The Pomp Podcast - The Hidden Cash Machine Wall Street Keeps Ignoring | George Arison

Episode Date: August 13, 2026

George Arison is the CEO of Grindr. In this conversation, we break down how AI has transformed Grindr's engineering team and product roadmap, the real "gay discount" baked into the stock price, and Grindr's fast-growing push into health. We also discuss the app's outsized role in gay relationships and safety risks abroad, and why efficiency — not headcount — is driving the company's next stage of growth.======================Arch Public is an agentic trading platform that automates investment strategies across Stocks, Commodities, ETFs and Crypto. Whether you’re rotating into AI & Gold, allocating to the S&P 500, or accumulating Bitcoin, Arch Public executes your plan 24/7 without ever taking custody of your assets or funds. Sign up today at https://www.archpublic.com, and start your FREE automated trading strategy! ======================Figure’s $160k Community Appreciation (https://www.figure.com/crypto-community-appreciation/T&Cs (https://www.figure.com/crypto-community-appreciation/disclosures/) Need liquidity without selling your crypto? Take out a Figure Crypto-Backed Loan, allowing you to borrow against your BTC, ETH, or SOL with 12-month terms, 8.91% interest rates, and no prepayment penalties. Or check out Democratized Prime (https://figuremarkets.co/pomp) and earn ~8.5% APY on real world assets. Unlock your crypto’s potential today at Figure! https://figuremarkets.co/pomp Figure Lending LLC dba Figure (NMLS 1717824). Loans subject to approval. Crypto collateral may be liquidated. Terms apply - see full disclosures at http://figure.com/disclosures/======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/pomp======================0:00 - Intro1:27 - How AI is transforming Grindr's business & product5:13 - Life inside an AI-run engineering team12:04 - Using AI as a CEO 19:57 - The "gay discount" in Grindr's stock price25:27 - Grindr's growing health business31:01 - Grindr's global impact & safety risks abroad36:10 - Demographics of Grindr's user base39:34 - Marriage, kids, & Grindr's family policy push43:24 - Why Grindr's best days are still ahead47:47 - Cutting headcount & running a lean company51:34 - Where to find George & Grindr

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And then they add like Grindr discount line to it, and it gets you to a different number. I've had two different investors independently show me models like that. Oh, interesting. So they literally have like a line item baked in, which is like the gay discount. Yes. What's going on, guys? Today, we have a very interesting conversation with George Aronson. He is the CEO of Grindr.

Now, this conversation is interesting to me because Grindr is one of those businesses that everyone discounts, literally. We're going to talk about something called the gay discount and why so many different investors, they completely ignore this business. but it's actually really, really interesting because they drive a ton of free cashflow. They've been growing very quickly and it may be one of those diamonds in the rough

that people are completely missing. But on top of that, this company has also been embracing artificial intelligence in a way that very few public companies have. They're not only using AI inside of the workplace in terms of changing the ways that they actually work on a day-to-day basis,

but they're using AI inside the product as well. And we're gonna get into some of the details there that I think you're gonna find interesting. And then last but not least is that Grindr, most people think of it as somewhere where people go to connect with each other and try to find hookups. And that is part of the app,

but also they are pushing into health. And this derivative business model is ultimately driving why so much free cash flow is coming from this company. And so in this conversation with the CEO, I think you guys are going to learn a lot. I think it's going to change the way you think about how AI is being adopted by public companies.

And frankly, George is fun. There's a couple of good jokes in here. He talked about some graphic content. And for some of you guys, you're going to be quite interested. So here's my conversation with George Aronson. All right, George. You guys run a very, very good business at Grindr,

but there's a lot of folks who have zero idea how much AI you use inside of the product and for the employee base in terms of how you guys work. Can you walk me through how Grindr as a business and as a product has changed with the rise of AI? So I probably took this job because of AI. Once I was done with my last company, I was going to go and build an AI company

because this is 2021. one, I kind of knew that AI was going to be a big deal. And then when they approached me about this show, I'm like, wow, you have this incredible product that is very profitable and has the very devoted user base. At that point, I think it was like 11 and a half million monthly octaves. Now we're at 15. And there's so much data from them in the product, but there's no AI plan or AI strategy. And so if you could convert this to be an AI business, that would be super interesting. And so for me, AI in the product was always a big reason why I came here. And I think it's been very good.

And we can talk about that in a minute. But then I met with a mentor around maybe six months into taking this job. And I said, hey, this is a strategy that I'm going to go after. My hunch is we're going to need like 300 engineers to do this. And he had just left a job as a CEO of a very large tech company where his access to what was coming from a lot of other companies was much ahead of everybody. I think, oh, no, you won't. And I'm like, what do you mean? No, I won't.

