All right, everybody, it's the time you've been waiting for, the last presentation before cocktails. No. We're very happy to have Bernard Kim and Gary Swidler here from the Match Group to bring us home. We do have a little bit of a sizzle reel featuring all of the brands that we'll start with here to kick off, and then we'll dive into all kinds of hard-hitting questions for our management team. All right. Fantastic. I think that was, that was new to you guys as well, and BK, I saw you nodding as you went along through. That look good to you? Absolutely. First time I've seen it, actually. There you go. Well, there you go. It's inspiring. The comms team is on it. Nice job. We got that delivered in the nick of time last night. Well, listen, thank you very much, guys, once again for joining us. You know, naturally, Gary and Bernard, as everyone knows, the President and CFO and CEO of Match Group and also... Are we still calling it interim CEO of Tinder? Look, let me get back to that one a little later in the questions 'cause I wanna ask about that a little bit more. Gary, naturally, as the CFO, we'll have, you know, and President, we'll have a couple more questions for you later, but with BK here for the first time, we're maybe gonna lean on him just a little bit more. So let me start with this with a softball. You've been in the seat over 10 months now. What's the top unexpected opportunity you've discovered and the top unexpected challenge that you've had so far? Well, that's a great question. I think one of the unexpected things out of this love summit that we're in, that you found your significant other in Tinder, it's. There we go. That's right. ... incredible. Yeah. It's incredible. You know, upon joining the organization, I'd say that the positive, unexpected opportunity that I saw was meeting all the teams and seeing how open people were to change and new ideas. I've been in this situation before where we've had new leadership come in. I've worked in corporate America my whole career, and sometimes people are apprehensive to new people coming in. I really believe that, you know, the way that teams embrace me, they are open to, you know, discussing new opportunities, looking at the organization, setting up the right teams for long-term success. That was really positive. Yeah. I was really excited about that. The unexpected challenge maybe was how quickly we needed to work on Tinder and, you know, from the outside coming in, I always saw Tinder as this huge opportunity, but kind of understanding with the teams, going through the initial mid-year review with Gary, we saw an opportunity to make quick change and establish a leadership team for the future, that's probably what I didn't have written in my first 90 days upon joining the organization. Fair enough. Fair enough. Just a reminder to everybody, both in the room and on the webcast, you can scan the small QR code on your badge if you have a question for the guys. We're happy to mix that in. Let's start with that first one, with Tinder, thanks once again for having Faye and Mark join us earlier today to kick things off. The number one bear point that I think that we hear from investors is the online dating market is oversaturated, and Match and Tinder have the most potential risk from that. Do you agree with that statement? Is that fair? I mean, I know that's been a sentiment, and that's what I've heard a lot of, but I actually see that as the biggest potential opportunity, not the biggest potential risk. If I join the organization and everything was, like, pumping on all cylinders, we're delivering against a product roadmap, marketing was in sync with product, we're delivering against all of our revenue results, and then things were flattening out, I would be a lot more alarmed. The fact that we kind of were faltering a little bit on execution, we weren't aligned as a leadership team, marketing wasn't quite in sync, I saw that as a real opportunity. Young people today are jumping into Tinder. That's way different than when I was, like, growing up and I was jumping into dating and having very little success. There was no opportunity like Tinder. That stigma is gone. Now it's about earning that engagement. When they're jumping in, they know, "Hey, I wanna jump into dating, I'm gonna jump into Tinder." We wanna make it less of a requirement. We want really people to jump in, this profound opportunity that this team is going after. All of our decisions are really centered around the health of the long-term future of the ecosystem. Yeah. Yes, we, as I mentioned, we had the panel of private companies up beforehand, and Mark nicely asked them what their advice was for you guys and trust and safety and mental health were big, big parts of that answer. It's that's a that's a that's an important thing. Maybe I wanna get to the rest of the business, and we spent a lot of time on Tinder this morning. Just you know, beyond that sort of big picture about, still seeing a lot of growth, when you look out at the product roadmap, what are the things that you're sort of most excited for the Tinder team to roll out? You know, one thing that we did that was brand new to the company was laying out a product roadmap, both internally and publicly. You know, for the first couple months of this new leadership team coming on board, we wanna make sure that the team was gelling well together, we were all aligned around our long-term goals as an organization, and then aligning around this product roadmap, 