It's my pleasure to have the team from Grindr here at the conference this year. George Arison, CEO. George, thanks so much. Thanks for having me. I feel like this is the third year you're at the conference. the third year I've done this as Grindr CEO, but I've done this conference actually in my last company. That's correct. I was speaking with Roam and then Alexandra before me, before she went on to SAP. Thank you so much for always being part of it and always making yourself available. Really appreciate it. For those in the audience less familiar with the company and the platform and what you're trying to build, why don't you take the opportunity to talk about a little bit of the evolution you've been on and the journey for the company? Grindr has been around for six and a half years. We really invented the idea of using a mobile device for local discovery, and we were one of the very first geo-located products on mobile, on iOS, launched in March 2009. It really took off, like, you know, instantaneously through word of mouth among gay people in the United States initially, to the point where, like, I've seen estimates from investors, like half a million iPhones were sold in 2010 because Grindr was iOS only at the time. It's been a fundamental part of gay life ever since then. It's an open architecture platform, so you can talk to anybody you want. Anyone can talk to you, and you can maintain messages going as long as you want. There's no, like, double opt-in kind of on Grindr the way there is on straight products. We don't really think of Grindr as a dating product. We think of Grindr as a social network that's used by gay people to connect to each other for any number of reasons. We just monetize the hookup, casual dating, relationships, et cetera, component of the experience. People are doing a ton of other stuff on Grindr, and they don't leave the product necessarily when they are in a relationship. You can still see a lot of people who are using the product when they are in a relationship because so much more is happening on Grindr. We are in 190 countries around the world. We went public in 2022, and I joined about two months before we went public. There's been a lot of company building that had to happen along the way. We've been flying the plane while building it at the same time. So far, like, things have gone really well. We've been very focused on driving growth in our revenue while building a lot of products. It's product-led growth rather than anything else, and we're very happy with the results so far. I think there's a lot to mine in there from what you said. If you take a step back and you try to draw the distinction between dating and social connectivity and the intersection between the two, how do you think about the addressable market opportunity for the company when you think about what the user base might be or what the payer conversion might be? How do you characterize how different that might look in different geographies? We did a survey last year right prior to the election in the U.S. asking—we did a very targeted gay and bi men survey run by one of Kamala Harris's primary pollsters and co-run by a pollster for John McCain. It was a very high quality, fairly expensive poll. One of the questions we asked was, do you have a Grindr account or not? 50% of people in that poll said they had a Grindr account. When you look at our U.S. MAU, it's less than 50% of U.S. gay and bi people in the country. There are about a million people in there that claim to have a Grindr account but don't appear in our MAU. That is all, I think, a reactivation opportunity for us from an MAU point of view in the U.S., where people have used Grindr a lot before but don't appear in our MAU because they don't use Grindr on a regular basis anymore. Obviously, we are way less penetrated in every other country in the world because we started out in the United States and then grew everywhere else. In a lot of places in the world, it was very uncomfortable to be gay 10 or 15 years ago versus it's a lot easier today. India is an example. In those countries, you're seeing much faster MAU growth. MAU for us is growing very well in there. On the payer side, people oftentimes assume that having high payer penetrations is a good thing. I actually don't think it's necessarily true because you want the free users in a product like Grindr to be as big as possible. People who are paying want to be able to connect with people both who are paying but also people who are not paying. The more options of core connections that you offer, the better off the users will be who are paying. One way to satisfy your paying users is by having a lot more non-paying users on them. Necessarily driving the product to be one way—it's not usable if you are not a paying customer—is not a good thing at all. We are trying to avoid that from happening. We are increasing the surface area of the product by creating new product experiences that people could go and pay for if they wanted to. Some of the things we're building are freemium. Some of them are only premium only. You can still continue to use the core Grindr product without being a payer, and we want to facilitate that very much. Free users matter to Grindr a lot. We also have a pretty big advertising business. It's about 15% to 16% of our total revenue. That business obviously monetizes free users because we don't show ads to paying customers. That's another way in which we make money as well. Okay. Understood. Maybe sticking with the theme of engagement first, when you think about how the product has