It's like I had just finished this tour of like Microsoft and OpenAI and Amazon and what is coming down the pike. And you're going to do all that with about 100 people. And I was right and he was right. I'm doing all that with about 100 people, but without AI coding, we would have had to have about 300 people doing the stuff that we are doing. So we've fundamentally transformed how the company is run internally. ai is now in everything that we do and it's really incredible to watch that change and transformation

for somebody's been building software for like 20 years the amount of stuff you can get done in such short amount of time is really incredible never in my professional life has the challenge been hey we don't have enough projects to work on it's always been i don't have enough engineers to to do the work, the eng team came to our Q2 planning meeting in March and said that they don't have enough work, which is like an insane thing to think about as a technology organization. And the reason they don't have enough work

is because we don't have enough product people inside the company to go after all the projects that we want, so we've kind of flipped where the shortage is. It's not on engineers anymore, it's on the product side, partly because the product AI has not yet caught up to where engineering capabilities are. And then in the product,

we are slowly going through the entire product and changing how the product operates with AI in mind. Initially, we are starting that at the more premium features level. So we're launching a new tier that is all AI focused, and it's gonna be fairly expensive for a small segment of users. I call that our kind of like roadster,

investor in the Tesla view. And then over time, we'll kind of democratize it down to a model three where, you know, everybody gets some of those features. It's probably a two-year journey because fundamentally all consumer products are going to have to change how they operate in an AI world, not just from functionality point of view, but also what they look like. And that journey is actually a really fun thing to be watching. And in a product that started out as a mobile-first product, so it was like one of the very first mobile products, and now we get to be one of the very first AI products,

and that's really fun. So let's talk about internal work first before we talk about the product. What are some concrete examples of things that have changed, given maybe other companies that you've worked at or run versus now? So engineers no longer write code by hand, right? They're not typing code in.

I'm not saying not at all, but that's not the job. The job has fundamentally shifted from I write code to i manage agents that write code or synthetics whatever you want to call them so a lot of it is around architecting the work that needs to get done and giving it to these agents that then produce it and then you're bringing all that work together so in effect every single engineer has become an eng manager because a lot of the work that they're now doing is more like what an engine manager would do previously by taking a big piece of work and assigning to a bunch of engineers and laying out what would need to get done so that transitions basically happen fully

there are still a few pieces of the grinder code base where we cannot let ai do work because the code base is old and we need to make it kind of re-architected for the world that's getting finished now but you know other than that almost everywhere ai is working um the next phase is to to actually turn these agents to be a lot more agentic in what they do. So go to a world where it's not just that you assign these pieces of work to the agent and then the agents do it and then you bring it together,

but rather just give it the broad product requirements. And then the agent figures out what is the work that needs to happen for that work to get done and then produces code for that. Now, it's already starting in a lot of ways. So, for example, I got an email or I got a message today on Slack from our head of engineering saying that one of our senior engineers got a message over the weekend notifying him of a bug that had just been filed.

And this was the kind of bug where it was not a mission-critical bug. It could have sat out there for many months and not been fixed. Instead, he told one of our coding tools, in this case, Devin, that's built by a company called Cognition, that go take a look at this bug. So then Devin looked at the bug, recreated the bug to make sure that it was actually real, wrote the code to fix the bug, and sent this engineer a message telling him that the work was done and ready to be checked in. before he finished walking his dog, he had gotten the message while he was walking the dog. And this was on a Saturday. So now the AI is not just like doing assigned work

or like go fix it. It's actually like figuring out what work needs to get done and then doing that work. That's the next big transition in AI coding where you will actually be managing like synthetic employees that are doing the work with you, alongside you, which makes each engineer way more productive.

But beyond productivity, it's the fact that you couldn't have hired these many engineers like this, right? Constraint on software historically has never been, I don't have enough money to hire the talent I want. It's been, I cannot find the talent that I want to hire them and then have the productivity or the output that I want from this.

AI is kind of solving that. And in my shareholder letter last week, I called it, it's like creating air on Mars because this is something that previously just was not theoretically possible. And when I listen to things like what I just described, it is a little bit like science fiction, right? I don't know if you're a Star Trek person, but like it's kind of like, hey, computer, like, go find this problem and fix it.

Like, in effect, that's what's going on. And we're not actually like living it. So in engineering, the tools are so advanced that this is all happening. We are not yet finding that the tools are quite there for non-engineering. Even product and design tools are behind where you want them to be. I think they'll catch up, but they're probably running a year, year plus behind. But once the tools on the design side and the product side catch up, I think you'll start seeing that the job between an engineer, a designer, and a product manager collapses

because a lot of what a product manager or designer does, an engineer will be able to do and a lot of what an engineer historically has done, a product manager and a designer will be able to do. We already have one team at Grindr that is a very small team, it's four people working on a brand new what we call expansion bet. They don't have an engineer on the team.

Now, the PM is quite technical. He used to be an engineer. The designers and the product person is quite technical as well, but they're just writing all the code themselves. this product has in-app features and out-of-the-app features, and for the in-app features, they're on my phone in my app, and an engineer never wrote that code.