'cause it really comes down to execution. Yeah. We were public about what our product roadmap looks like, and part of it is, like, two-thirds we actually talked about as optimizations. We kinda have to earn our way back into rebuilding trust. With our investor community as well as daters in the marketplace, we have to deliver against these optimizations. You know, I'm really proud that our product execution has increased dramatically from where we were last year. Yeah. We're delivering, we're testing, our builds are getting through the platforms a lot faster. I'm really excited about kinda how this team is working together and gelling, but we need to prove through long term. Execute. We appreciated the product roadmap too. We know it's no small thing when things are disclosed publicly, Gary knows that, and practice of guidance and when you lay things out there, you know, this group's gonna hold you to it. We know that doing that raises above a bar. Accountability is super important. Yeah. We know we need to execute this year. You know, we look at our investors as partners in the space as we go and increase that pie. Yeah. It's really important that we execute as a team. Let's switch gears, 'cause like I said, we spent a lot of time with the Tinder team this morning, and there's so much else to your business. Let's go to Hinge. Justin McLeod, their CEO, was at a conference last week, said he thinks that should be a billion-dollar business. He also added that when Hinge's partnership with Match started in 2017, they were targeting only $1 million in revenue. Oh. Your guidance this year is $400 million, and we estimated in our model at $822 million by 2025, hopefully. With that as a little bit of context, you know, what do you need, BK, to see from Hinge to push to those sorta levels and beyond, and turn it into that billion-dollar business that Justin thinks it could be? Wow. Wait, I think we can take a moment to reflect on that. Talking about a million-dollar run rate business and then having a conversation around $1 billion is pretty inspiring. Great acquisition. We are really happy to have Hinge and Justin and his team to be part of Match Group. I do think we're kind of still on the early runway of what we can do with Hinge. you know, I like, you know, as an outsider looking in, when I heard this marketing campaign of Designed to Be Deleted, I just about fell out of my chair. coming from the space of gaming and what we wanna do is designed never to be deleted or ever to be put down. This is way different, but it, like, it was a jaw-dropping campaign. Yeah. This idea of great dates and intention daters is something that I personally found incredibly inspiring from the outside looking in. Coming into the organization, though, you know, I, like, my first week, I think Gary had slapped on, like, 7 mid-year reviews in my first 7 days of the company, and one of them were Hinge. The team was really focused on product innovation and product execution. That was the mantra for last year. Now, this year, we're moving into global expansion and monetization. We made a hard call in the middle of last year to hold actually HingeX for further testing. We wanted to make sure that it was perfect for the high expectations of our daters in the marketplace. After lots of testing and product and proper surfacing, we're really happy with the way that it's rolled out. For those of you that don't know, HingeX is being launched, it was launched at $50 price point, we lowered the price of Hinge+ from $35 to $30, making the approachability of a subscription model better. We had kind of two tiers, and seeing that roll out and the execution of the team, still we're early on the surfacing side, we're testing that whole side of it. Yeah. It's very exciting and inspiring. On global expansion, we're in this process right now of rolling out throughout Europe. We see great opportunities ahead of us internationally as well. The virality and the organic install, I mean, Hinge is on fire. People are really excited about the brand coming into their marketplace, so we wanna add fuel to that. Awesome. Let's keep moving through your business, and switch over to Asia. We published our sort of new and improved industry model, on Sunday, and just what remains so clear from it is how much of the industry growth for Match as well will come from Asia and how significant that is. You've, you've now carved out the region as its own reporting segment. It includes Hyperconnect and Pairs, and is now being led by former Plenty of Fish CEO, Malgosia Green. Question for each of you. First to Gary-I think the market's view of the Hyperconnect deal has been a little bit mixed. Maybe just take us back, remind us sort of how you viewed it when you bought it, and then what you've learned since then, sort of through COVID and ATT, the Apple privacy changes which we know impacted it, and more importantly, the keys to resurrecting growth at Hyperconnect. I'll come back to BK. Yeah, I mean, look, I think you were very diplomatic probably in the way you described the reaction to that transaction. I don't think, you know, our investors or we are happy with the way it's turned out so far, but there's still a long way to go, and we just have to keep working and grinding it out. I think, you know, one of the things you already mentioned was a key component of it, which is there's big opportunity in Asia. It's a place where we're under-penetrated from a business standpoint, and getting, you know, 