Okay. Great. We'll get it started. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Nathan Feather. I'm Morgan Stanley's small and mid-cap internet analyst, and I am pleased to be joined by George Arison, Grindr's Chief Executive Officer, and Vanna Krantz, Grindr's Chief Financial Officer. Thank you both so much for being here today. Thanks for having us. Excited. Before we begin, quick housekeeping item for important disclosures. Please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. And with that, let's kick it off, maybe a little bit more high level. It's been just over two years since you both joined the team at Grindr. Can you talk to me how the company has evolved over that time frame and how you see the market opportunities today? Sure. It's been two and a half, which is good. But I have children who are five, and so for them, they're coming up on their five and a half years, and so it's like a really big deal that they're five and a half, not five. A small thing from us is we have not done earnings yet. We're going to do them on Wednesday, so some questions we might kind of dance around on, but stay tuned for the answers to those on Wednesday. Yeah, so when I considered joining Grindr, the big question that we all talked about with large shareholders at that point was private stuff. Where does it go beyond just as a hookup product? Because just running a hookup product didn't really entice me that much. And we all had this vision that actually Grindr is used for a lot more things than hookups. And so thinking of it as a dating product was actually not accurate. And then beyond that, there was an opportunity to use it as a distribution engine for even more things beyond the core product. So I tend to think of Grindr as a social network that monetizes through dating and immediate connection use cases, but actually serves a much broader spectrum of things for the users. And then secondly, that yes, there is a lot of stuff you can launch that is peripheral to what we do, but we have a great distribution engine for launching those things, and that can be standalone businesses themselves. So in a little bit, like the way I want people to think about Grindr is in five years, I want Grindr to be like Tesla is today, where it has this insanely awesome engine of making money, which are the cars themselves, and then it's now built at least three businesses that are either already there or on the come, on which it makes a ton of money, right? Full Self-Driving, the Powerwall business, which is amazing, actually, given where I live, we lose power all the time, and it's totally seamless. And then the robot business that's kind of on the come. So that's the end state of where we want Grindr to be, and that's how we want people to think through. There's a social network with the Grindr app, and then other stuff on top of that we're going to build. And that's all totally new. That's not how Grindr presented itself to the world or thought of itself as in 2022. But I think at this point we've earned the right to go after these bigger things because we have done, I would hope, a reasonably good job in monetizing the core business and also making the core business a lot better. Because Grindr had not really invested in a lot of products that it needed over a period of time coming out of Chinese ownership that were just not an opportunity to do those investments. We've solved a lot of the technical debt issues that we had. Not all. There's still stuff on the front end that definitely needs solving and is a longer investment that needs to be done. But we've solved a lot of those. That now puts us in a place where we can actually build and launch new products that require that technology to be solved. A lot of the things we're building are AI-first products, which I think is really exciting. I think we're way ahead of the curve on that. And then concurrently with that, we are working on these what we call neighborhood expansion opportunities that are pretty big and could be standalone big businesses on their own. Hopefully, we'll launch at least one this year, obviously in a limited kind of beta, but at least to give people a taste of what it can be. So that's how I would think of what we've done so far. The foundation that we've laid over the last two and a half years is really now setting us up to be a really awesome growth business, not just for the next three years, which I now think of as midterm, not long term anymore, but for many years to come beyond that. Okay. Great. Well, a lot in there, and I want to pick apart that kind of bit by bit. But let's start out with the most common question that I've been asked, which is other large brands in the dating industry have seen user pressure, especially with Gen Z. You've been much more isolated from these impacts. One, why do you think that is? And two, how should we think about market growth within your core TAM? Yeah. So I think that a lot of the user issues that these companies have actually come from product issues that these companies have, so I don't think it's like users don't want to go there. It's the products that are not enticing users to go there, and then secondly, just as a meta level thing, we are not worried about user growth at all, but we also don't need a lot of user growth to drive the revenue expectation that we've laid out for the next three years, so obviously, we want users to grow, and we believe they will continue growing, but that's not a requirement for the financial numbers that we put out. There's a bunch of stuff that really helps us. Number one is historically, to this day, Grindr has never had an issue of younger generation trying to flock somewhere else. They want to come to Grindr, partly because the critical mass of users is at Grindr. And I think there has to be a really significant platform shift for