It was a totally non-engineering team that's produced it, that's working now, that's a special team that's exceptionally good, but it's an example of what the world is going to be like. To me, that's a pretty incredible transition where the ability to build a business from scratch, fundamentally changes. The amount of people you need to build a business goes down,

and the capabilities that you need also fundamentally change as well. I think outside of the technical orgs, like in finance or in legal, you are seeing similar transitions. Like I know that our GC basically has told all the outside counsel that their bills have to come down massively

because so much of what they do can be done with AI now. And so I think you're seeing a huge change there. In finance, same thing. You know, you're seeing a huge change there as well. I know that we significantly renegotiated our audit costs in part because of AI, because so much of what happens in audit

can now be automated with AI as well. And so the changes in the organization are pretty massive. And I mean, as a shareholder, you should love them, right? right? Because it makes the business so much more efficient. I'm super proud of our, like, roughly 2.5, 2.75 in revenue per employee end of last year. I thought that we'd actually go down a little bit this year because we need to hire more people, but now we're actually going to go up, meaning the dollar per employee is going to be higher than it was last year because we are hiring way less people this year than we had intended to hire because the team we

had can do all the stuff that we had wanted to do. How has it changed what you do on a day-to-day basis like do you have agents that are running do you have certain systems are you writing code i don't i don't write code i um my job has well my job hasn't changed but the way i work has changed i think one of my big challenges historically the ceo has been that i have a lot of stuff going on in my head but i don't have the time to share that all with everybody else because there's so much day-to-day stuff to do that you don't have the luxury of time to do that um that's less of an issue i don't think it's been fully solved for me but it definitely has been solved to a large extent so for example um there's something really exciting that we're working on

that is not public yet if that happens it's going to have implications across the business and so i had a bunch of thoughts about that um i was going to a wedding on saturday from manhattan to Queens. And in the car, I voice recorded a lot of my thoughts in a fairly disorganized manner. But ChatGPT, my instance of ChatGPT knows so much of how I like to say things in writing that it can actually take my very disorganized thoughts and turn it into a memo. And so then I took the transcript of this, inserted it into ChatGPT in the car still, and said, hey, can you take this

and create a much better memo out of it? Now, I have to, like, be very specific in what I want. I'm like, hey, like, make this be all George talk, remove all of the kind of corporate speak bullshit that you tend to add to what you produce a lot. And the end result was, you know, a memo that was probably 70% done. And then with one or two more edits, it was 100% done.

So I was able to get that out to my team, you know, with about one hour's worth of work, which otherwise would have taken me probably four. But because I don't have four hours, it would probably just never get done. And then I would have had team running after stuff where the clarity around why I wanted them to do all these things was going to be far less. So I think what AI has done for me more than anything is it's allowed me to be way clearer in the expectations that I set for the team and giving them the rationale for why I set those expectations, which I think has been a very big improvement in my quality as a CEO. I can't really compare before to now because it's such a big change. I've not yet gone to a place where I have AI do things for me right away without me telling it what to do. Could I do that? Probably yes.

And there are some people who are doing that. I'm a little bit more cautious for right now. For example, I don't have it read my email and try to manage which emails should be read and which emails should not be read. Is that probably doable? Yes. Will it get there in a year? Probably, but I'm a little bit hesitant today. today's episode is brought to you by figure markets all right everyone who wants a slice of a hundred and sixty thousand dollars our partner figures running a promo where they're giving back to their community from july 27th to august 27th one month any users who've never

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liquidity and put capital to work check out figure using my link below or go to figuremarkets.co slash pomp yeah it is um kind of this weird thing of uh peace of mind versus efficiency and i catch myself sometimes i know i could do some stuff but like if it misses one really important email yeah i'm like it's actually not worth the efficiency gain and so i would do other i use superhuman i don't know what you use as like an email client but i'm pretty fast with it i've been doing it for a long time and in a weird way uh i actually get a bunch of emails that i'm not going to respond to but it's a data point and if i see the same theme three or four times and then somebody that i know or trust tells me about something i'm like oh wait a second pattern

recognition yeah three or four people emailed me about this theme that i have no interest in talking to but like now somebody trusted okay i can try and get it so in a weird way it's almost like being in the flow yeah has some value the things that work for us we want to continue doing like i so i don't use superhuman or any one of those clients i'm still a gmail person i've been a gmail person for a long time i kind of know what i'm doing there and you know could i switch to something else yes but is that going to take some brain power for me to do also yes and i don't like want to go through that yet, but I also know that my current workflow on ChatJPT, so I don't use Claude and there's reasons why, but my current workflow on ChatJPT is not ideal. There's ways

I can do that. It's better. That actually would save me time. And so I just need to make that mind shift. My hunch is that it's going to be like next Christmas when that happens, because That's like the logical time when those kinds of things happen. But like, I know what needs to get done. I just haven't gotten there yet. And so I am, you know, I'm probably top 5% most forward in this regard as like an executive, but I'm not 1% most forward.

Why don't you use cloud? Um, this is going to be pretty controversial, but I view cloud as crack that I want to get off. I want the company off. Why? I was outrageously taken back. by the choices that they made about working with the DOD. I believe that as a gay man that enjoys every freedom that a human being can now enjoy,

that is only possible because America is what America is. And part of that is that we elect people to be in office and those people get to make decisions about how to protect us. And I might not like who is making the decision today, but I like some of the people who make those decisions. And I am fortunate enough to be able to vote on who is in that place. And so does everybody else in this country. And a private company doesn't get to decide how we secure ourselves.

