The Vergecast - Tinder CEO Elie Seidman on finding love during the pandemic

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Tinder and its parent company Match Group have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic relatively well, all things considered. User engagement is up, as is interest around new product features, like video calls. More than six years after its launch, Tinder is finally introducing a one-on-one video calling feature that it says will be heavily moderated for content and safety. At the same time, Tinder CEO Elie Seidman says he and his team are focusing on how to keep young people coming to the app and how they can build digital relationships inside of it, especially as in-person dates slow down.Seidman joins Vergecast host Nilay Patel and Verge senior reporter Ashley Carman for a chat about the future of the platform, how it’ll keep people safe over video calls, and what happens to its Tinder U initiative that it’s focused on for years. Plus, he explains how Joe Exotic might be more important to a relationship than living near each other. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everybody, it's Tanyline from the Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, Ashley Carmen and I sat down with Ellie Seidman,

the CEO of Tinder. Turns out running a dating app in the middle of a pandemic, pretty challenging. Ellie told us that he thinks of this is the third wave of the internet, where people hang out online as a destination that sits right alongside the physical world.

He brought up Animal Crossing. He brought up Fortnite. He wants to make Tinder a place where people hang out, not just a place where you swipe, find a date, and then go on a date in the world. That's a big change for the internet. It's a big idea to have. We unpacked it a lot. We also talked about Tinder's upcoming video chat functionality.

In order to moderate that, they're going to have computers, AI, watch your video chats in real time. So if something goes wrong, you can report it. That's a hard challenge. We got into it. We got into some of the technical details. You hear all about it. Check it out. It's Ellie Seidman, CEO of Tinder.

Ellie Seidman, you're the CEO of Tinder. Welcome to the Vergecast. It's great to be here. And Ashley Carmen is joining us as well. Hey, Ash. Hello. So it's the middle of a global pandemic. As you may have noticed, I'm not sure if you've been watching the news. Tinder is a dating app.

It's for dating. How are things changed for Tinder in the midst of all this? You know, it's interesting. I think the high level is that now more than ever people want connection, right? You've got physical isolation. But if you're single and you're alone, you know, now is perhaps the most important time. And so there are, you know, there's some interesting, you know, sub-trends, But that's probably the highest level thing that we're saying is a lot of engagement.

Depends on where you are in the world. It depends on whether you're kind of in the peak of the crisis moment, the way Italy or Spain were, New York was a month ago. But the thing that's really come through loud and clear is people want connection. Makes sense. And when you get isolated, you want it even more. So are you seeing increased usage of Tinder during all this? Yeah, it's kind of ebbed and flowed. It depends. I mean, there's, you know, we break it into two parts. There's the business side of Tinder,

the part of Tinder, which is, you know, the financial engine. And then there's the engagement side. The majority of people who are using Tinder at any given day, the majority of the community globally is not paying for it. It's basically an entirely free product for them. And a small subset of them are paid members, people who are paying for premium features. If you look at the engagement side, you know, what is the entirety of the community doing? There, yeah, you've seen. very clear positives around engagement. Longer conversations, a lot more conversations. We've seen big increases in place from young women. Women kind of 18 to 30 has been a big area of increase for us. And so that's been probably the big one. We reported earnings now 10 days ago or so. And we talked

about Q1 and Q2 a little bit there. We have six million subs, paying subs. And that's, you know, that's really a part of the business. It's harder to predict given the financial component. But, you know, that that part has held up pretty well, all things considered. And, I mean, what are you seeing as far as, like, obviously Tinder's a huge global brand and different parts of the world are in different stages of the pandemic? So what are you seeing as far as what's going on in India right now versus what's happening in the U.S. versus, you know, Canada or something else? Yeah. I think the simplest way to think of it is it seems to follow the psychology of the moment, you know, both the actual substance of the crisis. So if you look at, for example, Italy, you know, now a month ago,

or New York a month ago, you know, you see their, you know, real decreases, you know, and I think that makes sense, right? You know, you've got a significant crisis that's happening in real time. People are, you know, distracted with something else that's really much more important. But when that kind of subsides, you get a rebound back and it seems to happen pretty quickly. I don't think we know perfectly how quickly. But, okay, now the crisis is starting to pass, you know, the psychology is easing, but I'm still home. I'm still home alone. And, you know, and I'd like some companionship. I'd like connection. And, you know, we offer that. And so you definitely see it kind of rolling through. You see, you know, now New York is

rebounding and as things have eased. California, certainly that's been true. We see that true in Germany. Germany has kind of been, you know, one of the earlier rebounds. And we saw that very clearly. So you could really kind of follow the news and follow the correlated trend on Tinder. Japan's been very interesting, right? We have a big community in Japan. And, you know, that's been kind of across the period of time more moderated. And you see that. It's kind of had, you know, fewer peaks in valleys along the way in terms of engagement. So actually, if the pandemic lets up, would that mean that you would have less engagement on the platform? It's hard to know. I think we'll probably see a big rebound because, you know, all of the physical world stuff that comes with

Tinder is easier, right? And so I expect that we'll see that part of the rebound of, oh, now, like, get out of the house and, you know, get back to our physical world social life. So, you know, it's interesting because there's a bigger idea here. We span really two types of connection. You know, one is the kind of connection we can have digitally. And that's really important. We've been thinking about that idea for a while. You know, we actually started early this year to work on a feature that's about to come out. You start to get rolled out to the first of our members in test next week, which is global mode. And global mode is the idea that says, hey, I can get connection from somebody who's not a mile away or around the

corner, you know, five miles away. I can get that connection. And those connections are meaningful and validating. I'm seen in those connections, even though the person is a thousand miles away. And that's kind of the story of, it's actually an old story, right? It's the story of the internet, which is, how do I find my people? It's interesting when you apply that to Tinder, a big global community. And within that, there's a set of people who say, I want to be seen, I want to feel validated and valued. And maybe I can't find that person right around me. Or maybe it doesn't matter if they're right around me.

So that's kind of a part, which I think is really interesting. We've been working on for a while and thinking about a lot. The other part is the physical world. I do want the person to be a mile away or two miles away. What's the difference between global mode and passport? So passport, yeah. So passport is, and so we maybe I'll give the context there. You know, we started working on global mode early this year before we actually understood that COVID was going to come.