any kind of real risk to arise to that. A lot of younger gay men just finished college or just starting college because we don't allow anybody under 18 to be on our product want to be around other older gay men, probably to kind of learn what it's like to be gay, especially if you didn't grow up in a very large city. That's a big topic for people. And so Grindr is a great place to do that, and we hear that from users. So there's this network effect that are like, well, all the older guys are there, so obviously I need to go there as well. Number two is our free product is really robust. I get a lot of questions all the time about, couldn't you take X or Y away and make more money on that? Absolutely. We've left tens of millions of dollars on the table just in the last 12 months on things that we could have launched that would have depreciated the free product slightly, probably not have impacted user experience much at all, but would have been still a taking away of stuff that we did not feel was the right thing to do for our users because we do come to things from the user-first perspective. I think both of those factors have made it a lot easier for us to continue getting re-engagement from free users, who are really critical. Obviously, paying users matter, but free users are the reasons why these people are paying. So if you don't get a lot of new users coming in, that's a problem. I guess one last thing is here, we know that a lot more younger people actually want to settle down in a relationship in the gay and bi population. We did a survey last year where we asked this, and 50% of people 35 and under said they wanted to be in a relationship, which is a pretty incredible thing to hear as somebody who is in my mid-40s. And when I would say that I wanted to be married in my 20s, I was like this weirdo dude who was talking about God knows what. Incidentally, 25% of that cohort said they wanted to have children. And that is even a crazier change because I was literally one in 100 of people who would say I wanted to have kids. And so we know that that's a world where people are going to, and that's why we're actually building a lot of features in the product for relationships. But even when people settle down, they don't leave the app because the app does so much more for them besides dating that they'd make sense for them to keep the app still going and their profile still going. Okay. Great. Well, talked a lot about the differentiation here kind of holistically. Maybe to put a finer point on it, where do you think Grindr is most differentiated from a product and a financial perspective versus the swipe model? Grindr is an open architecture product. You see a bunch of people on a grid, and you can talk to any of them. There is actually, as of today, virtually no recommendations in the app. We just added a short, small line of people that are picked for you as a recommendation, but until now, we've never done anything of that nature. Now, that's going to change. We're going to keep the grid as it is, for sure, but we're going to add a new space that we call Discover Tab. Think of it a little bit like the Instagram Discover Tab, where we will have a more targeted set of people in there from all over the world. We're not going to just limit it to your local neighborhood or local area. It's going to be people from everywhere. As we build more AI features, we can do that in a really high-quality way, but historically, that's been a really big difference, and you can message anyone you want, and that makes a really big difference. That's why conversations are such a huge thing on Grindr. I mean, last year, we sent 130 billion chats. People sent 130 billion chats back and forth, which is like a really crazy number. It's over 50 chats per user per day, and that's more than WhatsApp per user per day in terms of chat sent, and we're not a just chatting problem, so I think that's structurally where we are very different from that. Okay. Great. Well, I want to come back to some of those product expansion points in a second, but let's start with monetization. I mean, you've made significant progress here, both in terms of payer penetration, revenue per user. What have been the key unlocks that have enabled that expansion as you've worked through this? And where are you now in that monetization journey? Has the low-hanging fruit been picked, or do you think more is available? So the last four years, so before I got there and since then, we've usually had one or two big things that we launched a year that drove most of the monetization. So in 2021, it was more profiles upsell. So we showed you more profiles on the grid, even though you couldn't open those profiles unless you were a paying customer. In 2022, it was Boost, which was a big driver of growth. In 2023, it was Weekly XTRA kind of pay structure where you could pay for Grindr XTRA on a weekly basis. And then in 2024, it was Unlimited weekly payment option. So all those were. We did other things too. Not all revenue came from that, but a lion's share of revenue growth came from that. This year is actually very different. This year, we have a bunch of smaller things that we're launching that are going to drive all the revenue. We'll give guidance on Wednesday, but we're very confident of what we're going to say and also that there might be potential for upside, obviously also. The reason we ask is because all these things have been tested through in pretty significant detail last year, which is a big change in how the company is run. We wouldn't think about revenue next year until last minute. Last year, we started planning for 2025 in April, May. This year, we're actually planning not just for 2026 now, but also for 2027, which is we now have more grown up and have much more of a forward-looking view. I think that's a big difference in