evolved with the goal of sort of incenting engagement across a wide array of users, how has the product evolved, and what are you most excited about in terms of engagement mechanisms that have launched most recently? Grindr's evolution was you see a certain number of people on the grid that you can talk to. Then Grindr added Extra, which was our first pink subscription offering, and we showed you more people than we were showing you before. Then we added Unlimited, which shows you basically an unlimited number of people. You can see anybody on the grid anywhere, and you can talk to any of those people. That's kind of how engagement was driven initially. Plus, the chatting system is open to everyone, and you can talk to anyone you want. Whether you're paying or not paying, you can engage in as many conversations as you want. Grindr users sent 130 billion messages last year, which kind of tells you how active they are in chatting. That's more messages per day per user in DAU than WhatsApp has in their product. WhatsApp's just a chatting product. We're a lot more than just a chatting product. What we have been thinking about a lot now is creating intention-based experiences for people. Like they're there for a specific intent. How do you create a really good experience for them in that regard? We built what we call Right Now, which is for people who want to have a connection happen immediately. They can use that experience for that. We're now building a lot of dating experiences, a lot of dating features where if you're looking for a long-term partner, we'll offer you products for that to make it easier. Concurrently with that, we're building a ton of features that are AI-first, AI-native features that are making the app a lot more targeted for the kinds of people you want to be talking to, which is something we never offered before. Now we can offer you a grid that is different from what it was prior in that it's targeted for your interests. We call that Discover. Within that, on the profile, we will show you not just what the user says about themselves in the profile, but insights that we Grindr are able to glean about them. You see those as insights. Those are all AI-generated insights. That is going to be all combined into a separate tier on Grindr, right? Now we have two tiers for payment, Extra and Unlimited. We're going to create a new tier on top, which is going to take all these AI features into that because they're very, very high-value features. We believe they are worth a lot more than $40. Figuring out what the price is is something that needs to be still being done. The idea of putting all that together into a tier is very much kind of the intention, which will then allow us to monetize a lot of the features that we're creating that add so much new value to the product in a different way. Okay. Understood. Probably the biggest debate coming out of the most recent set of results was a bit of noise around the MAU growth. We spoke about this the night of earnings, and I'm sure you've been getting this question a fair bit. Why don't you talk a little bit about what you were trying to accomplish with a bit of a cleanup dynamic around MAUs? I think the inclination I heard from investors was this, they've overreached on monetization and they're harming the user growth dynamics. Maybe give your take on where this sits right now. Totally. This is something that we have spent some time talking to people about. Let's kind of go through that. Bear with me as I do it. There are like six points I want to make. I even have each of the points written down. First, let's define what Grindr reports as MAU versus what other people do. We do not report users. We report device. So, monthly active devices. The reason for that is that a lot of our users have more than one Grindr account. They might have a travel account and a local account and a more discrete account. They'll be using all three of them in any given month. If you reported at a user level or account level, it would come off like we're reporting three people when in reality it's only one. We report device. For you to get into our monthly active device reporting, your device needs to have a device ID. Not every legitimate Grindr user gets reported in that because their login does not have a device ID associated with it. You can go ask Apple and Android, mostly Android, why that's the case. The reality is that there are people who we don't actually report out at all in our monthly active devices because their device does not have an ID that we can look to, but they are legitimate users that are using Grindr. Secondly, we have been in a very active process of removing what we would classify as unwanted MAU or users that should not be in the product, meaning removing their profiles. There are two categories of profiles that we remove. Category one is when there is a device ID, and those get reported in our MAU. When they're there and they get removed, they're no longer in our MAU, obviously. Then there are profiles that don't have a device ID associated with them at all. These are spammers who spoof accounts on Android using a computer and create accounts on Grindr. We aim to remove those as well. Obviously, you need to do that for the health of the platform. What we have seen in the last year is, one, increase in spam because technology allows you to create spam more now than it did before, meaning AI in particular, as well as a significant increase in our removals. The increase in removals is in far excess of the spam increases that we've seen because our ability to