So that, and that was on schedule to come out now. And so that's continued down the path. In late February, early March, when we really realized what was happening in the scale of the pandemic, we said, hey, let's take that idea of global mode, which is, hey, I want to find connection from anywhere, from, around the globe. Let's bring, take the paid version, which is passport, and let's offer it for free. And what passport is, and you've probably heard these stories, it's, I live in L.A. I'm going to London or I'm going to Paris on a trip. And I want to kind of teleport myself into London or Paris so that I can connect with somebody there who I'll hang out with or they'll be a tour guide. That's the typical story you hear, you know, when I'm there. And, you know, and so, and so you get,

you get that version of the use. And it's a paid feature. So a very small percentage of the total population of Tinder is using it. Global mode is I'm in L.A. They're in Paris. They're in London. They're wherever. They're in Tokyo or Seoul. And we both opt into being shown to and being seen by people in this kind of global community versus the people who say, no, only show me to. And I only want to see people who are in L.A. or in New York. So, and that's going to be, it's going to be a free feature when it comes out. Passport is a paid feature. And so they're related, but they're they're actually different in some important ways. So I always think of Tinder is, you know, it's a means to an end,

and the end is companionship or meeting somebody in real life or some sort of interaction that happens outside the app. Right now, it seems like you want a lot of interaction to happen inside the app, right? You have global mode. You might be, I might be in London, that person might be in Seoul. We've connected, now we're going to stay inside of Tinder, or do you expect there to still be some conversion to something else? Yeah, I mean, so I think there's a, there's a really interesting,

trend here. There's two, in my view, there's two waves of dating apps, and we're actually entering the second wave. We've coming out of the first wave. The first wave is go back to 2012, Tinder is, you know, launch on U.S. college campuses. At the time, it's very, very unusual. You know, stigmatized, really is the right word, for an 18, 19, 20-year-old to use an app,

use a website, right, at the time, probably more likely, to meet new people. Although the technology had existed for a long time, it wasn't a new idea from a technical perspective. It was a social cultural stigma to doing it. You know, I at the time was in my, probably my late 20s in New York, and you would never have used a dating app to meet new people. It was very stigmatized. So the first wave is more and more people joining the social cultural stigma's falling, falling in the U.S., for sure, but more broadly globally. but we're still using a dating app the way we kind of met in the regular world, right? You know, if friends would introduce you or you met somebody in college, you met somebody

at a party, you kind of meet somebody, and then a week or two later, you'd hang out one-on-one. And that's kind of how we've used, you know, dating apps, is you come to Tinder on a Sunday night, you find somebody, and the goal is to hang out with them a week or two later in the physical world. What we're seeing now, I think, is going to be a really interesting second wave, which you actually come to the app and you hang out in the app, and you get to know them in the app. And the thing that really brings this to life is a story we all know really well. You meet somebody on Tinder.

You go out with him a week or two later. You get there and four minutes into the conversation, you're like, wait, there's like no spark. There's no chemistry. Like, I need to press the eject button. And, you know, people have concocted all kinds of fancy ways to get themselves out of these situations, right? You know, the emergency phone call, 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night, you have a sudden emergency. You know, no, you just like, the problem was you didn't develop rapport. or you didn't develop a connection with that person first.

And this is a well-understood idea. And I think nobody's really innovated here yet in a big way. And so that's the big idea, which is, wait, if we hang out here and connect, what does that look like? How can Tinder as a product facilitate that? You get that digital connection. Maybe it just stays in the digital world. For many people, it will want to go to the physical world when it connects. But for some, it will stay, you know, it will stay in the digital world.

So that's the set, to me, that's the big second wave. It's like, how do we innovate here? How do we come to Tinder on a Sunday night and hang out live and connect live? And then, you know, some of those connections will then go and, you know, have a physical world connection as well. This might be like a dumb question, but why do you want people to hang out in Tinder? Well, because I think it's an interesting place to actually get to know. It's much less intense than I swipe on you, I match with you. and now the next step, this big jump, the next step is to be on a one-to-one physical,

you know, physical date, right? And what we see is this is not like a new idea. I think this is like a new idea if you're maybe in your late 20s or your 30s. But in a sense, you know, the idea of hanging out is already happening with our Gen Z members. You know, the background for this, the important backdrop is over the past 10 years, you've not only had the growth of dating apps, of course, you've had the growth of the entire entire social internet. That's been a huge growth, right? We have now three billion people on the social internet. The social internet is the third one after the commerce internet and before that

the information internet. So information internet, commerce internet, social internet, you now have three billion people. And then specifically, Gen Z, the 18, 19 year olds who arrive on Tinder today, they've grown up with the social internet. They've had that in their life from a very young age. So when they arrive, they've already hung out in digital environments. It might have been Fortnite, right? That could have been the place where they were hanging out with their friends. So the idea of like hanging out and developing a relationship and developing a connection, letting it unfold in a digital environment is not a new idea. I'll actually give you an interesting anecdote here.

We do a lot of talking to our young members. And we kept, in one of the conversations, we kept referring to like IRL, IRL, IRL, in real life. And one of the members we were talking about you said, you guys keep talking about like digital experience and then IRL as if IRL, the physical world, is my real life. You don't understand. Like my digital social experience is my real life. They're both my real life. And that's a really simple idea, but a profound one. And so the idea that you can't hang out on Tinder is already happening as a concept. Do you sit in strategy meetings and you're like

Fortnite dating is coming and we got to be there? Is that, are you worried about that? Like, when you talk about Fortnite and other social places, yep, that is hanging out there. But It's still a video game, right? They might have Travis Scott concerts and whatever. But it hasn't built the set of features or tools you might need to, like, have a romantic relationship in Fortnite. Do you see that as an opportunity you need to create first or something that will happen organically or an emergent behavior that it's already occurring and you're just trying to catch

the wave? So I think there's two parts, right? Fortnite clearly has the contextual environment that makes it, you know, possible to hang out. That's a game specifically. there's other contextual environments, you know, trivia and Ashley, you know, you wrote about this, right? Like that is an idea. It's another contextual environment. There's lots of different social, you know, social communities out there. The thing that's very specific to Tinder, right, is it's young, 18 to 25, predominantly. It's global. And everybody who's here is looking for something more. That's really important, right?

