Hinge CEO Justin McLeod on how he rebuilt Hinge from scratch

I think that entrepreneurship is really the art of being both hopelessly idealistic and ruthlessly practical at the same time.

You can either focus on the competition or we're going to learn from the competition.

We don't look at the competition because in a sense, like we are playing a different game.

When we did our reboot in 2015, it was an opportunity for us because the company had, we'd had some success, but then that started to peter off and that's when I decided to reboot the company. And move it from a world of making a quick, superficial, fun connections, but actually to moving to a very relationship-oriented, how do we get people to put in more effort and more thought? And part of that reboot was yes, we rebooted the product and let go of half the team, but we also did a big breakdown of where we had gone wrong internally and culturally and how did we want to operate going forward.

Yeah, you know, there was the dimension of the business problem, right? And it felt like, okay, we really need to, if we're going to reinvigorate, it's not a marginal or iterative thing from here. It's a kind of a reset. The bigger thing though that hit me was just where the company had landed in terms of our values and our mission. The sort of moment was this article came out, in I think it was Vanity Fair about, it was called "The dawn of the dating apocalypse." You know, it was about how these apps had just created this hookup culture and ruined dating. And it was hard for me to deny, frankly, a lot of what was in that article. And I just felt like this isn't really the company that I wanted to build. It's not having the success that I imagined it having. It's not aligned with me from a values perspective anymore. And I was out to lunch, actually it was right before Thanksgiving with my Chief Brand Officer, a woman, Katie Hunt. I was telling her this and I was like, "I just want to start over." And she's like, "Well, what? You know, you're the CEO right? What's stopping you?" And I'm like, so I went home and thought about it over Thanksgiving. I'm like, "What is stopping me?" And I came back and talked to the board and talked to my senior team and I said, I think we need to like start over from scratch.

Yeah, it was within the next like two weeks, I called up a couple friends who are entrepreneurs and I think there were like two companies, I think TaskRabbit was one of them that I reached out to that had gone through this similar kind of thing and given me some advice. And what we did is that on the day that we decided to announce the reboot, I sent messages to everyone who was not getting let go that morning to say, "Hey, we're going to have some things going on at the office. Can you come in around noon?" And then everyone who was going to get let go came in that morning. I explained to them that like Hinge was going to go in a new direction and unfortunately we couldn't bring along. It was only 30 people at the time, but still, if we were going to reboot and start from scratch, we had to dramatically cut our burn rate. So I had to let them go, which was like very, very hard. And, you know, ushering people out of the office and then had to like, turn it around, have the next group of people come in, and then give them an inspiring presentation about the future and why they should stay on board. That's hard. I offered every single person the same severance package that I offered the first group if they didn't want to come along on this journey, which one person took and the remaining 14 stayed. I wanted to show strength and like that we're okay. So I, 'cause we had just raised a large round of financing, so we got a big house upstate in Connecticut and the whole team went up there and we stayed there for a few days and just reimagined what the product could be, what the culture could be. Did a big diagnosis like I was talking about in a breakdown of where we had gone wrong and what we would do in the future. And that was the birth of the Hinge that we know today.

Yeah, it was interesting. I mean, I had some people including board members telling me like, this is the total wrong path, let's just start monetizing our users. Yeah. And like, let's take it that direction. You know, I think that entrepreneurship is really the art of being both hopelessly idealistic and ruthlessly practical at the same time. Like, if you're going to create something big in the world, you have to both hold onto that big vision and not be satisfied with, okay, I've created an app with 500,000 people on it, but I wanted to create something with a lot more. And that made a big impact in the world. And at the same time being ruthlessly practical and admitting, you know, when things aren't going the right way and being able to constantly iterate and tweak and look at what's not working right. And I think it's doing both those at the same time.

Certainly. And in some sense that's what Katie did in that moment, reflected back to me and pushed and inspired me to think bigger and differently about that. Yeah. And I think that any good leader would welcome that kind of big push and big thinking.

