Hinge CEO Justin McLeod says dating AI chatbots is 'playing with fire' | Decoder

Certainly not. We are already in a crisis of loneliness. And I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, like most people don't have enough friends, but you know, we're going to give them AI chat bots.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You got to... Hinge is a harder path. It really is like a deep personal mission of mine.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Great. Excited to hear.

Over a decade ago.

Yeah. So...

Yes, definitely. We have a lot of single people on our team at Hinge. So, there's a lot of internal dog fooding for sure and a lot of opinions. I think that the relationship is different. So, I started the company in 2011 and I was single at the time and I was single for the first four years of Hinge and then long story, but I got back together with my college girlfriend and we've been together for the last 10 and married and kids and all that.

You know, it's such a... we were together. I tried to get her back. She said no. I started Hinge in response to that. And then someone who met on Hinge inspired me to go back and like she was about to get married to someone else. She was living in Switzerland. I flew over a month before the wedding. She like called off her wedding and moved back to New York.

I feel like I should throw my questions...

Yeah. Yeah. It was a... it's been a ride and an incredible ride and very intertwined with Hinge. But back to your question, I think that we can overweight our own personal experience I think a bit when we're especially as the CEO of the company. And what I found over time is that people have a wide array of very diverse experiences. And to some extent, I think it actually helps that I'm not in there overweighting my own niche feature requests that would matter to me and not to the whole population. So, yeah, it's evolved. It's more about helping others than it is about helping myself, which was probably the original idea of Hinge.

It's, you know, this is a very complex, nuanced industry. I think sometimes people look at their Hinge feed and they're like, why doesn't this understand my taste as well as my TikTok feed? And people don't really quite understand that like people aren't products. They're not infinite copies of everyone. They don't always behave the same. Your videos on TikTok don't have to like you back. There's just a lot of nuance to getting this right. And you're right. I mean, a fair amount of this comes down to the people on the platform. And so, what we're trying to do is obviously like build a great product, but also build an environment and a community where people are encouraged to be intentional and authentic and attract users who are really looking to find their person. So that is definitely the art and the nuance of trying to build a dating app like we've built it.

Yeah. Well, it's very much about, you know, what are you optimizing for? And you're right, social media is optimizing for ultimately engagement, retention, time in app. Like that is the lifeblood of their company. So, how much time can they get you sucked in? And that is their objective function. And so, everything is built around that. And we've seen what the consequences of that are pretty dire. And yeah, I think Hinge is almost the exact polar opposite. We're trying to get you to spend less time on your phone and more time out in real life on dates. And you know, it's interesting. When I started Hinge back in 2011, people very much as VCs looked at our business, they kind of asked those questions around engagement and retention. They were kind of looking at social media and they're like, 'What's your daily over monthly? How much time are people spending in an app, how many sessions per day?' And we were kind of optimizing for those things because that's what VCs are asking about and that's how we were raising money. And then Hinge did a pretty big pivot in 2015 where I like let go of half the company, rebooted from scratch because we felt like we really lost our way. We'd become more of a piece of entertainment that was about getting people just more matches and more activity and getting them back every day. And it had lost sight of what we were trying to do, which was people came to us to find a relationship and we weren't really optimized around that anymore. And when we did that pivot back in 2015, the biggest change that we made was we stopped focusing on the competition. We started focusing on the customer and we made our north star metric actual great dates. We introduced the 'We Met' survey where we asked people if we suspect they went on a date, if they went on a date and if it was good and everything became around optimizing towards that and it ended up creating a very, very different experience and that actually became the primary differentiator of Hinge because a lot of the other apps in the industry were based on engagement and retention and just getting people back and they were more entertainment platforms and Hinge became a utility and we started growing through word of mouth and now today we're the fastest growing, in fact only growing major dating app. We were growing 40% last year and other dating apps are shrinking because I think we've built a very sustainable business model that actually delivers on the value and the lifeblood of our company is getting more users out on dates so they tell their friends and then those people come and join Hinge.

