, one thing that I would be super psyched about. Then secondly, I think if the Right Now product achieves a really strong virality by the end of next year, I'll be really proud of that, as well. Okay, understood. So with that, we'll leave it there. George, first thanks for giving me the opportunity to have the conversation. Please join me in thanking Grindr for being part of the conference this year.