The attributes that we look for in any given employee is like one piece of our culture. Another piece of our culture is the principles about how we operate. And at the time we actually created an open Google doc where I started to sort of write down all the different principles that I thought should define our culture. And it was actually quite extensive from, you know, the office policies to the way I made decisions, our strategy, everything. And I sort of just documented the whole thing and allowed people to, it was open for comment and anyone could come in and we'd have these long debates in the comment section of the Google Doc about, and this kind of codified as our culture and document. As we scaled it was always in flux. We're always changing and updating and learning and adjusting. And then as we started to hit a certain level of scale around 100-150 employees, it got stable enough that we actually documented it and put it out and made it a really nice beautiful little book that we could print and hand to people.

Yeah. And then we locked it and what we also were doing over that time is we went from a list of, I don't know, maybe like 150 different principles and thoughts and different sort of elements of our culture and distilled it and distilled it and distilled it down until we, I think there were five in the last version. Now there's four. So actually as we get bigger, I've learned that you actually need fewer principles for people to, so that everyone in the whole organization knows them and they're really clean and simple so that people know how to apply them. And there are sort of subsets of principles within each of those. But we really try to distill like what really defines the Hinge culture? What are those four things that define the Hinge culture?

We have three interviews at Hinge: a skills interview where we're testing directly for the skills we want for this role. A narrative interview, which is to look at your history and your track record of success. And then finally a culture interview, which is very much like, have you demonstrated the values that we have as a company in your prior roles? And are you going to be a good fit here? I think that you take the attributes that you're really looking for and then just ask behavioral questions about those. I think one of ours around authenticity was like, when have you actually spoken up when it was uncomfortable to do so? So that's an example of an interview question that we ask around authenticity because we like when people share what's on their mind and we want people to just speak up even when those moments are uncomfortable.

We do have an annual planning process, but we also aren't afraid to update it during the years. Things adjust and we're part of Match Group and sort of flow into their kind of annual planning process so that we're thinking about headcount and resourcing and strategic planning. And I do find it's a good forcing function to step back and do that periodic... 'cause if I think if you're like doing planning on a continual basis, you kind of miss the moment to step back and think like, are we really heading in the right direction? Is this a moment to change and move over this way? So I actually find that cadence of semi-annual to annual is very useful. Yeah. When you're thinking like, but we always try to create like this sort of three year-ish vision of where we're trying to go at any given time.

I think it's like, I call it sibling rivalry, right? Like there's a little bit of bumping each other, but we're all in the same family and we all ultimately want each other to succeed. But also there's a fair amount honestly of independence. Toto Wolff, the CEO of the Formula One racing team, Mercedes team, he wants his people to have a picture. He tells them like, figure out who your direct rival is. Print out their picture, put it up on your computer, and you have to stare at that person every day and think how you're going to beat them. He's like obsessed with only thinking about the competition all the time.

I am the complete opposite of that. Yeah. So I, and that's the mistake I made the first time around. And that was one of the most foundational principles that actually we created coming out of the reboot in 2015. 'Cause at the time we were very focused on the competition and everyone had all the dating apps downloaded on their phone. And every time someone else released a feature we'd scramble to release that feature too. And what I learned is if you're the smaller player, copying the bigger player is never going to, like, you're never going to be able to break out like that. And we had to figure out our own game to play. And so that's the second when we did the reboot, I was like, no one's allowed to have any of the other dating apps on your phone. We're only paying attention to our customers. And we're going to like head in a completely different direction. Like if someone does something, we're just, we're not going to copy. In fact, we're going to like not do it.

Well we still, I don't like insist that no one else has other dating apps on their phone. But you'll notice that we don't look at the competition because in a sense, like we are playing a different game. Like we are the app that's designed to be deleted. We're not about engagement and retention and gamification. We're really about getting people who want to find their person off our app as quickly as possible. And we just do things very, very differently. So there's no one even else to copy, I think.

I mean, we're the only major growing dating app. There you go. And I think that... So they're doing that for you now? Yeah. Yeah. Ironically, it does feel like that a bit. And I just think there's so much opportunity in the space that it's, I'm not, it's, to me it doesn't feel like this competitive environment. Where we have to like carve things up. There's so much opportunity to serve customers in this space, especially given the opportunities that are being opened up by AI. There's no point in looking at what competitors are doing.