You need that kind of top level intent, that top level filter on. Why are you there in the first place? When you come to Tinder, you don't come for trivia specifically. You come to find somebody for something more. And then maybe trivia. And there's going to be many examples and ideas, some of which won't work and some of which will. And we're going to experiment a lot with these in the coming year. But the point is still to find something more with someone.

That's really the point. It's the, you know, what's the end and what's the means? So how do you map that to this is a place that you want to hang out a long time? Like once you find that something more, you probably don't want to go back in an environment where everyone's intent is to get to something more because you, right, do you anticipate people are going to spend a long time in Tinder that they're going to come back to it again and again and again throughout their life? Or is it once you make the connection, you move on?

Yeah, we already see episodic behavior, which makes sense, right? You know, if you find somebody, you get really connected to them, you date them, it's maybe a long-term relationship. You know, we're really the only app which says just because it doesn't last forever doesn't mean it's not important. You know, it's still important. And we're very clear about that. We don't think everything has to last to be important. And as a result, you know, we see very clearly episodic use. People come. They come for a while. They leave. They come back. And, you know, if that starts at 18 and to journey and they'd spend their time on that journey, and I don't think this will change that. I think, you know, I very much hope and expect that people will still form,

you know, important connections, even if they don't last forever. Could you talk a little bit, maybe just to catch listeners up on some of the work you've done on the interactive side to try to kind of crack that code? Yeah. So, you know, this is, you know, what we're seeing happen now, you know, if a few of the themes in, in COVID are, you know, you can see that your online dating life is your dating life, right? We understand and we're seeing, you know, you can develop connection through a screen. You can develop connection digitally. That's a real connection.

It's a valid connection. We understand that. And there's kind of a bunch of really interesting hacks that are inspiring us, you know, whether it's having a date in Animal Crossing or it's, you know, you're seeing in Silicon Valley like Zoom Bachelor, which I think is quite funny. You know, we're hacking together these social experiences, right? having cooking class as part of a date, an online date. You know, those are kind of like the things we're seeing right at this moment in COVID.

But they're really, like, especially for our youngest members, a continuation of themes that we've been really interested in for a while. The thing we did in the fall, last fall, which is an interactive experience called Swipe Night, which was a, it was an event. It was four Sunday nights in October in the U.S. And we built a first-person interactive adventure. What that is is like a series of. of, it's a story, literally a story we had pre-filmed. We'd filmed all the different components of.

You came to Tinder, the whole community at a certain time of the day on a Sunday night, and you engaged in that experience, and you kind of chose your own adventure. It's fun. It's entertaining. And then you talk to the people on Tinder who are also doing it. And now you have a shared live experience. You have shared context with those persons. You have kind of, in a sense, a diversion, the context about which to talk about. And so that was the first, that was the first, you a major experiment. We had worked on that really throughout 2019, and it was inspired by these ideas, which is like, hey, you can have hang out on Tinder. You can have the whole community come and have it be alive and have it be an experience with shared context. We'd use the metaphor of going

to a concert or going to a festival. You're all there together. Of course, you're there live. Everybody's there at the same time. You're all having the same experience. And that's important. It becomes a way in which you share in a way as you have the same experience and same, you know, to talk about. It makes it easier and lower pressure to connect with other people. So that's the kind of thing we've been doing. I think what you're seeing right now with COVID is a broader number of people, especially perhaps people who are not, you know, are 18 and 19 year olds who used to hang out on Fortnite. They're getting exposed to, oh, wow, this digital thing, this virtual experience thing, it's real. Like, I could totally understand it. And that will

look, the big takeaway will be, it will lower the cultural stigma. And like at the beginning of the first wave of dating online. We're lowering cultural stigma was the big change. This is going to lower the cultural stigma. We don't understand all of the ways it'll play out. But I think for sure, we're going to see a big change in how we, in our psychology around these things. A lot of your product innovation has been around university students. So you have TinderU, which is specifically for people with a dot EDU address, I think. There are a couple other ways to verify. But yeah, that's the idea. Yeah. In the college campus area, students. And then obviously you made a spring break mode. You've done music festivals.

sort of IRL events. So I'm curious, like, have you pivoted those teams now? Like, are you just kind of like, all right, school campuses are empty next fall? No one's going on spring break. Nobody's going to music festivals. Like, so much effort was put into that. I'm curious what those teams are doing now. Yeah, yeah. The short answer is yes. The question I was talking to somebody out the other day is, what does back to school look like when there's no physical school? we've referred to joining Tinder at 18 as a right of passage. And to become that, it's an important one is an important, you know, we're an 18 plus app where we work very hard to keep people who aren't 18 off the app. So when you turn 18, that's a right of passage.

And of course, we think of all the other rights of passage that relate to going to college and Tinder U is solidly in there. So what can we do? How does that map over to the virtual world? So what is the festival mode when the festival isn't, you know, in the physical world isn't in real life? You know, so yeah, we've migrated over there. It's a really important area of our innovation, inspiration is the youngest members of Tinder. It's just interesting because I remember you also briefly experimented with Tinder Places, which was a feature that was supposed to allow you to see people who had kind of crossed your path and then match with those people.

So it was like, oh, you go to the same coffee shop as me. There you are. I see you every day. Now I have an opportunity to swipe on you. and a lot of your features were oriented around geographical location, but it kind of sounds like you guys are totally pivoting away from that. And like, actually, location doesn't matter at all. I think social cultural cues matter a lot more.

Like Joe Exotic is a much more meaningful cultural cue than like where you went to coffee. You know, if this is the wave of the social internet, it certainly seems that way. You know, a lot of what happens in culture is what happens in online culture. And the advantage of online culture, this is kind of a broad world. broader idea is that it's democratized, right? A lot of the physical world stuff we kind of tend to talk about, like take a festival, and we've had this conversation internally. It's really expensive. The number of people who can go to a music festival is small. It's really a privileged few. So when we did swipe night, one of the ideas behind it was not just that we can have a live experience

and a social experience in the context of Tinder, but it's one that's actually free for everyone. And that's really powerful. And so I think when we think about the physical world, versus the social digital world, like one is first of all just becoming more and more important in culture. And we're a part of culture. We're not just, are we, you know, an important place to meet new people. We've become very fortunately a really important, you know, brand in social culture, specifically in youth social culture. And so, and those cues are, you know, those are in TikTok, right? In TikTok videos, those are in what you're watching on Netflix. Those are in the memes that are circulating. So, yeah, we pivoted.