400 people on the ground in Asia with market knowledge was very, very important to us. That was definitely a key piece of it. You know, the other thing was a bet on their technological capabilities. They have a lot of very highly trained, capable engineers that were helpful in video and audio, which we've exported to some of our other apps. We think as AI and things like that start to become more critical, they can help us in that regard as well. That's why I say, you know, there's still a lot more runway for that acquisition. I think if you look at their businesses specifically, we really acquired two apps, Azar, which is a one-to-one chat app, video chat app, and that app is actually performing reasonably well. It's back to some reasonable growth levels. We're also improving the profitability of Hyperconnect. I think 10% kind of margins this year are achievable. Between that level of profitability and the growth we're achieving, we're happy with the way Azar is headed. Hakuna, which is their other app, you know, needs more work. We've got a new head of Hakuna now. He's got a new strategy we're planning to implement in the back half of this year, so we need to see how that goes. You know, I think there's no question that Hyperconnect benefited from people staying at home and the COVID phenomenon. They also ran into some challenges with the Apple changes on the marketing side. There's a few things that kind of outside of their control that we're moving around. And we've done a good job kinda coming in there, getting it back to growth, making some changes on the marketing side, and more work to do. There's not a silver bullet in a sense. It's just hard work that needs to get that app back to, or those two apps back to where we want them to be, and we're gonna continue to work on that, as well as leveraging the capabilities across our portfolio, for future innovation. BK, then, to you, tell us a little bit more about your appointment of Malgosia Green to run the region and then, you know, beyond Hyperconnect, other key growth drivers in the region. Of course, Pairs is a business, obviously, but maybe some points on, you know, what are the differentiating elements in Asia specifically that really drive growth there versus, say, other regions? Yeah, I mean, I think that's, there's a couple different facets, and I, and I wanna make sure that Gary doesn't get all the hard questions. The story on Hyperconnect still isn't completely told. Like, I joined the company in an unprecedented time, kind of post-COVID, and, you know, I did recognize that, you know, we haven't had a lot of IRL meetings with the Hyperconnect team. A lot of magic happens when you're in a room together, you're brainstorming ideas, you can read people's body language. I actually think that the talent at Hyperconnect is actually really well-positioned for the future of where Match Group can be with AI and machine learning and the talent that we have that's super motivated in South Korea and this real chip on their shoulder around like, you know, achieving success. The fact that, you know, our comments about Hyperconnect is a little bit tepid, like, you know, it's not a home run, let's call it, and not all M&A works. There is this like, you know, chip on their shoulder to prove that it was a great acquisition for Match Group. That's what I love, is like this spirit and this energy, kind of infusing great internal talent with external talent is like one of my skill sets. saw an opportunity to recruit Linda Kim as COO, a new head of one of our apps that came over from Kakao. It's like kinda really exciting. Also it's saying, okay, you have great talent in South Korea that's focused on AI, machine learning, a fantastic sponsor in Malgosia, and then having them work with one of our largest platforms in the world, Tinder. Like, I actually crashed Faye's meeting with Will Wu with Linda Kim. They happened to be meeting. I found out where the meeting was, Linda and I just showed up at their table and say, "Hey, like, let's the four of us sit down and talk about the opportunities." Will's kinda fresh in from Snap. He hasn't officially started, we started brainstorming ideas. These are like these great moments that happen in real rooms, in real life, not on Zoom. I think that's like kinda the magic that we're recapturing. Part of that is like, now to move over to Malgosia and what the opportunity looks like in Asia, you know, I did really see an incredible talent in Malgosia. You know, when she's in the room, she was kinda commanding, respect from not only Match Group, but like the team around her, but a really strong product sense. I, like, you know, having experience running business in Asia, like having somebody that's remote, that's, you know, hundreds of miles away, that doesn't work for Asia 'cause like sometimes what happens in Asia stays in Asia. You need a leader that's on the ground that also has like camaraderie with the large, like the larger part of Match Group, and I personally saw that perfect solution in Malgosia. When she told me, "Hey, I'm open to like picking up my life, my family, taking a big risk with you and jumping over and trying, like, working with the teams in Asia, with Pairs, with Hyperconnect, our go-to-market teams," I saw like things really clicking together. You know, the opportunity sits like we're in a little bit of a weird time in Asia. Like, are people back from COVID? Are they not back from COVID? You know, this spirit and this energy that people