And so the idea that we don't trust our leaders enough to make decisions is totally contrary to the foundations of our system, which in effect I view as a declaration of war on those systems. And I think this is by far the greatest thing that's ever happened to mankind, meaning America. And I just had a very revolting reaction to that. And I think as a gay business that in particular benefits from and should be appreciative of the freedoms that we afford in this country, it is doubly problematic. Do you feel like the legalization of gay marriage, all of this stuff that has really evolved over time?

You know, when you and I first met a couple of years ago, one of the things that we talked about, which, you know, frankly, when I brought this up to you, I'd heard this from other people, but I didn't know how legitimate it was. It was kind of this like gay discount, right? And the gay discount was in the stock price. And the way it was originally explained to me is, you have a bunch of heterosexual male portfolio managers who don't want to go to their investment committee and say, we're going to buy into the gay app. And they want to, you know, people give them shit

or, you know, whatever the thing is. And so when I first heard that, I was like, that's an arbitrage. Like, it's undervalued compared to where it should be or whatever. When you and I first started talking about it, though, you had a very kind of unique view as to, you know, does it exist or not?

and like what will change or not change about it. So maybe talk a little bit about this, like the discount. So I 100% guarantee it exists because I've had investors literally show me their financial models for Grindr all the way down to like what their projection of share prices per, you know, based on where EBITDA is, et cetera. And then they add like Grindr discount line to it, and it gets you to a different number.

I've had two different investors independently show me models like that. Oh, interesting. So they literally have like a line item baked in, which is like the gate discount. Yes. Because, and I- So it definitely exists. Yeah, so it definitely exists.

Because like, I literally have people who own the stock tell me that they're modeling it out this way. How big was the discount? Do you remember? 25%. That's big. It's a lot. I mean, like, yeah.

And to be honest, like that's roughly where I think we trade versus where we could trade, right? Like I- Interesting. And- It's those two investors, by the way. It's like, they're the ones dictating the market. I don't think they're taking the money, but I think it's like

they're very supportive investors or not. So I think it's definitely there. I think there's a combination of factors. I think it's number one. There's a lot of historical brand debt associated with Grindr. And I've had business partners, banks, investors, people who want to reach our audience and want to buy ads all raise this as an issue that, hey, I don't

You know, when I go and search for stuff, stuff that pops up is not that positive. Now, I think that has fundamentally changed. We have been very intentional about telling the world what Grindr is all about and telling our story. And I spend probably more time than an average CEO doing that because we have this debt issue that needs to be addressed. And I think we have, by and large, addressed that. And, you know, I think what we did with Madonna this summer was a perfect exemplification of that. I know the fact that probably one of five most famous people in the world would come to you and work with you to launch her album kind of saw

speaks to maybe there's not as much of a, you know, a dead on on brand anymore as there was three years ago, but there's definitely there and that was having an impact. I think secondly, because most of the things that you invest in on the consumer side, you can go and use those products. And, you know, if you're a Snapchat investor, you use Snapchat. If you're a Facebook investor, you use Facebook products, et cetera. With Grindr, most people who are investors don't use Grindr and they don't have employees who use Grindr.

I think they kind of peripherally know that Grindr is out there and they have friends who might be on Grindr, but like it's kind of not discussed frequently kind of thing. And so there's a lack of like knowledge and that lack of knowledge leads to them not appreciating how embedded Grindr is in gay men's life. I mean, a gay man who uses Grindr, which is a very large percentage of the U.S. male, gay male population, is on Grindr for over an hour a day. It's like, you know, you sleep seven hours, you work nine hours, you got eight hours left. And of that, one of them is on Grindr. Like, it's a huge portion of people's lives. And, you know, that appreciation, I think, is lacking among investors. So that's, I think, the second reason why.

And then the third one is, yes, there is a little bit of like unease. Hey, I'm going in and telling my older partners I'm making this investment. And that ties back to this like reputational thing, but it's a little bit more narrow. But I do think that us telling the story really can help, right? We want people to think of Grindr as, hey, this is the kind of thing that my grandson's on, and if he's on it, that's totally okay, rather than, hey, this is this product out there that is just for hookups. Grindr started out as a hookup product, but today, 50% of all existing gay relationships in the U.S. originated on Grindr. Wait, wait, wait. 50%? Yes. All existing gay relationships started out on Grindr? Yes.

That's a huge number. It's a massive number. So, I mean, you can talk about hookups all you want, but of all long-term relationships in this country among gay men, we resulted in, we're a source of half of them. So we are very much a relationship product as well. I mean, if you go and survey gay men,

every single one of them will tell you, yeah, I have at least three friends that I met on Grindr that I do all this other stuff socially where that has nothing to do with, you know, romantic connections and whatnot. So there's that piece also. So we need to be able to broader understand the breadth of what people do on Grindr and why they are on it. Now, you all obviously have the dating component or the relationship component, but you started to expand an area that I think is very fascinating is the health tab or the health center that you guys have. Talk about how did this come about? And when people think of Grindr, they don't exactly think of health.