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AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Gramerly for free at Grammerly.com. That's Grammarly.com. So, I'm an old guy. I definitely married the girl who was assigned the dorm room next to mine before Tinder ever existed. So my simplistic view of Tinder is that it's for hot people. And my understanding is like the profiles aren't built out with all of this cultural signaling. Like you're not required to fill out a lengthy profile with your interests, your thoughts on Joe exotic. Like, it's a very visual platform. This is what I'm told.

I'm also married to a divorce lawyer, so like I'm really, really out of remove from Tinder. But are you trying to shift that so people are signaling more of their interests? They're signaling more of their cultural alignments versus just photos themselves. Yeah, I think the challenge, right,

is how do you make it easy to do, right? Because, you know, we've experimented a lot with this, and it's something that comes up okay, well, how do I show off myself? Like, how do I tell my story in a way that feels comfortable, but it's also easy to do? So we've recently added, you know, conversation starters and we're prompting people on social cultural things. But it's always focused, you know, and I think it's something that we at Tinder have

understood perhaps uniquely well. It's not enough to try to give people things to do to add. It's got to be easy to do. It's got to be fluid. Because talking about yourself is awkward. And people don't like to do it. So, you know, and I've seen. seen the thinking around, extensively seen the thinking around, okay, well, should we have them

write a thousand-word essay about themselves? No, no, you don't want to do that because the number of people who can do that is very small. The number of people who will read that is very small. So it's always about finding ways. And I think it's why when you hang out, one of the reasons, the inspirations behind the idea of hanging out on Tinder is I think we can create ways in which naturally you can show more of yourself and get more, be seen more than just for the two-dimensional visual. But it's still easy to do. It's still natural to do versus I think it's very awkward to write 500 words about yourself. So is that where things like trivia comes from or other things where it's just like really quick hits to almost gamify that interaction? Yeah, we think the activities

you do can be a way in which you can kind of like naturally show who you are. And actually that emulates a lot more of the college dorm room example. that you gave, right? Like, that is how if you were hanging out on a college campus and you're meeting people, there isn't going to be this, like, one moment where you just yes or no, you're going to get the opportunity to, like, unfold a little bit more as a person and be seen more as a person, but without having to, like, write a 500-word essay that you then put on a piece of paper and put, you know, you know, a slide under her door, which... I was a very dramatic college student. I don't know if I want to go down this road. But, yeah, no, I philosophically understand what

you're saying. So, I mean, it just sounds like a lot of what you're talking about. here, at a very simple level, boils down to user interface design. Right? I mean, the key piece of Tinder that everyone knows is a swipe that was a user interface innovation. It sounds like you're trying to apply that thinking to all of these other spaces as well. Yeah, I would say there's two parts, right? There's definitely product design is super important.

You know, if you don't get the product design, right, I think the best idea just, you know, kind of stays as an idea. And so, you know, we're proud of our ability to do that well. I think we do that really, really well. I think we take ideas and don't just leave them on a piece of paper. They become proct ideas that are elegant, that are simple, that are fun, that are delightful. So, yeah, for sure. The other part, which is more complicated, but I think we understand pretty well is how do you make

these things acceptable in social culture, right? Like, how is it okay to hang out on a Sunday night? And there you've got to tell the story in a way that's fun and excessive. and exciting that people want to do it, that it's not a chore. If you think about the first wave of dating websites, they were really websites, they kind of felt like a job interview. It felt like work. You know, here's, you know, all these things.

You've got to say about yourself. You're like, God, this is not fun at all. And, you know, our members, you know, more than half of them are 18 to 25. They're in Gen Z. This is a fun time of life. It's supposed to be a fun time of life. We want to facilitate that, not make it a job interview. So one of the biggest product features you guys have announced, I think in the company's history, is this one-on-one video calling that's going to be coming soon.

So I'm wondering, I guess I kind of want to just first ask, was this a product you wanted to launch before the pandemic? Yeah, this was on the list, but was lower on the list than the things we've been talking about, you know, which are these broader themes of hanging out. You know, we think this is an interesting feature. It's coming. It'll, you know, the first of our members will see it in June. And so it's been on the list. It just wasn't at the very top list because of the other areas, which kind of the themes behind Swipe Night, for example, were higher on the list.

So video chat is fraught for every company that launches it. It's technically hard. It's data rich. If you get it, if it looks bad, it's not very worthwhile. Did you prioritize it lower because the technical challenges were harder or because the sort of big social changes that come to a platform like Tinder with video were difficult? I think it was just less interesting to us than the other things we've talked about, more so than the technical side. I'll tell you how we've done it, how we're approaching it. And this will

inform some of how you're thinking about it. The trust and safety team at Tinder is the team that's building it. Because we want to ensure that it isn't fraught with problems, that was very important. You know, the trust and safety team has done our efforts on kind of anti-harassment and on moderation at global scale, Tinder scale, has done it really successfully. It's been a big, big effort, you know, for the past three years in particular. It's always been an effort, but it got a lot of attention. I joined Tinder as a CEO two and a half years ago. It was kind of like on the list of things. There were a very small number, one of which was going global, the second of which is like we have to make sure to be ahead of the curve, you know,

and from kind of just a kind of how do you make the experience better and better for the for our participants without that you don't have a platform you don't have a community and so that was really important and I'm really proud of what the team has done it's really an incredible team very very talented and so they they're the ones building this you know very specifically tinder's version of this is a mutual opt-in right if you think about tinder you both have to opt in to match and so you know in order to be able to talk to each other at all, you have to match, and that's a mutual decision. And then further, in order to be able to use video, you have to specifically opt in to agree to video with that person. Both of you have to.