identify unwanted users, meaning users who are engaged in illegal activity or in spam, is a lot better than it used to be before. We're removing a lot more people. Roughly 2x the number of accounts are being removed. We're being removed in Q2 than had been removed in Q2 of last year. It's been a significantly larger number. That does not mean that our spam went up 2x. It did not. It's just that we were able to identify bad actors and remove them from the ecosystem a lot better. The total amount of MAU impact that happened as a result of the removals that we have undertaken in Q1 and Q2 of this year and a little bit in Q4 of last year is in the hundreds of thousands, not in the tens of thousands, right? If we were sharing with you an adjusted MAU number that accounted for that change, the MAU number would actually be significantly higher than the number that we reported in Q2. Even with that, though, the MAU increase was very significant, right? We grew MAU 6% year over year in Q2, even while we were doing all these removals. These removals are continuing because it's not a one-time thing that you need to do. We'll do more of that. We think that ultimately having a cleaner ecosystem that does not have spammers in it is a good thing. We want to continue kind of doing that. Lastly, I think it's worth discussing demographics of Grindr. A lot of other products have said that, hey, they're having trouble with MAU because their demographics are not looking very good, meaning young people do not want to use dating products for dating. We have not seen anything like that. Grindr is significantly over-indexed in the 18 and 22 category versus the U.S. male population and in the 23 to 29 category. On the overall product, nearly half of our users fall into those two categories. If we had any trouble in driving more MAU through things like monetization, that would be most impactful on young users because our payer penetration among young users is by far lower than it is for older users, which obviously makes total sense because they have less money and they are more successful in the product, even just using the free product because they're able to get what they want out of it. Versus if you're older, you might need to get paid because you're less successful in the product. We don't think there's any issue with Grindr MAU. Grindr good MAU, meaning wanted MAU, is actually growing really well. It's just that as we removed more accounts, that kind of impacts the actual MAU growth number that we show. As far as younger demographics, which are the demographics that matter the most for a product like ours, we are seeing nothing but growth and new people coming into the product all the time. The last point on that is internationally, it's even more over-indexed on younger people. If you look at India, like two-thirds of the app is under 35, which is not surprising because it was illegal to be gay in India until 10 or 12 years ago. Older men are less likely to be using the product versus younger men. Okay. Understood. Last year, you laid out sort of a multi-year product roadmap. As we sit here now, coming up on the last third of 2025, where does that product roadmap sit in terms of what's been deployed, what's soon to come, and how should investors think about executing against that roadmap on a two, three, four-year view? Yeah. I think what you're referring to is our Investor Day, which was in June of last year, and we shared a three-year plan for the product. We gave some examples. We didn't give all the examples, obviously, in terms of what we were going to build. We had a Product Day last January. We shared, hey, these are the things we're going to launch this year. A lot of the products we're building are these intention-based products for specific unique intentions that people might have in the app, such as Right Now or Relationships. Another one that we're going to work on in the future more is around travel, as well as creating AI-native product experiences. This is not latching on AI to an existing product and declaring that that's AI. That's silly, in my opinion. It's literally products that you could not create before until GenAI existed. These are like AI-native, AI-first experiences. We are building all of those. I think we're either on schedule or ahead of schedule on virtually everything that we had intended to build. Some of those things are either live to everybody. Right Now is live to all our users. Others are in testing with a portion of our users. Others, we're actually holding back until we make certain pricing and tiering changes because we don't want to go live with them in our existing tiers. We want to only go live with them with a higher price tier. For example, Discover is an AI product that lets you discover people more closely aligned with your interests. We don't want to release that to the overall user base. We're going to reserve that only for the premium tier. It's going to go live when the premium tier goes live. Insights is also something that we will not release to a broader user base. It'll only go to the premium paying users. We're holding those back until we get the premium tier out and ready to go because those are so valuable. The kind of information that you're getting from that is so powerful that I don't think it'd be fair to put that into a tier even at $40 a month because the value that you're getting from it is way more than that. The company should benefit from that as well. Okay. Understood. That dovetails with my next question, when you think about user monetization. I know we've focused a