how we think about the business now. I'll hand over to Van to talk about how much opportunity there is. So thanks, George. So I agree with all that. And I'd say we have a very robust free product. And that free product comes with a very highly engaged user base. And as George mentioned just a few minutes ago, the free users are very valuable to the paid users and vice versa. And so that loyal following gives us a beautiful runway for developing more and more products. And you've seen the product roadmap in June, and you saw a new one in January. So I would argue that, yes, we're still at the early stages of our monetization journey, and you could see a few proof points. Our payer penetration is half of the other folks in the peer group. So that gives you a sense. Also, we're really focused on our user community and building value. So, when I say building value, the way that we're going to try to convert folks from free users to paid users, we've already seen conversion rates go up in the last two and a half years that we've been here, not by surprise. I mean, obviously, a very deliberate action that we've taken to do that. And I would argue that we're going to see higher and higher conversion rates. And we are also going to be working on localization internationally to increase those conversion rates. So I'd say still really at the early days of our journey here. And yes, we've probably picked some of the low-hanging fruit, no doubt about it. I would say. By the end of this year. Sure, yeah, by the end of this year. The low-hanging fruit, I'd say that we've picked some of the merchandising or the way we've packaged the pricing, but there's still some features that I think could be very helpful. I think the way because two things. One is you can kind of get to the numbers that we want to get to, say, over the next three to five years, either by increasing payer penetration massively or increasing how much money we make from people who pay significantly. Either one of those gets us to the numbers we want and more, actually. But if both of those things happen, obviously, then you're in a totally different place. So that, to me, is why it's such a kind of good and manageable opportunity for what we want to do. And then, obviously, all the products that we're building this year and putting into test this year, they're not going to really drive a lot of revenue this year. Maybe they're driving a little bit, but not a lot. A lot of them will still be in testing next year as well, but we'll probably rely on a lot of them for next year's revenue, 2026, that is, and then in 2027, I think we'll start seeing a lot more benefit come from that. Okay. Great. Let's dive into some of those specific features and I want to start on Right Now, which is currently in testing. Talk us through the pain points you're looking to address, and what are the key indicators you are measuring to try to figure out what success is and what would be kind of the milestone you'd want to do a global launch? So Right Now, it's not built to be everywhere. Right Now, the way it's built today is for markets where you have some level of population density of gay people. So it's basically large metropolitan cities all over the world, not just on the coasts, to be very clear, because actually, there's a very large number of gay people in places like Houston and Dallas, et cetera. But it is designed for larger cities. I think with a few small tweaks, it can be applicable to people who don't live in large cities, but that's like a second phase of that. When Grindr was launched in 2009, I lived through this on my own, frankly. This was my own lived experience. What made it awesome was this immediacy of, hey, if I want to try to have a connection with somebody right now, it's kind of right there for you. Now, over time, as we added more and more people and they have different intentions, it became more complex because a lot of people on the app do not want to have an immediate connection. They might not want to have a connection at all. There's a whole push of people who are on the app who are super active and actually very high payers who we call social skimmers. They're just there literally using the product as a social network, kind of like they use Instagram as a social network. So with all these different intentions, the thing that makes Grindr hum so well became a little bit lost within all these people who have other interests, and the thing that is critical, and this part of gay culture, I don't think will ever change, is that hookups and casual dating is a really big part of gay life. And so we wanted to start addressing things through user intent by saying, okay, users have these different intentions. Let's build products that meet all these different intentions without breaking the core that we have. And so Right Now is the first one we tried. Feedback on it is awesome, and the two places where it's live in Australia and Washington, D.C., there's a new number, and I think it's useful to kind of have out there, is 25% of people, WAU, meaning weekly active users who have used Right Now, regularly use Right Now. 25% of our weekly WAU is in Right Now mode at some point during the week, at least once, which is fantastic, which is kind of what we always thought, that there's about a quarter of our users who are much more interested in that kind of immediate connection, and they're getting a lot of value from the product. We can't measure yet did this connection actually result in people meeting in real life. That's a little tougher to do. We can infer things, but we can't be certain. One of the things that we use to kind of understand whether we're getting there or not is do people share location? Because that's like a pretext to meeting. Location sharing is significantly higher in people who are in Right Now versus people who