So it's kind of like multiple layers removed. And then it's being built by the trust and safety team who's just really, really deeply experienced in all of these, in all the issues that come with moderating a platform at global scale. So I feel like we know we know how to do it. We don't have all the answers. There's going to be a lot of things that we learn, but we come to a pretty big foundation of knowledge. Is your trust and safety team just Tinder's internal trust and safety team? Like, it's not, you're not pulling from the brain trust that's match group. I think because of our scale, we're, you know, we, so we do.

We borrow lots of thinking across match group. You know, there's a match group safety council that is a broad across match group. It's not just us. That's a knowledge base that has, you know, external advisors. who are very, very accomplished in the domain. And so we definitely leverage that pretty extensively. But then if you compound that by our scale and the global component, which is not just U.S. scale, but global scale for Tinder,

we're probably the most experience in the group of doing this at scale, of applying. And there's really three vectors, right? One is machine learning that is looking for problems. The second is a large human moderation team that is moderating, what the computers can't deal with or need human intervention on. And then our members are a really, really critical part of how we get signal, right, how we get information about what's happening.

And all of that is, you know, kind of baseline has to be in every feature we build. Any feature where there's the potential for anything problematic, you know, we build in all three of those. So we spend a lot of time covering moderation at scale on other social platforms. We think about it a lot. One of the things we hear from, say, Facebook is we need to be this big in order to have effective moderation. We need to be Facebook size in order to build AI moderation capability, in order to have a scaled moderation team around the world. Just in order to support a global business, it's this big.

Facebook size. I don't think Tinder is at Facebook size. I don't think Match Group is at Facebook size. How do you think about the challenge of scaling a moderation team to support the world? and then adding video, which is, I have many sort of mechanical questions about how you might moderate video chats, but that's just another level of work. Are you growing your trust and safety team to meet that challenge? Is it big enough? Does it need to get bigger?

So I can't speak for how Facebook thinks about it. I can tell you, they're just like, we need to be huge. Yes. That's fundamentally their answer. We're big. We're not Facebook scale at either Tinder or match group. And I feel that we have sufficient scale, both in terms of, you know, signal from what's happening to learn on and not just in English, but across more than many languages. We've got sufficient financial resources to take the human moderation side as seriously as it can be taken.

I'll say for us, you know, we're very specific. We are not a broad-based social community. We're a social community with a very specific intent, right, which is the fun. that's something more we were talking about, I feel very good about our ability to do it, even though we don't have the Facebook scale. So let's say I'm 19 on Tinder, get through all the opt-ins, someone wants to video chat with me, I want a video chat with them, I hit the button, and then that person does something bad or untoward or I don't like it.

Mechanically, what is the moderation step? Do I hit send? Is it recording in the background for someone else to review? How does that work? Yeah, probably what happens there. And again, some of this is still, you know, you're still getting me, you know, a month before launch, give or take. So there's still some of the very last details that we've figured out. And then there will be details we have to figure out, you know, with the first test groups that we get. You know, this is, this, this experience is going to be quite far into an interaction between two people, right? So, and then we will, you know, through that path have had people opt in and, you know, we remind them of all the policies around Tinder, you know. And so there's a, there's a series of stuff. you have to get through. I think that based on what you're describing my guess is, we probably get in a report. You know, our members are very proactive about reporting. That probably becomes

one of the signals. We'll probably catch something with one of the machine learning models, especially as we get more scale in this specific scenario. Maybe one of our other machine learning models is able to pick it up. Maybe we need a specifically tuned one for this area. So, but so, I mean, let's dig on that for one second. A machine learning model picking up something bad happening. It usually looks like one thing, right? So are you saying, like, I'm in a video chat. Someone whips out their dong and like, an AI is like, that's dumb cutting off the video chat reporting you automatically. So, you know, there are existing, you know, terms of use for Tinder. And so, you know, I expect we'll enforce that. The scenario you're describing is probably

the easiest one to catch, quite frankly. But I guess to make that question less funny, you're saying an AI is going to watch the video chat in real time. Yeah. I mean, we've been pretty, open, right, that on the balance between safety and privacy, we balance in favor of safety. And that's a trade, right? So, for example, if this was end-to-end encrypted and nobody else can see it and we can't get in there, we can't see it. And so, yeah, I think, you know, we've been very open broadly, not specific to video. It's broadly true about the platform because of what we do, safety is more important. How it plays out exactly and specifically in all of the nuances around, video. We're really

accomplished and experienced here. We'll have to see all that. I don't want to try to give you answers in areas where I don't yet know the answers and don't yet know actually which are the real scenarios. But the one you describe is easy to catch. Yeah, I think I'm just fascinated and taken with the idea of having computers

chaperone a video date, right? Which is, it sounds like that's very much the way you're going. Yeah, so I'll generalize because I don't want to, I don't want to we have terms of use. The terms of use are not going to change. This is not going to change that. You know, the area we operate in is, right, we have members who make decisions and what's, you know, what two people decide for themselves. There's no one size fits all. And that's, I think, one of the beautiful things about Tinder is it's actually incredibly diverse. It's incredibly diverse in a really amazing and important part of life. And we've been able to do that at global scale and support that. And so that is something that I want us to be able to continue to do. It's important and valuable. You know, what's right for our 18.

and 19-year-old college campus students and what's right in Delhi and what's right in Seoul and Tokyo for 25 and 30-year-old. It's just there's no one-size-fits-all answer for this part of life. Nothing to do with harassment, nothing to do with abuse,

purely to do with like how people want to live. And that's, I think, a wonderful thing. And we have been in so many different ways supportive and encouraging, whether it's trying to do things that are better for our trans community, trying to support our LGBTQ community, right? These are important.

And so that's one of the underlying values of Tinder is that we're supportive of all the ways in which people show up when they're looking for something more. But all that being said, there's a big team that's monitoring all the vectors for harassment, all the vectors for abuse.

But let me push on that just in one other way, because it is philosophically fascinating. And then I will let Ashley, who is actually a reporter on this beat and knows what she's talking about. Take it away. But when you're chatting with somebody or sending photos or doing whatever else you might do on Tinder, the chat platform, there is a mediated step where you hit send and then, you know, a server can say, hey, we're going to catch this, right? But there's like that act of transmission to a server.

The server declines to send it on. And that's kind of built into that interaction model. A video chat in real time with another person is not mediated by a server, right? So that's like an interaction design problem. that's a user expectation problem. It also seems like a really computationally intensive problem because you're monitoring however many video streams at global scale all day long.