lot of this on user growth and engagement so far. When you focus on monetization, we'll talk about the ad tier, but away from the ad tier, how do you think about tiering? How do you think about the platform's overall approach to monetization evolving in the years ahead? In the last three years, we did the following two things. In 2023 and 2024, we launched weekly payment plans for people. That was based on user demand. We did not come up with those on our own. I know it's counterintuitive, but a lot of people, especially younger users, prefer to pay for things on a weekly basis versus a monthly basis. We launched weeklies. Those have been really successful, and they drove a lot of our revenue growth and our payer conversion growth in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, a lot of the focus was on driving more people to become payers rather than on things like weeklies, which drove ARPU up, even though that was not what we were aiming towards. We knew that as a result of weeklies, ARPU would go up. This year, there's not really much that we're doing to drive ARPU up, but there are things that we're doing to drive conversions up, and those have been very active. We did not feel comfortable launching some of those conversion drivers until after we launched a lot more free product so that as we potentially took some things away from our free users, we wanted them to be experiencing a lot of new things. There was a little bit of give and take in kind of how that happened. Next year is going to be a lot around driving a price increase in our existing tiers because so much new things were launched in our Extra and our Unlimited tiers. The value of those tiers went up. Now it is fair to ask users to pay a couple bucks more for that than they were paying before, as well as starting to launch this premium tier, which will be a driver of revenue growth in a significant way in 2027. Though it will have some level of impact in 2026 as well, because at that point, the tier and the offerings in that tier are going to be fully mature, and we'll be able to kind of expect to have a large number of people go into it. The premium tier is a very unique thing that we've never done before, which is we actually do not want too many people to sign up for that. The price that we'll pick for it might be one that's very high for an average user, but the amount of experience that you're getting in that tier, you need to really kind of offer in a measured way. Think of it a little bit as like a Disney, you know, they have a new lightning pass where you basically get to skip a line in every ride only once. Our premium tier is something similar to that. They don't offer that to everybody. You have to get in line and get it on a specific day, and you might not get it. We think of premium tier the same way. We don't want everyone to have it because if too many people have it, that might actually degrade our users' experiences, and we don't want that to happen. Okay. Understood. You referenced earlier the size of your advertising business today. Against that size today, when you think about the base of users you have, how do you think about drivers of advertising going forward, whether it be ad load, different types of ad offerings, U.S. market versus international markets? What's the scope for opportunity there? Totally. When I joined Grindr, my hypothesis was that we were not leaning into advertising anywhere near enough. Frankly, if we didn't do that, then we might be pushed towards having to monetize more of the free users, i.e., doing more things to drive more free users to become payers. That would degrade their experience, and that was necessarily not the ideal thing. Why not lean more into the advertising? We kind of saw a three-part process for what needed to happen there. Number one was just increase the total number of ads that we have in the product. We were showing people like two ads an hour, which was very, very low. I think we were very successful at driving the ad load up in the U.S. We're now closer to eight ads an hour, which is still less than a comparable social media product, but it's a lot better than it used to be. We did that without seeing a decrease in our CPM per ad. By adding a lot more third-party advertising partners, we're able to fill the supply that we're creating from these additional ads. In the U.S., we'd reach the max of how many ads we want to show per hour, per day. In Europe and Asia and Latin America, we're not yet at the same level, partly because the third-party ad ecosystem in these parts of the world is not as developed as it is in the U.S. There's still some opportunity for more ads there, but not in the U.S. The next step for us is to replace the kinds of ads people are seeing with the types of ads that are both more valuable to us and of higher quality to the user. That includes video ads and rewarded video ads, as well as native ads that are more targeted and allow you to exit the ad when you're looking at it and replace it with a different ad. That will also have high CPM, right? Both of those ad formats actually have a high CPM. Next year, we expect a lot of the revenue growth in ad business to be focused around this transition from current type of ads to these higher quality and more premium ads. That's kind of the second leg of the stool that we're working on in terms of our ad revenue growth. The third one is around the direct advertising business. These are when we actually partner with an advertiser to have ads in Grindr directly rather than through a third party. For me, probably