are looking for love, and they're looking for human connections, they're looking for IRL relationships. That will rebound at some point. We just need to make sure that we're patient, we're calm, and we're well-positioned in the marketplace with the right leadership and vision. Fair. Thank you for the additional comments on Hyperconnect, 'cause it's good to know your conviction and the comment about the chip on the shoulder of the team is very interesting. I mean, that is a comment that I'll say across all of Match Group. Like, right now, we're not happy with where we are today. You know, and like, this idea of, like, what inspires people, part of it is, like, having that chip on their shoulder, proving through that we can win, and we have the winning organization. That competitive fire is, like, is rampant in Match Group. We might not be seeing it in the open marketplace, but there is this competitive fire positioning ourselves to win, get out of our way, and we'll go after it. We've got a few coming in on the Q&A, I'm gonna start with one. I'm gonna come back after this and talk about in-app payments. This is a good one to, I think, kick that off. For B.K., compare the elasticity of dating at Tinder versus mobile games. Is cyclicality pressuring net ads in 4Q and Q1? Well, you know, we have seen a slowdown since I've joined, and I hope it's not because I joined the organization. You know, I will say that, you know, the life cycle of a gamer versus a dater are very different. What is indisputable, though, is that the rewards of, like, finding the right date, or having that great, you know, experience, finding the one like you did with your wife on Tinder, I mean, those rewards are literally endless. That's what inspired me to join this organization. It doesn't matter what game you play, like, and this is a fallacy that, like, gaming executives will tell you differently. No one plays these games forever. After a certain point, people churn out of a game experience. What are you left with? I personally have spent $50,000 in 3 months in Clash of Clans, and I still look back on that with lots of shame. I'm like, "Oh, my God, what did I really get out of that experience?" Nothing, other than, like, a really amazing wall, which is not cool today. Now you look at, like, what can come out of Tinder, like you meeting your wife. Like, I mean, that's an immeasurable reward, like something that will last a lifetime, that will lead to unbelievable amounts of happiness, maybe sometimes despair, but at least you're feeling something. I'm like, you know, I think that it's just this really incredible opportunity for us. It leads to children too. Yes. That was the other surprise. Let's come back. I wanna talk in-app payments because the implementation of the Digital Markets Act is starting to come up on the horizon. Reporting from Bloomberg and others are suggesting that Apple is ready to consider sideloading. I know there's lots of caveats and other activities going on in different countries around it, but could you talk about what you're expecting in terms of the outlook for in-app fees? Do you think that there's a material change coming? Why don't I toss that one to Gary to start? Yeah, look, I think this year is actually a very critical year around the DMA, right, in terms of how it's gonna be implemented in Europe and what kind of standards that's gonna set for Apple and Google. I think it's pretty clear that the current store policies don't comply, and they're gonna have to change the policies. I think it's a question of, you know, how much longer they're gonna kind of battle and push and see how long they can drag this out. My sense is, you know, they need to comply by the end of 2023. They don't comply today, so changes need to be made. My guess is that you'll see that as a global policy for Apple and Google, because I don't think they wanna have one regional policy where things are cheaper, the consumer in Europe versus what's being charged in the US, or more advantageous for developers in Europe versus developers in the US. I think you're gonna see a significant amount of change this year, which will then kind of be a financial implication for next year. That's my best sense. There's already a lot of discussion by the regulators of what new policies could work, what makes sense, what's fair and non-discriminatory, which is the language that the DMA uses. I think you're gonna be hearing more and more about this as the year goes on. Look, like there's, you know, I'll just add on a couple points to that. Gary mentioned the word fair and unfair. Look, like, you know, I've had a career in mobile freemium. Sometimes I talk to like, you know, my old friends, not really current, but old friends at Apple and Google, and I say, "I owe these guys a lot." Like, you know, they created this incredible ecosystem where anyone at any place at any time, boring meeting, three o'clock in the morning, they don't have to run over to GameStop. They can download an app and play it and experience and get into the fun super quickly without barriers to entry. That was 10 years ago. Things have considerably changed w hen the App Store launched at EA Mobile, we were one, and Mark Van Ryswyk was there with me. We were one of hundreds of apps. Today, you're competing against hundreds of thousands of apps. The organic install on browsing through the store aisles is gone. Now it's all a paid acquisition channel. You come to the financials. I mean, you look at Match