Is that the set of challenges for video chat that you're facing? And how are you solving, particularly that computational one, because that seems really hard. Yeah, so I'll give you a really concrete example of a place where we are clearly moderating text, right? Start there. We have a feature called Does This Bother You?

Or we actually have transmitted the text but we think there may be a problem. But, you know, there's a lot of nuance. What is a problematic for one may not be problematic for another. And there's lots of examples where that comes to mind. And so we say it to the recipient, does this bother you? And actually, in many times, the recipient says, no, it doesn't bother me. In this context, this is appropriate.

This is what I'm fine with this. And it gives you a sense of like the complexity of what we're dealing with in our specific environment, right? When you're looking for something more with someone. With video, I don't, you know, it's real time. Right? Like it's not, it's not this, you know, Texas slow relative to a real-time video. So it's complex. It's why we're going to roll out in small steps and small phases, why it's being built by the trust and safety team. It's computationally intensive. You're right. We've got lots of technical chops to do it. So, you know, let's, I think what we should do is let's come back in a, not a month, too soon, but like in three months, let's come back and go deep on it and we'll tell you, you know, all the things we've learned. And I think at that point, we still will know, not everything. We'll know a fraction of what there is to know, but we'll know a lot. But, you know, I think, I think, like, all of the efforts to moderate large communities to help make the large communities

as good as they possibly can be, it's an ongoing effort. And it's probably an ongoing effort forever. And so, you know, we're coming at it with a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience, a lot of a lot of really critical foundational knowledge. But it's, you know, it's the beginning. It's something we'll take, we're taking super seriously. You know, you have introduced video to Tinder in like baby steps. You've done the interactive swipe night, loops, the looping gifts that they have on profiles. Why not just stay out of video calls entirely? Why do you feel like you need to have, I mean, FaceTime works great.

Why do you want people to have video chats in Tinder? The broader answer, well, there's a, I'll give the broad answer, right? The thing that video does, right, video is not about video. Video is about live and videos about the ability to get. connection. And it's more broadly about the second wave of the evolution of, you know, dating apps, of connecting apps, of, you know, of networks where you're there to meet new people. And so it's a, it's an important, it's a really important technical tool because it allowed, look, you know, we're able to do this, you know, all of us are doing this now in our work

environments and we're able to get a lot of what we get from a connection perspective and a signal perspective. So it's a really powerful thing. I think. when we do it on Tinder, we actually, the positive side is we bring to bear all of our experience with safety. You know, the things that are completely off platform, we have a much, we have, you know, most cases, zero ability to do anything about. They, there happen outside of our purview. So there are a lot of benefits. You know, the second thing is, which I think is related to this idea of safety, is people often want a certain amount of privacy as they're developing a relationship, as that relationship is forming, and they don't know where it's going to end up. They don't know if it's

going to last. And so giving out your FaceTime, you know, your ID, your phone number, your FaceTime ID, giving out your Snap handle, et cetera. Like, giving out all these other things may not be what you want. You may want to be abstracted a little bit. Those are really more for people you know really well, your friends and family. And so I think we have a lot of role to play. But the core place it starts is around human connection and the emotion of that. And that and video powerful for that. And you imagine this is a permanent feature for Tinder. It's not just like a thing you're rolling out during the pandemic. I mean, you're putting a lot of work in. Like, you're not going to be promoting it, you know, just for this period of time. This is a forever

Tinder feature right now. I would believe so. Yeah. I mean, you know, we're very careful to try, as we look at all things COVID, to try to figure out what are the things that we believe are here forever? You know, maybe they are accelerating things that were already true. They're pulling the future forward, you know, as somebody said, I thought that was a really elegant way to say it, versus it's just here today and gone for it because it's a big, big, big effort. And by the time we'd finish it, you know, the crisis will be in a different place and if it's fleeting. Now, we believe that the idea of connecting emotionally in the community on Tinder directly

is an important one. And we believe that video is a powerful tool for that. I think that the way I frame it is, it's not. a matter of if people will hang out on Tinder and connect on Tinder in that way and spend time on Tinder. It's really the what and the when. The what is like, is it going to be trivia? Is it going to be some other, you know, some other activity that you do that helps you connect? Is it things like Swipe Night? And then, you know, the when. I think it's going to be different if you're 18 versus if you're 35. For some people, it will be never, right? But for a lot of people, it's just going to be where they are,

where they personally are on the adoption curve. Oh, I really wanted to ask. Can you screenshot a video call? We will do everything in our power to block screenshotting video calls. How does that work on the different platforms? Is that something you have to go to Apple and Google and AskCore? Is it something you can just build? Is it that seems like a very complicated thing to execute after you say it?

Yeah, we have really, really good partners in both of those platforms. We work really closely with them. So whatever is technically possible is what I said it the way I said it, which is we will do everything possible. I want to stop short of being like, it is impossible. Obviously, you can take another phone and photograph the screen and like old school screenshots.

If you ever see these contraptions for how they took screenshots in the 80s, they literally use a camera. So, yeah, we have, we, we're experienced in this area with really, really helpful, you know, partners there. So let's, let's come back in, you know, let's come back in three months time and I'll give you more and more specifics as we have them. How do you think about, I mean,

You were previously the CEO of OKCupid. That seems like it has a different user journey than Tinder. Yes. We mentioned Match Group earlier. If the listeners aren't familiar, Match Group is a company. It's about to spin out and be a public company. It owns all the dating services, I think. That's my understanding.

If you run a dating app, you probably work at Match Group. We're a public company that is spinning out our major shareholder, which is IAC. IAC, you know, we're predominantly held by IAC, and we're spinning out of that. But we've been a public company since the fall of 2015. Match Group owns OKCupid, Tinder, and others. So Match.com, of course, which is really where so much of this started. So as you think about Tinder in its role in people's lives, and then you've got this other constellation of dating services,

do you see people moving from one to the other? Do you see people, I know, leaving their longstanding OkCupid relationship and coming into like the Tinder swiping ecosystem. How does that work out inside a conglomerate of so many different brands? Yeah, it's a good question. So I'll frame it from the Tinder perspective. I think it's, you know, every, every, you know, the CEO of OKCupid today, he's a very, very sharp guy and he would want to be able to answer the OKCupid specific questions. You know, but I'll frame it for how we think.