the single biggest change in my opinion since I got here was around this third-party business. I was a lot more bullish in being able to get more advertisers to sign up to work with us sooner than it had happened. Unfortunately, the Anheuser-Busch incident took place along the way two years ago. That really made it a lot harder to get advertisers to work with us at the pace that we, I think, wanted. You know, I'm a founder, and so I don't give up. Usually, when things are going to stop happening is when I continue pushing on this. We believe there is a huge opportunity. We just need to cast the conversation here in the right way, where for Grindr, you know, Grindr is full of high income, lots of disposable income, gay men who are not only wealthy and are able to spend things on experiences and luxury products. They also set trends, right? They start buying something, then they tell their girlfriends about that. Those girlfriends go and get their husbands and/or partners or boyfriends to buy those things as well. You can really use Grindr as a trendsetter for luxury brands and luxury experiences. That's the way to, I think, lean into the advertising story. This is going to take us, I think, longer than I had anticipated. Fortunately, we've been able to drive a lot of growth in our ad business without the direct advertising business having to do things. We feel really good about how that's going so far and what will happen in 2026, 2027 on the ad side as well. Understood. You've alluded a lot so far to AI and elements of machine learning and what can be built for the company. Talk a little bit about how the platform products, certain initiatives are increasingly being driven by AI and ML, and how you plan on bringing some of those to the market in the years ahead. I had built an AI company in 2018, 2019, 2020. Coming into Grindr, one of the things I was most excited about was the data that Grindr possesses because unlike previous platform shifts in technology, AI is best when there's a lot of data. Whereas mobile, for example, was massively beneficial to startups, the AI shift actually is really beneficial to incumbents if the incumbents make the transition quickly enough. Most won't, but those that do will be able to create competitive advantage in their user experiences that no one else will be able to have, and that'll be long-term competitive. We've been really thinking through AI and how to drive that from the very beginning of me getting here. That's kind of what we're working towards. The infrastructure that we've built for our AI products and experiences is no different than what most advanced AI companies out there are doing for themselves. When I meet AI founders of these super successful AI products, I'm not talking about foundational models, but products that are built on these foundational models, their architecture, their infrastructure is no different than the infrastructure and architecture that we're creating, which makes me very proud because here we are, a 16-year-old company doing the same thing and really transitioning the product to be much more AI-first and AI-native. Now we're in a place where we can actually start utilizing this infrastructure to build actual product experiences. The product that is most AI-forward on Grindr right now is called A-List. It goes through all your chats that you've ever had and creates a subset of those chats that the AI, which we call GAI, believes are most relevant to you for the long term. It creates a summary of the conversation that you've had, whatever information you share, whatever information that person shared with you, and creates a different list of people that we call the A-List that you can go to. All the images and media that were shared between two people is also going to be there, which is really valuable because obviously, people really care about that media. You see this shortlist of people you should be engaging with. That's going to form the cornerstone of our premium tier. We think it's going to be a really kind of game-changing offering into Grindr. We have two other big AI features coming out. One's called Discover, which takes all the information we have about users and slowly starts utilizing it to offer you a set of profiles to look at that are more targeted to you. The third one is Insights. For example, showing a person that, hey, you are interested in this other user. This other user really tends to respond heavily to people in the 35 to 45 age category, even though they're only 25. If you are a 40-year-old person who is seeing that, that will give you the confidence to go and email that person, whereas otherwise, you might not have that confidence, right? That Insights piece is going to be really critical as well. These are all very new. Usually, when we launch things, the first iterations are not perfect. That's totally fine. That's how products, you launch an alpha, then you launch a beta, and then you kind of innovate on that. Zero to one is always way harder than one to two and two to three. We are really psyched about where we are in this development now, but it is very much in the zero to one stage. We're launching V1s of these products, not V2s and V3s, and over time, they'll get a lot better. I would not have people expect financial results necessarily right away because we are going to give these things time to mature and develop. Ultimately, I think they'll be very, very successful. Okay. I know we only have a few minutes left, but when you bring all of this together, what do you see as the key strategic priorities to deploy