are not, which tells you that something's clearly working. And so we're very happy with that. I would stay tuned for the next three months as we kind of expand that. But again, we're not focusing on monetizing Right Now. Right Now, it's very much on user experience focused. Eventually, if you have something that adds a lot of value to users, you're going to make money on it, but that's not the focus today. And we're not looking at a global launch. We're looking at a city-by-city launch to see how it does in each city. Okay. Great. So that's Right Now. I also want to talk about relationships. You've mentioned it a little bit as a kind of key expansion point. First, how do you size that market opportunity kind of within the Grindr user base and outside of it? And given that, do you see this as an opportunity more for increased engagement and retention among existing users, or as a way to tap into and kind of expand the overall TAM? So are you taking that or am I? Oh, you can start. You can start. I think that when we joined, I think George has mentioned a couple of things, like social skimmers. We looked at the entire community, and we got the segmentation of the different groups. Inside those different groups, some are much more active than others. One of them that was potentially less active, and we hadn't really developed a use case or a specific use case, was for the relationships. In my mind, that is really expanding the TAM, getting them on the app more often. We have a MAU that's quite healthy, and I think you've seen it grow every year that we've been here. I think there's more room there, and I think that's the predominant vector that we were thinking about originally. Grindr is the primary source of relationships among gay people in the United States and probably the world. I just don't have the data about the world. But the U.S. number is staggering, how many of the people who are in a relationship, whether it's monogamous or open, found each other on Grindr. And again, we did a very deep survey of users last October, both Grindr users and not, to understand this. So we already do very well, but it's a pain to go through that because it's basically find people on the grid, start talking to them, and then figure out who's actually in that mode or not. And that's pretty painful. So we want to solve that. And we also know from our research that 50% of Grindr users are open to being in a relationship. And we also know that a chunk of Grindr users go to Hinge and other products to set up a relationship profile that is a little different than their Grindr profile. And then they tell us, oh, so we do that because all the features over there are available and you don't have them. But then we discovered there's no critical mass of users at Hinge and Tinder. And so then we end up having to come back to Grindr for the relationship. And so that, to me, just screams like a product opportunity, and you should go fix it. Unlike Right Now, which is like its own space in the app for Right Now, dating features actually are going to be introduced along with other features as we build those out. And then eventually, if those features are used really well, we maybe bring them together into a dating space, but we're not going to start in a dating space. And the reason is that, again, for Right Now, we know that 90% of our users are interested in some form of Right Now, but the same number is not as high for the dating. So we're building this Discover Tab, which we released information about in January. And initially, that's going to be just like people who we think you would find interesting all over the world. But the next phase of that would be like, hey, be able to reshuffle that list based on who actually wants to date or not. So if I'm interested in dating, I then kind of can do that to that list and see different types of people. Now, that would be a paid feature, presumably, and then secondly, then we can ask the user, "Hey, do you want to share more information about yourself with people when they're looking at you from the dating perspective?" And so it's not like you have a new profile that you had to create, but these are the 10 things that we infer about you that we think people who want to date would find interesting. "Do you want to share that information with somebody else or not?" And so that's kind of the path we're going to take there, where it's going to be a lot more integrated in the app initially, and then eventually maybe it lands in its own space. But we did not want to say, hey, let's go rebuild the Hinge or Tinder completely within the app, because then you're building a second marketplace within your marketplace, and I don't think that makes sense. Okay. Great. Now, underlying a lot of this is investments in AI and Gen AI. And George, certainly, you've been quite vocal on this topic. So, interested to hear, if we jump forward two, three, four years, pick the right time frame, what's your vision for how Gen AI can really enhance the user experience here? And then a lot of these products are more expensive incrementally than some of the ones. How do you balance the cost side of the equation? So let me take the cost first. They're expensive for two reasons. One is because you have specialty people who you need to work on that. But I think as we recently saw, if you go to Twitter and look up who works for xAI, and then you look up who works for OpenAI, the numbers are going to be literally staggeringly different, like maybe 10x different. And so we have a model now from xAI, which is literally as good or better as the model from OpenAI. And so you don't need all these people working on that. And I think companies have overblown the number of people that you need to get this stuff done. And I think Elon is once again proving to the world that that's actually not the