But we're really in the world of these apps. I think this is broadly true, both within Match Group, but really across the eco, across the entire category. We're the only one that is, you know, focused entirely with all of our energy on 18 to 25, on Gen Z, on kind of how this, how it shows up when you're really young. And it doesn't therefore mean that there aren't members who are over 25 on Tinder. There are lots. But that's that's the unique place we play. You know, Ashley, you were saying it with regards to Tinder you. There's a reason why we do all the stuff we do for U.S. college kids.

That's not the entirety of our audience. You know, we're much, much bigger than just the U.S. college. student population, but it's a place where we derive a lot of inspiration for our innovation. And that's when we have in mind a member, we're thinking about them. When I was a CEO of Ok Cupid, that was not the member. I was thinking about, you know, Ariel would have, Ariel is a CEO of Okay, Cupid. He'd have to tell you how he thinks about it today. But I definitely, you know, having been in both roles at different times, I very much conceptualized who my, who I was building for, who we as a team thought about quite differently.

Do you share resources across these groups? I mean, I'm literally coming off. We just spoke to the CEO of Google. He has to operate Google and Alphabet. He resource shares across the various alphabet companies, but he wants to keep them very different. Is that how you think of Tinder inside of Match Group? It is remarkable, and I don't think it gets enough attention

that Match Group owns so many of the major dating services and manages to keep them somewhat independent. How does that roll up at the top when you decide to share resources? Yeah. So, you know, Char de Be is the CEO of Match Group. And she and I worked together closely now for four years. She's fantastic. Very, very brilliant, super experienced in all things dating online. She's been doing this for a long time. She was at Match.com, you know, running Match.com for many years. You know, we've started taking sharing of specific knowledge bases, you know, more seriously. Ashley, you know, you were talking about trust and safety. It's an area where we absolutely,

absolutely don't want to reinvent the wheel, right? It's really important that we take the knowledge developed at Tinder or the knowledge developed at OKCupid or at Match.com and applied for the benefit of all of our members, independent of which one of the communities they happen to be in anywhere in the world. And there are other examples of that around that, which, you know, start to get more technical, for example. You know, there are technical resources where Tinder teams are working with, you know, OKCupid teams or other teams, hinge teams, et cetera, to bring to bear very specific technical know-how. It tends to be in areas where the knowledge that you need is very specific to what we do

versus its very general computing knowledge. And, you know, honestly, the person, the company that knows best is like AWS or Google Cloud, for example. When it's specific to the world that we're in, then the sharing is pretty significant. And it's gotten more, you know, I've been with Matt for four years now, first at OKCupin, now at Tinder for two and a half years. You know, can keep it for one and a half before that. And I've seen us increase that a lot over that time.

And that's very intentional. So I've been recording a podcast episode, Why'd You Push That Button, the other show that I do. And we interviewed a bunch of daters who are virtually dating now and kind of how that experience has been going for them. And pretty much the feedback we've gotten is that there's only so far they can go with the digital conversation and they miss that in-person connection. So I guess I'm wondering. I mean, is there a world of which Tinder creates like a Tinder haptic suit? Like, how do you, I just, do you think there is still this limitation? Like, where, what's the line?

Like, where is the limitation with tech and what do you think needs to happen in the future to make virtual dating maybe a true reality? Yeah, I think that as it varies for everyone. But, you know, our view, you know, my view personally, but our view more broadly as a team at Tinder is that there is a limitation. There is only so far you can go. that we're physical beings, right? And that's important and that's wonderful.

And that's been true for, you know, millennia, millennia and is not going to change because of COVID and is not going to change. It's not going to change. I think that's going to be true. So the physical connection we get will remain important. And I don't think we'll build a haptic suit. But look, I think that the wonderful thing about all things,

kind of internet and all things tech is somebody somewhere will be inspired. and we'll say this is important. It's important to be able to hang out an animal crossing. Oh, that's really interesting. Peel want to do that. Okay, that's inspiring. You know, I think the physical world has a really, really critical role to play. I can't wait till, you know, my wife and I can go out to restaurants and bars and hang out in the physical world and have that experience.

And I'm eager for that to come back. So there is going to, I think there's a very important place to play for hanging out virtually, but I think there's a very important place to play for the physical. the physical world. And no, we have a huge community. And so there will be parts of the community and you say, look, I'm very satisfied. I feel validated. I feel seen. I feel heard. And I get my connection without that. I don't know what I will have a better sense in a year's time of like how the how this shakes out, what percentages or what. But I'm definitely betting on the physical world being very important and here to stay. So I end all of these conversations with CEOs by

asking about how you manage your time and when people do work. I'm imagining running a team the size of Tinder across the world remotely is challenging. How have you structured your time? When do you get work done and how are you adjusting to managing remotely? Yeah. You know, one that I think a lot of people are seeing that I definitely started to see maybe six, seven, eight weeks ago, whenever this, you know, started. I do not do Zoom video conferences all day long. I think it is draining in some very unique way, and I don't like it.

I've moved actually a lot of the things that don't need to be Zoom to phone calls or to asynchronous inside of Google, you know, inside of Google Docs. I think that to me the big takeaway, which is maybe I don't have to direct answer to your question, but I think it's a really interesting topic is recently, right, we assume that the default number of days you need to be in the office was five, right? And I think that was broadly true. There's a lot of social, cultural inertia around that idea. You work in the kind of work we do, right?

It's digital work, and you commute across the Bay Area or across Los Angeles or across New York. Those are where U.S. offices are. And it takes you 60 minutes and you go sit at a desk and then you do Google Docs and you do Slack. And, you know, occasionally go to a conference room and you do that five days a week. I think what this is teaching us for sure is that the default of five doesn't make sense. You don't need five. I do think there's a really important value of being in the office. that the office has, you know, the physical space has certain jobs that does really well.

And so we're not, I think that's a big unlock. I think in terms of my personal time, you know, the things that I'm being very careful of is, do I need to do this live or not? And how do I ensure that my day doesn't end up spent just sitting all day? You know, the office actually brings with it lots of little breaks, right? You know, I'm walking here, I'm walking there. And I think that's a more balanced version versus just sitting at my desk. here looking at, you know, the video screen, you know, 12 hours a day.