growth investments into the company over the next 12 to 18 months? Yeah. The way we think about Grindr's growth is along kind of three vectors. One is core app. We want the app to continue to monetize really well. I talked a lot about today how we're doing that. The second one is AI and all these AI features and kind of monetizing those. The third bucket of growth for us is building new products that are not necessarily directly tied to Grindr, the core connections app, but are offerings that make a lot of sense for gay men. We can use Grindr, the core app, as a distribution engine for these new products and services that we are starting to offer people. We call these gay-hood expansion opportunities because we're building the global gay-hood on the phone. The first thing we've launched so far is Woodwork, which is a telehealth platform. Its first offering is easy medications, but it's going to expand into many other offerings over time. We purposely don't talk about that in earnings calls. I think I got some rumors that people were like, oh, he talked a lot about it in May, but then he didn't talk about it in August. In May, I also did say, like, do not expect updates on Woodwork for a while on purpose because we want to give this very small, nimble team that is working on Woodwork the time to be able to build basically a new company inside Grindr. It's using Grindr as a distribution engine, which means that its CAC for customer acquisition is really, really low or zero, and building a new brand. That's all going really, really well, and we're really happy with how that's going. That's one business we're launching. We have a second business around luxury experiences that we're launching that has not lived yet, but it will go live kind of next year. Similar thing, we're not going to talk about that very much because we want to give the team time to get it right. The third one is already in the works that's going to be in stealth for now, but it's actually probably the single biggest business opportunity that we're pursuing. The goal is to have like, you know, six or seven of these new business initiatives that are using Grindr as a distribution engine live over the next three years, knowing full well that not all of them are going to work. If three of them work, that would be like a huge win for us over the long term because then we can drive this kind of growth not just for the next five years, but for the next 10 and 15 years. Yeah. Last question for you before we lose you, just in terms of capital allocation. Those are the areas of investment and growth. You've laid out the growth narrative. How should investors broadly think about a dollar of capital either going back into the business or coming back in forms of return? You have an opportunity to think with your stock on the buyback front. One thing to say is all these business things that I mentioned, the new businesses, the cost of launching these is all accounted for in our three-year plan as far as EBITDA guidance that we gave, but none of the revenue is. All the revenue is kind of incremental to what we guided towards. I run a pretty lean ship. Grindr peaked at 225 U.S. employees and 15 people in Asia. Three years in of me being there, we're at 150 U.S. employees, maybe 155 now, and 30 people in Colombia. We're not even back yet at the stage of where we were at our peak. That's because we did a return to office. A bunch of people said they didn't want to come back to office. I said, great, you don't have to come back to office. Self-selection is a good thing, but the people we did keep and people we've hired are being way more productive, and we are very, very lean. I believe in really lean organizations because I think those are way more effective at getting stuff done. We run a very high revenue per employee number, probably a little bit too high, honestly, right now, in as much as like everyone's telling me, George, we need a lot more people, a little bit more people. Even at the end of the year, we will not be close to the number of people that we had in 2023, January, right? Even though the business has doubled in size since then. I think we will definitely continue to hire, but we'll still generate a ton of cash, and our EBITDA margins will remain very, very high. Our three-year guidance is 39% to 42% EBITDA margin. We've done a little bit better than that because we've been so lean on people, but like, you know, that either one is a great number. Otherwise, we'll return capital to shareholders. Our focus has been through the buyback. We've actually been, I think, using that buyback pretty aggressively this year, and people should expect us to continue doing that into the future. We think our stock is very cheap right now, quite honestly, given what we are delivering and what we can deliver into the future. Again, Grindr is not a dating product. Grindr is a social network, and I want investors to think of it as a social network and value it as such. We are one of the very first existing technology companies to be actively moving towards creating our products that are AI-driven, not bolt-on on top. I think we'll be very successful at that. That's how we think of value in Grindr. Obviously, in that sense, our share price is not reflected in that, and we'll be as aggressive as we can be in returning money back to shareholders. All right. All super clear. I think we're just inside of a minute, so we're going to leave it there. George, thanks so much for being part of the conference. Please join me in thanking Grindr for being part of the conference. Thank you.