That's like the first thing from a brand perspective. Grindr is as much a public health company as it is a connections company. And I think over time is going to be even more so. So because you've guided also that the health care revenue or the health revenue was likely to continue to grow and at some point become more than 50%. Yeah, I've said I'm not given any numbers on that, but I think that health revenue could frankly have a business that's bigger than the core grind of this one.

And partly because we would then be able to give, you know, kind of integrate those two things together so people could get Grindr features while they're on our health products, etc. We already do that. So if you subscribe to Grindr Woodwork, which is our ED medications, you can get Grindr Unlimited for for free. Hold on. Go back for a second. What is the ED medicine?

It's called Woodwork. Woodwork. All right. And it's a very popular product in the health space. I mean, it's a good product. It's ED medications. OK, compounded medications. But the you know, so for gay men, health is a pretty big deal.

I think for anybody who grew up during the HIV epidemic, it's even bigger deal. But even post that, like you are taught from the very beginning that making sure that you avoid STDs is a really big factor and what you do about them matters as well. And Grindr has always played a really big role in that education to the user. So, for example, you know, PrEP is a set of medications that you can take to prevent HIV from, you know, from getting HIV, even if you have unprotected sex with somebody who has HIV, PrEP had been around for quite a few years and was not really

taking off in the user base until Grindr started to ask people on the app if they're on PrEP or not, which was probably the single most important thing in the kind of post-discovery of PrEP for prep to take off and most public health people will kind of tell you that so so you guys have an app yeah people go on and they can use they use for the dating connection relationship etc you have a health tab essentially that people can go they can go get what i would consider um uh more like pleasure type i call them performance medications performance medications okay there you go uh but then also there is like preventative health care and those types of things yeah so it's kind of like in a weird way offense and defense yes in the health yeah and we don't yet

Like, we don't yet sell you a PrEP medication. We send you to a partner to do that with. But for all our partners that do PrEP, they all tell you that Grindr is by far the best source of, you know, customers. And so that piece of that vertical of, like, HIV prevention and STD prevention is a huge opportunity from the half on you. And I think we'll, you know, do more there over time, inevitably. Do they trust you because they think that you guys are the best at health or is it because they feel like you understand them best and you're the trusted brand that then can route them to the right partner? I think it's because we understand them better. Yeah.

I mean, look, I am, you know, I'm very open about being gay. I am married to a doctor, so I don't need a gay doctor per se because I have one at home. But I wanted my GP, my general practitioner, to be a gay doctor. I could not find a gay doctor in the Bay Area. Interesting. Because there's a lack of them. I had one at Stanford, and then he stopped seeing patients because he was just doing research. And then I was like, I don't have one.

And it was a whole process to try to find one. But, like, a doctor doesn't carry on his sleeve that I'm a gay doctor, right? Like, the one I had happened to work at the LGBTQ clinic at Stanford, so more clear. but, like, a random general practitioner doesn't. Maybe there's a business opportunity. There's a huge business opportunity, because, like, if we could figure out a way to aggregate gay doctors and then connect our users to those gay doctors through telehealth, it's a huge opportunity.

But I'm not unique as a gay guy who wants a gay doctor. Like, there's stuff I want to talk to him about that explaining to a straight doctor is more work. And I have a very good doctor now. Like, he's totally fine. I'm not being negative about it. But there is a little bit of a cringiness going on in your mind when you were talking to him about some of these things that you wouldn't have with a gay doctor. And I think most gay men would agree with that kind of thesis.

And so I think because we are a gay company and we understand the user, we can do things for them in the health side that people just, you know, appreciate and they trust us as a result. I mean, it's just when you understand the user and you build things that they want, whatever. And then there's another piece of it, which is like, this is in the U.S. Now, there are numerous countries where we operate where there's literally no access to gay health information online

in that language at all, right? Whether it's in Arabic or in parts of India, et cetera. And we maintain this global health center. That's more for, like, we don't make any money on that. It's nonprofit reasons. But people in many of these countries, They literally only can go to Grindr to access that kind of a health information. So you also told me there are certain regions where being gay is not like in America, right?

And there's obviously a lot, big part of the world. But when you guys enter a market, all of a sudden, when there's people who have access, there's people who feel like they can, you know, go and they can use whatever community, et cetera. How do you prevent it being used from a targeting perspective as well? It sadly is. I think I joined Grindr's board before I became CEO. My first board meeting, there was a big discussion topic on do we enable Grindr again in Iran or not? Because it had been shut down because of your sanctions.

And then for a while you could get it back on. And so we were getting all these requests from local NGOs in Iran saying, can you guys please come back to Iran? Which like in a way, a crazy topic for a board to be talking about. And obviously you're going to make no money in Iran. So you're doing it purely as a, like, not-for-profit community good kind of aspect. But the message from these nonprofits in Iran was we would prefer to have the risk of the government using it to honey trap people than to not have access to a best way for us to be able to connect to each other because there's no alternative. And you hear the same thing from people in virtually every other country where it is illegal to be gay and Grindr still operates.