When you say there's stuff the office as well, didn't there's a software company. I think as you kind of see the split of bigger companies, the companies that have a lot of like hardware divisions are like itching and go back. Pure software companies like Twitter, Square, work from home forever. Is that, are you thinking about the same split? Yeah. The big thing will be that there's an unlock from the inertia of we just do it this way because we've always done it, right? Especially for work that is a lot around information work. Obviously, if you're manufacturing something, most of this doesn't apply, right?

You're physically manufacturing it in a physical space. But for the kind of work that, you know, we do for sure, right? It's software, it's digital. But I don't like the framing of it's all or nothing. It's like, we're going to work from home forever. There's going to be no physical office. I think it's the wrong framing. I think it's really a question of how do you,

how many of those days a week do you want to have, the office time. I think teams really benefit from that. You know, kind of maybe picking up off the conversation from before, right? The physical world is important, and we get a lot from it. And I know that I get a lot from our team interactions that are in the physical world. I miss it. I know a lot of our other leaders do, but you don't need five days. I actually think that a lot of hardware companies, people who are working more in the hardware world, will also find that that's a balance that makes sense for them too, you know, because a lot of their work is not physically with their hands on the hardware.

It's very often inside of a computer in CAD or whatever it is. When you think about just how you want your team to come back, and then you have a lot of access to a lot of signal about when people are using Tinder and going on dates again around the world, what are the indicators you're looking at around the world to say, okay, our team is going to start coming back now? You know, it's hard. You know, we're looking at two different things. We're looking at after this is all over.

what does the future of work look like? That's, I think, a really interesting thought experiment. I think it's hard to know exactly what it will be, but we can come up with some really good theories around it. In terms of signal to come back, you know, it's hard. We've looked at this a lot. You know, you've got density challenges. So even when you're like, oh, things are getting better.

And yeah, going to the park and going on a date in a park or going to the beach in L.A., right? That seems pretty safe, seems a pretty low risk. You know, in a dense office environment, you've got a lot of challenges. And so we don't have a good answer. I think what you're seeing, right, is a lot of tech companies, us included, are continuously pushing out the date, right? The kind of comeback date. And my guess is that as people work through all of the details of, like, how many people can you really have in the office? And what would that actually look like?

And what if you have one person who's sick and how many people do they get sick, et cetera, the date keeps getting pushed out? So where that's led me personally is I'm thinking more and more about what happens after versus trying to guess like when do we come back. Because I think there is going to be, we're seeing this now, right? If you're in Seoul, South Korea, it's a very different story. That's probably the best case in the world at this point. If you're in, you know, if you're in Germany, clearly better, but office work in Germany is still difficult, right, because it's a confined space.

Anyway, I don't know that we have a better, I don't know that we have a better conclusion. We have lots of signal of how people are behaving, but they're behaving that way in kind of outside areas or low density areas. And office is very high density. Okay. So last question. You're obviously you're making a lot of moves right now for Tinder in the, what I would call the stay at home moment, right? We're trying to make Tinder more social inside of its app, inside of its community. At some point, this does wrap up and people start to shift and hopefully see each other in person again.

Hopefully, when we have this video chat conversation in three months, hopefully we're at. actually physically together. That would be great. When you look beyond this moment, what changes inside of Tinder do you see as being permanent in terms of how people interact with the app and like live in the app? Because the shift from, I'm going to swipe to, I got your phone number, to we're going on a date. And that's one contained interaction to this is a community or this is a social environment that you're going to come back to again and again and again is a huge shift. It seems convenient to do it around everybody's saying at home. But it obviously seems like it's bigger inside the life cycle of Tinder as a company.

What's the main thing you want to hold on to is you pull through this moment? I think the phrase you said, pulling the future forward. What's the thing that you see inside of Tinder is pulling the future forward? Yeah, I think it's, you know, it really relates to how the experience of our 18, 19, 20-year-old members looks, which is for them, if we can create an experience that allows them to kind of get to know somebody to hang out digitally before they go into the physical world and they're for what they do get in the physical world is more likely to be good, more likely to be kind of viking, right, to have a real connection.

That's the part that stays. And, you know, we were doing this. We were thinking that way, going back to late 2018, you see it in Swipe Night in the fall of last year. How do we make the community more alive? Is a place to come to? It's a place to hang out. So, and that was informed by the trends we were already seeing. I think what it does is it brought.

It speeds it up. COVID speeds it up. And it broadens the number of people who say, yeah, that's relevant for me. Now, I think, by the way, the path you described of like I swipe, I match, I, you know, we text a few times and we say, hey, let's find a date to go on in a week or two. That's not going away. These are not mutually exclusive. They're both will be contained. But that's the part that we'll keep with us. The other part that I'm describing is the part we'll keep. Yeah, it seems like that you're at an inflection point where you can accelerate the broader vision. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. You know, it's, it's an outside, it's an outside thing that gives a lot of people willing to try it, right? That's a big deal that people are willing to try something new, you know, whether that's Instacart, right, or that is a Zoom meeting or it's hanging out on Tinder. Yeah, this is a, it's a, it's a moment in time where, like, you get a lot more people who open their minds out of necessity, who are willing to expand what they think is, you know, for a lot of time. a better word like normal. And that's a big change. That's a big deal. All right, Ellie, I think we're out of time. It was really great to talk to you. Ashley, thank you. Thanks. Thank you both. We're going to come chasing after you after this video chat launches. We're going to have a million questions after it launches because it sounds fascinating. Absolutely. I'd be happy to do it. Yeah, it's going to be fascinating. I agree. All right, my thanks to Ellie Seidman for joining us.

We're going to have to have them back after a video chat rolls out and really get into some of those moderation details. My thanks also to Ashley Carmen. That was a great interview. I was a glad to have her with me. We'll be back on Friday with the chat show, and we've got more and more of the CEO interviews coming up, as well as a few politicians. We've got quite a lineup. It's still common. It's the vertcast. Let me know what you think. Let me know who you want me to talk to. I'm at Reckless on Twitter. I love your feedback. We'll talk to you soon.