case. That's not necessary. And then there's compute costs, but compute costs are going to come down. Every time we talk about compute costs, compute costs come down over time, and I don't think we need to worry about that. Now, they're very valuable features, and so you charge for those, obviously, and that's going to happen also, and that makes sense. As far as how we envision things, frankly, we have a lot of ideas, and we don't yet know, because this is all totally brand new, and we have no clue how people are going to be using some of the stuff. Our job as a product-driven company, one that drives growth through product, is to create a bunch of things that we believe would be valuable to users, to put them through user research, understand user feedback, tweak if necessary, then actually build them and put them onto the market and see what happens. Because no matter what kind of survey you do, it's not actually going to be real until users have something to touch and feel and play with it. Now, I have a gut feeling that some are going to work better than others, but I don't actually know how things are going to exactly land, and so I can't predict. Things that I'm excited about is inference around people and letting other people know what that information is in order to create better connections, and obviously, we would never do that without user consent. And we've just gone through a whole cycle of getting consent from people at a very high percentage rate, saying yes, actually, proactively asking them for consent, which, by the way, is totally different than what everybody else does. On LinkedIn, you guys probably all use LinkedIn. You were all put into their AI stuff, and you could go into their settings, blah, blah, and remove yourself. But there was no proactive process of kind of actively saying, are you interested in that, calling AI out in terms of service. We actually did that, and we got a very, very high percentage of people saying yes, which is great. Gay men are normally early adopters of technology, so it's not at all surprising that that's what's happening. But I think that these inferences and matching people better with inferences rather than just things that they tell us about themselves is a really powerful thing. And I think we're going to see really awesome results, including on dating, because one of the biggest problems for dating in the gay world is lack of density in any given community. So there's probably, roughly speaking, 60,000 gay men who live in San Francisco, the city proper. I don't mean the entire Bay Area. But then when you split them up by age and you split them up by position, interest, and who wants to be in a relationship or not, you probably have a universe of 15,000 people maybe that actually is your dating cohort if you're living here. That's not a lot of people to choose from as a comparison point if you are a straight man living in New York City. And so that's a big reason why gays travel so much and go to new places to meet people. And we can break down that barrier in the app if we have much better recommendation capabilities that I think AI can enable. Okay. Great. Now, moving over to the cost side, talked a lot about opportunities for investment, new product features, et cetera. And I think one of the more surprising things when people start looking at this company has been the strong profitability historically with even a margin consistently in the 40% range since going public. Long term, what's the right margin cadence or profile for this business to balance the investments and capturing the growth opportunity with the profitability side? And then over the next few years, how should we think of how the kind of key puts and takes here? Sure, so we gave our guidance of between 39% and 42% for EBITDA at Investor Day. You can see that we've been in those ranges, and we feel that they're very healthy because they allow us to invest in our business. We predominantly are investing organically, as you can see. We generate a lot of free cash flow, and there's plenty to invest, and we've talked a little bit about our investment areas, that being AI, which you've just heard about, data science, which we still are very interested in investing further, and our overall technology stack, so we are thinking about areas internally to basically scale with our business as we continue to scale. That being said, we also have a very nice financial structure because we don't need to spend a lot of money on marketing. We spend about 3% of our total revenue. That is significantly less than anybody, really any direct-to-consumer internet company that I know of. And so that's a structural advantage that we have. We are going to continue to invest for taking really hold of our brand narrative and allowing it to, I would say, propel even our advertising business. And what I mean by that is by taking hold of the brand narrative, getting people more comfortable on what Grindr stands for, as well as adding it to the screens that George has just been talking about, the discover tab and things where people might want to show their brands. So what I would say is we're happy with the 39%-42%. We think it's about the right range for where we are right now in our trajectory of growth. And let's see what the future brings. We're early in our monetization journey. Okay. One of the reasons I got excited about this job when I took it was that Grindr is a very profitable business, but it's also very small in number of people. And I've been founding companies in tech for a very long time now and was pretty frustrated by just this belief that you needed a ton of people to grow stuff. And given our high margins, I felt like there was an opportunity to actually experiment with trying to do all this with a very small team that's very agile and very high-performing. Because what I