So basically, like, I'll take my chances. Yes. Because I have no alternative and all my alternatives like are even worse. And so, yes, like one of my worst moments as CEO was three years ago when we got a message from a nonprofit in Egypt that the local police in Egypt had gone after a gay party. At that party, they arrested a bunch of gay men, confiscated their phones, and when using those phones and the app on Grindr to honey trap more people on Grindr. And, you know, so number one, we were like, okay, what do we do about this? We actually started, we stopped people from being able to create new logins into Grindr in Egypt at the time.

And then number two, we started a message every five minutes. to users saying, hey, we know this is happening. You got to be super careful in who you talk to. And for now, probably you don't want to meet up anybody unless they can prove to you that they're actually real. And that was, that kind of tampered things down. But it was really awful for me because like, I mean, being in Egyptian jail would be awful

no matter why you're in jail. But if you're a gay man in jail and you're in jail because you were arrested as a gay man, it's like infinitely worse. And what made me really upset at myself at the time, and I'd just only been at Grindr for like nine months at this point, if that, was we didn't have anybody to call to help us in D.C. So that was my big aha moment, like, hey, we need a totally different level D.C. operation, because the good thing is that there's actually a ton of people in Washington who would want to work with you because our users are a big part of their constituency to help fight things like that. And so now we do have a D.C. operation. We have a great team in Washington, very bipartisan

and able to accomplish a ton of really great stuff because of that event. Because I was like, this is not acceptable at like I don't know who in Washington to call to try to get members of Congress or people in the administration to, you know, push the Egyptians to stop doing from what they're doing. And I don't have to be loud about it, but behind the scenes, we can have that impact.

And so unfortunately, this does happen. And, you know, there are things we can do to prevent it or to reduce it, but we cannot prevent it. Right. Like we cannot control bad governments and how they're going to behave. Today's episode is brought to you by Simple Mining. Bitcoin mining has a reputation for being complicated, risky and hard to evaluate as a real investment. If you're considering mining in 2026, what actually matters is in headline profitability. It's uptime, repairs and whether the operation is run like a real business. That's why I've been using Simple Mining.

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because that's another aspect that I think people don't really understand is you've told me that they're overeducated, very high income earners, which I don't think I quite understood. So, yeah, gay men are, broadly speaking, overachievers, right? And some of this is like literally the challenges of growing up gay and people not accepting it, then you channel it into, hey, I'm going to show you what I can do. And so Grindr user demographic is significantly wealthier

than average American and significantly more educated. So gay men have 2x the rate of PhDs in America than straight men, 2x the rate of MBAs, 2x the rate of JDs than a straight American. A gay couple earns about 2.1x more in annual income than a straight couple. And then their disposable income is even higher because many of them don't have, or most of them don't have children, which is like your single biggest expense, right, as a household. And so they do have very high disposable income, which then leads them to be able to spend that money on disposable goods, et cetera, et cetera.

We also have a very young demographic on Grindr, so 46% of Grindr users are in the 18 to 29 cohort. We don't allow people under 18 to be on the app. It's an 18-plus app only, and, you know, we don't have the challenges of the Gen Z generation that a lot of the other dating products do because Grindr is almost like a rite of passage. Like, you turn 18, you're either out or you're trying to figure out, are you out, or, you know, maybe buying, you're trying to figure out where you're going. Grindr is, like, the logical place to go join to be part of this, like, figuring out process. And so we attract the 18-plus-year-old younger men into the app through that, and then they kind of stick with us as they age. And travel has become a huge part of the business for you guys? Travel, yeah.

We don't make any money on travel features yet, but as a product, Grindr is used exponentially more when people travel. And one in five Grindr users is traveling any given week, which is like a pretty incredible thing. That's crazy. Yeah, it's totally crazy. It's probably because a lot of people will use Grindr when they are traveling and not when they are at home, right? So we have a lot of users who, they might be in a relationship already.

They don't use Grindr that much at home, but when they're on the road, they use Grindr a lot more. And then there's a set of people who are not in relationships that, you know, are traveling in part to meet people in new locations. Because one of the fundamental challenges of being gay is that you're only 5% of the male population, right? So in most places outside of New York City, there's not a very large set of people in any given geography, right? Even in San Francisco, probably gay men are closer to like 8%, 9% of the male population. It's still only 50,000, 60,000 people.

That's not what I read in the headlines. I heard that gay mafia is dominating. Well, gay mafias, yes. Gay mafia is a thing. We can talk about that separately. But I think just in total people, it's not there. And so people then travel to meet more people, which I think actually, so one of the things that we are noticing, which is totally predictable from where the world was and is going to, is a lot more gay men today want to marry. So when you survey gay men, even outside of the app,

50% of them say they want to be married. Interesting. Which is a huge change from where things were. 25% of them under 35 say they want to have children. Which is like not at all. And when I would say that I want to have kids when I was sub 35, I was like literally one in a hundred. Like I was this weirdo guy who wanted to have kids

and I was obsessed with the idea of having kids and I do have kids now. But back then it was not something that people thought about. That's fundamentally changed. And Andrew Sullivan, who is one of the architects of gay marriage, he would make this case back in, like, 1990s that, yes, if we allow gay marriage, then a lot more gay men will want to be married and a lot more gay men will want to have children, which is exactly where things are going to now in that younger, you know, 18 to 35 cohort. So that's a huge opportunity for us, obviously, because we are the place for people to meet. But because you're not demographically, you don't have a lot of people in any given location, you need to solve that broadly.