Group. We spent over $600 million in in App Store fees last year. That's more than we're spending on R&D. How does that make sense in a world that's, like, driven on innovation? We want innovative new features that people are inspired to jump into, you're paying a tax of $600+ million. That's why, like, there hasn't been a tremendous amount of innovation in the app ecosystems for a long time. People want to invest. They wanna have the biggest and bright teams, not like, you know, trying to copy something else that works in the marketplace. It needs to be driven off of innovation, and we need to fund those things. I mean, like, I'm jumping a little bit versus Fair versus unfair, or unfair, and then our financial metrics. You look at games companies, you look at, you know, you look at our company spending more in attacks than we are in innovation. That seems unfair to me. Fair points. Fair points. Another hard one. Let's talk about Google specifically. I'll get right to the point. On one hand, you're involved in sort of active litigation against them, while one of your biggest competitors, Bumble, is early testing partner for alternative in-app payments. BK, the broader relationship with Google obviously has a lot more variables than just those, but are you happy with the direction of your relationship with Google right now? I would say that it could be better. I've always had a pretty collaborative relationship with both Apple and Google in my previous history. These are people that I've had personal relationships with outside of even, like, kind of the work day to day. I am proud of the efforts that Match Group is driving around driving a fairer ecosystem. I think if we were treated fairly, our relationship would be absolutely better. We are on a forefront when it comes to innovation, when it comes to, like, leading that fight. I think long term, that will lead to better innovation. All right. Fair point. Just a reminder to everyone, we'll, I've got questions here that I can grab. I'm gonna have another one for B.K. It's about advertising, right? Which is a form of revenue which those two companies do not take a slice of, which is important to note. You've talked about it, you know, being much more of a priority at the company. You know, Gary, I can remember when we went back to the IPO, it was always sort of drifting around. I remember as Tinder sort of took off, the, you know, the explanation was, you know, "Hey, we're just gonna focus on this product." You've brought this focus on advertising a little bit back to the company. You talked about getting up to a $100 million run rate sometime over the short term. What are the keys to that? Do you think that that number is coming sooner rather than later? How important should advertising be for the business over the medium and long term? Look, I have a personal view on this. I think advertising should be an important pillar for us. It will take us some time to get there. Yeah. We're currently like a $50 million business. It could be a $100+ million business over time. You know, I, I do think that, like, when it comes to young people and the way that they experience their content in apps is very different than the way that you and I may have. You know, my son spends all of his time on YouTube, and I watch over his shoulder what he's doing, and I'm like, "Hey, you know, we have a YouTube Premium subscription." I did, like, pay for that one, and it's a family plan. I see. Hey, you know, we can link your account, then you don't have to experience any of those ads. He's like, "I love the ads." He's like, "I wanna know what's hot in the marketplace. I wanna know what the next game or the next app to download is. I'm used to it. It gives me a break from watching, and I can kinda zone out or zone in." It's like it's a real thing today. Now, some of the things that we're excited about is, like, my lens on this is, you know, not like revenue is revenue. We should be open to these other opportunities, especially if the majority of our daters are not spending today. I've done, you know, a lot of research in this area, and like, especially in gaming, is that, like, you know, if there's a rewarded ad that people might see, and then they get a great premium experience, they might be apt to spending money on that premium experience in the future. The nice part about our business is like in gaming, everyone's just promoting each other's games, and everyone's okay with that. Right. Here we're, you know, we're promoting different experiences that could actually lead to better dates. We have to be very careful about that, and we have to be very careful about our ecosystem. It's like kind of the long story and the long path of how we get to a $100+ million dollar business. Let me ask. I wanna come back, as I mentioned, to the Tinder CEO search, and your decision to put that on hold. We talked with Mark and Faye earlier today about how well the team is clicking. I wonder, are you headed for a Sundar Pichai type relationship or role here where it's CEO of the parent and of the largest company as he is at both Alphabet and Google? Are you a candidate for the role? There's a couple parts to that, and I'll try to answer it the shortest possible way that I can, is that I actually do not see gaps today. A gap that a CEO can fill, like, you know, has to be very distinct. Like, we need a marketer, we need a turnaround expert, we need somebody that's, you know, a product savant. Like, I've answered all of those