want eventually, five years from now, is for Grindr to be viewed as among the very best-run tech companies, not a really great gay tech company. Meaning, I want us to be among the very best-run team, being among the best in terms of what it can get done. Period, we just happen to serve a gay audience. And I think we are on track to kind of do that. And I think the number of people that work for us and the incredible increase that we've had in productivity from each engineer, for example, is kind of speaking to that. And that's very much the goal. Now, if you do that, you obviously will be then adding to the bottom line because your profitability per employee is just much higher and better that way. Okay. Awesome. Well, we have a few minutes left. Let's open it up for any questions from the audience. Feel free to just raise your hand, and we can bring around the microphone. Let me get another one on here first. We've seen a lot of news flow on additional trust and safety products across the industry. Can you share a little progress on the work you've made with privacy and safety over the past, let's call it five years, and where you're at now? These things are often conflated together, privacy and safety, and what does safety even mean? Definitions are not provided, and everyone's like, oh, safety. I think it's important to be nuanced in how we think about them. Privacy is paramount at Grindr because a third of our users are still discreet. Now, obviously, that number is higher internationally than it is domestically, but still, it's a very large number of people. It's not just because they're not out. These are actually people who could be out but are choosing on purpose to be discreet because they might live in a very small neighborhood and don't want to be known as being active, et cetera, because even though legally you're fully good, the actual tolerance is not where you want it to be. Privacy, we take really, really seriously. That's actually one reason why we went through this whole consent process for AI, et cetera. And we'll continue to do that. I think our privacy practices are exceptional, and they'll continue to be exceptional. And that's not just like, hey, good thing to do. It's actually necessary for our business for us to be successful. And I don't want to conflate them with safety because actually sometimes privacy practices conflict with some things that you could do in safety. So if somebody might say, well, why don't you ask for an ID from everybody? Well, it's because a third of our users are discreet, and they might not feel comfortable sharing their ID with us. And so we got to be careful with that. Now, they probably are much more comfortable sharing their age information with Apple and Android. And the same with it. You don't ask Anheuser-Busch to check IDs. You ask the store to check the IDs. It's a reasonable expectation that the stores are the ones that check IDs on age. We actually don't allow anybody under 18 to be in our platform. And we have pretty strict kind of limitations on that inside the app stores as well. On the more what normally is called safety, I believe our job is to get illegal activity off the platform. And we define illegal activity fairly broadly, meaning things that only are legal in the U.S. but not illegal elsewhere. We will still classify that as an illegal activity. So solicitation, for example, which is a big one of those examples where it's illegal in the U.S. but legal in a lot of other parts of the world, but we view that as illegal. We don't allow it. We don't want it on the app at all. We ban a ton of people who try to do that, and they get off the site. Drugs is another example. We don't want drugs on the platform under any circumstances, and we have ML models running to identify activity like that, and we ban those accounts if we find things. We also have pretty good proactive reporting from our users to us as well, and we do that in a very active way. That's the focus of our safety efforts, is clear distinction between illegal and legal, and anything that's illegal, we want off the platform, and we are now actually trying to build our own AI technology to do some of the stuff that Right Now is done manually, so we can be even better at catching it and then focus our manual efforts on more important things. We ban tens of thousands of accounts a week because we find them to be doing things that are not okay, and that'll kind of continue, and obviously, right now, we take such an aggressive stance. We actually probably capture some people who didn't do anything wrong but suggested that they did something wrong, and so the better our tech becomes, then we kind of might not have this problem of banning people who then had to be restored because they got caught. Okay. Great, and to wrap it up, what are the one or two things you think investors most underappreciate or misunderstand about the Grindr story? The biggest one for me is the fact that we are compared to a dating app. I think our analysts are finally starting to kind of fully capture this and are talking about us as more of a social network versus a dating product. And some investors are definitely getting there as well. So I think we're getting better on that front. And I think the second thing, which is because now that's up to us. We have to prove that we can do this. But the one very smart investor who I really respect, I think you are finally getting the credit for your execution on the core business. I don't think you're getting any credit yet for what Grindr can be in the future and the super big opportunity that you're exploring with this very attached user base. I don't think we're getting credit for that yet at all. Okay. Stay tuned. I think that we'll see how it all goes in 2025. Okay. Awesome. All right. George, Vanna, thank you both so much for being here.