Like you will need to help people find each other, not just in the place of where they live, but outside of that. When you think about, just take children as an example, do you think that there's ways for you to eventually get into those types of verticals? I think very much of you guys have like essentially a derivative business model, right? Like, where does the where does the concentric circle kind of stop? And you're like, OK, there's certain things we just will probably never be able to get into. Well, I don't know if we get into children and family creation as a business, but I think it is our massive obligation as a company to help ensure that the laws in this country

are such that it's easier for gay men to have kids. So one of the things we're really actively working on from public policy point of view is to get all surrogacy expenses to be considered medical expenses, which today they are not. And that would be for gay men? Of course, for straight, for straight, and by the way, most people who use surrogacy

are straight people, but for gay men who have biological children, surrogacy is the only way to do it. And today, fertility costs, if you're a straight couple, are viewed as medical expenses. The surrogacy piece of it are not. But if you're a gay couple, none of them are

because the IRS doesn't regard them. It's a pretty simple change. But if you did that, the cost of surrogacy and having children for gay couples goes down by 30 to 50%, depending on where they are in the income bracket, which is an incredible thing, right? Because the single biggest deterrent right now

to gay men having children is the cost of it. Right now, we're really happy with the Labor Department just recently issued new guidelines for insurance coverage for IVF. And those guidelines were written in a manner in which surrogacy situations would be included, which is like a huge plus. And one of the things we did at Grindr

in the last couple of years is we actually cover costs of fertility care for up to $300,000 for any Grindr employee, and which is the second best fertility benefit available. NVIDIA has an unlimited benefit. We're not quite- We're not worth $5 trillion, and so we have a way to go. But I think it's amazing that they have that,

and it's like a really massive statement, I think, from the leadership at NVIDIA for doing that. But my goal was to be as good as we could be, and so basically we cover the entirety of the cost of surrogacy, including the taxes that are paid on those expenses for a Grindr employee, which has led to then more people at Grindr having kids, which is incredible. When you think about the entire business, right,

and investors are evaluating it, what are like your two or three talking points as to why you think that not only do you guys have a good business today, but kind of the best days are ahead of you? So we today are monetizing just one use case of what happens in the app. And we've done that very well.

I mean, our revenue has grown from 195 in 2022 to 540 guidance for 2026. $100 million. $540 million. Yeah, $195 million to $540 million. So, very good growth with insane margins, like 40 plus margin, IWDA margin every year. And that's monetizing the connection relationship? That's monetizing just the connection relationship use case. Hookups as well. 100%, no question. Hookups are a huge part of gay life and they're not going anywhere.

And then, and frankly, we actually are doing things to make them easier. But we build this whole product call right now, which is for that. Like that's not, that's the kind of key to everything that we do. And it's going to be really good at it. Oh, you're selling sex and love? That must be a horrible business. But there's so much more that we can do. And just health alone can be a massive driver of growth.

And we make virtually no money in health today. Why? Well, because we just started. I mean, like this is all very new. And woodwork is a way for us to like tiptoe into, hey, let's start doing health. I mean, health is a regulated business. You gotta learn a lot about it.

We're doing that. And as we come more into it, there's gonna be more opportunities. But I gave a three-year outlook in 2024. We're now in year two of that three-year outlook. We're ahead of schedule on that so far. But there's no reason we can't maintain a similar growth rate kind of on a go-for basis

for about as long as I can kind of predict. So we feel really good about what's possible as we go into these expansion use cases and start monetizing them in the right way. And then thirdly, I think the big thing is just the way those companies run. I mean, my general view is that most tech companies are way too bloated and have way too many people

and could be run way more efficiently than they are. Frankly, they'll be run better if they're more efficient because less people is easier to manage. So Grindr had peaked at 225 employees in December, January 2020 to 23. At that point, we had finished the year at 195 million revenue. Last year, we had 160 employees at the end of the year

and we made 430 million revenue. This year, we're probably gonna have like 185 people, maybe 190, and we're gonna do 540 in revenue, right? So it's an insanely efficient business that can continue to be more efficient all the time. And AI is only helping that. So what do you do with all the cash? Give it back to shareholders. We've bought a lot of stock back over the last six quarters, I guess.

We have a $900 million authorization. I think we've bought $600 million plus of that. And what percentage of the company would you think that is? I think we've reduced it by like, I think we peaked at ballpark. Now, don't quote me on the numbers, but I think we had peaked at like 213 million shares fully outstanding or fully diluted. And I think we're now at like 185. Also pretty material. Yeah, we bought a lot of shares back.