questions in my own head 'cause I've seen the way that this team has gelled together. It's taken some time. Like, we've taken a lot of people, and we've pulled them out of, like, their day jobs and said, "You're now 100% focused on Tinder." That's like that's a, like, you know, we're basically submerging people in, like, the ultimate pressure cooker. Yeah. It takes some time to get that team to work together. I'm really excited about the way that this team is working. It's also forced me into a function of, like, really learning our biggest business, not kind of taking this parent approach of like, you know, I'm an arm's length. It's not us versus them, it's all just us. This year is a year of execution, another thing I wanted to do is make sure that we're removing all of those distractions in the marketplace. If we hired another CEO, or if we promoted from within, it would lead to six months of, like, retraining this person, you know, doing a, like, Tinder for dummies course. Like, we just don't have the time for that. We wanna see how this team performs, and I'm confident around our team. Fair enough. Fair enough. I'm gonna take the last couple here just from the audience, one for Gary and then one for BK to end. Gary, for you, actually, I'll combine it with the one I wanna ask, what are you thinking about for M&A versus the buyback, over the next sort of 12-18 months? Then I'll save one for BK for the end. Well, look, the company generates a lot of free cash flow, right? North of $800 million easily this year. You know, we don't wanna build cash for cash's sake. As we think about it, you know, things have obviously gotten cheaper in the M&A market. There's more attractive targets now. We've been good at M&A. If you look at the Hinge deal, as you said, you know, it was a fantastic deal. If we can find more great deals to do, we absolutely wanna do them in our space. Even with some M&A deals, we're gonna have a lot of capital that we can return back to shareholders. Certainly, you know, we believe in our own stock, especially at these prices. We really believe in it. You know, buying back stock makes a lot of sense for us. It's a high returning investment for us, and it's something that we don't have to do any due diligence on or negotiate with anybody or anything like that. We're gonna keep looking at both those avenues very, very seriously, and we have lots of capital to put to work in both those regards. You know, you kicked the buyback back into gear last quarter, and as you noted, at these prices, it's which has come down from there, I mean, Are you Is this the, you know, the proverbial signal to the market of where your value is and how you see execution improving? Look, we wanna try to buy our stock, you know, whenever we think it's cheap, and we certainly think that. At the same time, the market is super volatile, and every day the market is telling you something, and usually it's something that's less than it was the day before. It's a challenging time to obviously be a stock buyer. I don't have to tell everyone on the call and in the room about that. We have to factor that into our buying back as well, that just the market has been extremely challenging. We absolutely believe that a great use of our capital is to continue to buy back our shares, and we're looking for ways to do so. Okay, last one is for BK. Social responsibility and mental health, as I mentioned on our panel beforehand, when it was asked sort of advice for you two, that was a top one. What do you think your role is in both of these, issues, mental health and trust and safety, across the industry, and how do you expect to lead? This is not only one of our top responsibilities, it's actually when it comes to trust and safety and then mental health of users on our platform with potential of incredible rewards, also some distress that can be caused and fatigue that can be caused, it's existential for our survival to solve against this. We have probably the largest investment of any other dating app or maybe any games company that I've ever seen when it came to dedicating people, trust and safety, building tools within our apps that are verifying users and driving, like, a better experience. I do think it's something that we need to look at as an industry across, like, every digital experience as well. Sometimes I see my kids and they're... You know, my daughter spends, you know, most of her waking hours on TikTok, and I'm like, "You know, you probably need a little bit of a break." Like, you know, it's something that's really pervasive, and it's something that's really important, and we all have the responsibility to do it. For us, it's even more important, though, because if there's bad word of mouth, if, like, people are not feeling safe on our platforms, that will lead to deterioration. I've seen that happen to other digital platforms. We cannot let that happen. Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it. We appreciate your time all today. Come join us for a drink afterwards. Just lastly, thank you to everybody here in the room, all of the guests, all of our partners, everybody who tuned in. We hope it was a very informative day. We tried to do something a little different and a little special and really dive into it. I'm really happy with how it turned out. I hope you are too. We'll hope to do it again and have you back and do this one more time at some point down the road. BK, Gary, thanks again for joining us. Thank you. Really appreciate it.