Yeah, okay. And so basically you continue to do that until you find something else to do with the cash. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like, I think we can, there's nothing that I need to invest in. I don't invest in. Like, it's not like I have this, like, oh man, I want to do X, Y, Z things and I don't have money for that. It's literally leftover cash. Yeah. We invest in everything we want to invest in and we do all the things we want to do. And then we have, you know, in very strong profitability. Now there are very few things on which

people who hired me before Grindr was public were very insistent on, which was like, you got to keep EBITDA margins to be really high. I was actually a little nervous about that because I'm like, I think I'm going to need more people to do this stuff. But then it turns out that the inefficiency was so high

that you could do a lot more now. Elon, without knowing this, helped me a ton because when Elon did to Twitter what he did and nothing collapsed, I'm like, actually, you can run these businesses a lot more efficiently. I think that a lot of people

don't talk about it. I think what they saw, what he did at Twitter slash X, they were looking around on their rosters and they were like, oh, he did 80%. I don't need to do 80%, but 20%? Yes. And so we went, you know, we, right as that was happening

and a few months later, I told the team that we needed to come back to the office two days a week. This was not like- Two, wow, you're really hard on them. In 2023, it was 23, two days was hard. And we lost, we went from 125 people to 70. you had 150 employees that just said

I'm not going back to the office correct like what's that three-fourths of the company yeah oh my god but I don't think

I would have been willing to do that had I not seen what happened at Twitter because I'm like well Elon can run this business with from 6,000 to 1,000

I think he went down or something did anything break no we actually grew like 30 plus percent that year and obviously EBITDA increased

because we had less people Now, I don't think you could continue running this business with 70 people, but that's why we're now going to end the year with like 180, 185 probably. But it was totally workable. What we did do is we kept our most important people and we kept people who were keeping the trains running. Because I had one engine manager. At one point, like right after we had gone public, I had a company right at all hands. I said, hey, guys, like this is not a nine to five job.

Like we expect more of you than that. And my general view is like, I've never had a job where I worked less than 50 hours a week. I think most tech companies expect people to work 45 to 55 hours a week on average. Some weeks, 45, some weeks, 55. It averages out to like 50 on average.

That's not that bad. It's totally reasonable given how well tech companies pay. But that's not where Grindr was. And that's kind of was my message. You're like, this is not a nine to five job. And I got a message from one of the engine managers that night telling me,

George, I know you want us to work more than eight hours, but when I get my team working more than four hours a day, I'm being told that we need more headcount and we don't have enough resources, which was a big aha moment for me. This is a month. I'm like month four in the job. I'm like, wow. So the inefficiency in the organization is really high. This is true of Graham, but everywhere else as well. And that's a huge opportunity for businesses. Did you hear recently they said woke one was crazy?

I saw that yesterday. Right. Right. Like that's basically how I think of a lot of the coming out of COVID work stuff. Yeah. Work one was crazy. Yeah. Right. I mean, this is, but this has honestly been true in tech for much longer than that, that most tech companies are outrageously bloated because their margins are so high.

They can hire. You don't, you can hire. And what people think about is like, you know, I need X new stuff done. Let's get a new head for that versus of my five people that do similar things. How do I reallocate work to get some of this new stuff done? And when the business is growing 20, 30% a year and the margin is as high as it is, it doesn't matter. Where I think the problem is that now this the investors are going to expect better margins, A, and then B, stock based comp is not free. And I think we lived in a world for 20 years

where stock based comp was free, but it's actually not. And that is going to make it harder to just hire more people. I think you're the first person to come in here and talk to me about erectile dysfunction medicine, the military, gay men, hookups, right? That's why I enjoy talking to you so much. Where can we send people to find you on the internet and all the things you guys are doing? I'm mostly on LinkedIn. So George Harris on LinkedIn. I don't really have a big Twitter presence.

Maybe we should change that. We're going to change that. There's only so many things I can do at once. And as much as social stuff is important, you know, I've been kind of more focused on Twitter. So I'm on LinkedIn and then X. But I do need to teach you. What is your ex?

Hey, George Harrison. Yeah. We do have a very large Grindr X presence. I'm sure you do. It's very high, but it's not very business graphic. It's quite graphic. Yes. We have a one of the we have a very awesome uh, CMO, uh, who I found in the UK and brought him in like kind of once in a generation type of guy who like understands business, but also understands what gay men want to see.

And one of the things he's done is, um, really invested in content creation. So we create a lot of social content, podcasts, TV, TV shows, et cetera. And they're all really popular. We have a show called Hosted Travel where one guy meets another guy on Grindr from one location to another location. He then travels to this other location. And the guy that's local takes him around and shows him that city. And we record that and turn it into a show, which is done very, very well. So as we—

If you ever need talent, my brothers, they might be interested. Yeah. It sounds great. Happy, happy to. so it's you know so a lot of the content

on our socials is like that is that but we have a lot of I mean Instagram Grindr is very heavy next step

oh yeah we have millions of followers on these platforms right you know you keep describing it there's a couple of guys who are like

I wasn't interested until now but do I need to go look or not right alright thank you for doing this we'll do it again in the future

and I wish you the best of success as you guys continue building companies I appreciate it thanks for having me