Yeah, we think about it in terms of good churn. We want people turning off the app for the right reason. We don't want people turning off the app because they gave up too early or because they don't like Hinge. We want people turning off the app because they found someone ideally on Hinge.

It's different for different people. Like when I started, you know, when we did the reboot, it was our core market was definitely like 25 to 35 and very much people who were I would say like looking to find their person and get off the app for most people. And now our fastest growing segment has been like 18 to 25 and they're at a different phase in their life and it was pretty interesting because that segment started growing almost by surprise to us but I think what they were attracted to wasn't so much the focus on like long-term relationship like find your marriage partner today but it was very much about just the authenticity and vulnerability and intimacy on the platform and moving away from kind of a platform that felt very gamified and very flat to something that felt very human and intentional and authentic. And so we think about our daters as having a journey mindset like they're headed in a direction. They're on a journey of self-exploration. They don't want to waste their time on bad dates, but they don't necessarily are looking for their marriage partner today. And that's totally fine. We're just looking to help people get off the app, out on great dates, and forming intimate connection in real life.

Yes.

We're just always staying in tune with where culture is going. I think that it's just imperative on us because you're right, we can't rely on just a legacy user base. So we have to stay on top of culture where it's going, continually evolving the app. Whether it is, you know, right now a big focus is on AI and how we just generally increase the effectiveness of the app in a couple different dimensions. And we're actually finding for example right now how much coaching is becoming really, really important. I think people especially during the pandemic a lot of atrophy happened in social skills and people feeling comfortable meeting up with people in real life and how to have those interactions. So helping people create their profiles, write their prompts, things like that. So we're, you know, another big thing that came out during the pandemic actually was a more of a focus on voice and adding voice prompts, which I think was again moving where culture goes. So we're always making these kinds of tweaks to continually keep the app fresh.

If you look at the history of this relatively brief history of this industry starting in like the 90s, the big... there's only kind of been one major disruption moment which was 2012, 2013. And so you had the birth of the industry in like the late '90s, '96, '97 where you had Match and eHarmony come on the scene and then they kind of dominated from 1996 to about 2014. And it was actually a much smaller niche industry at the time. It was kind of people that older people used, people who felt like they really struggled to find someone in real life. And then you had the mobile dating apps come on because of a few different technologies that kind of started to come online all together. One was mobile, one was everyone the sort of cultural change of everyone having a social media account. One of it was data processing power and moving away from the world of searching people to a world of a feed of relevant people one after another and that created a pretty big paradigm shift where suddenly technology enabled an entirely new type of experience that it was hard for the old incumbents to mirror. They tried to pivot to mobile but they couldn't sort of unseat themselves from their way of thinking about the world. It's like a very classic disruption problem and we haven't really seen... I think the next opportunity for that kind of disruption is going to be a big technology shift. We haven't seen that up until very recently, right? So, like VR, AR, things like that. I just didn't see like... and not until they're very deeply adopted by 70%, 80% of the population is it really going to be something that people start using for dating. AI, I think, is a very different story. And it's unclear at this point whether it becomes a disruptive force for the current players or whether it becomes more of an evolution because obviously Hinge has a tremendous amount of data we can use to train AI models. We're seeing huge gains in our ability to match people up more thoughtfully given the tools and at the same time it could introduce very new paradigms for dating.

You know, honestly, at the time, we were in a tough position as a company. I'd done the reboot. And we were about a year into that reboot experience and we had not really cracked the code yet. Like there were green shoots there that made me believe and made I would say the trained eye believe that there was really something there. But to VCs they just saw that like oh we were popular and then we tore down our business and we restarted and now we started to rebuild again and there wasn't a lot of juice there. So going with a strategic who could recognize the value of what we were seeing which was massive increases in effectiveness, women coming to the platform at a much higher proportion. They were using other dating apps and so that was very interesting to them and so we received a strategic investment from Match Group that was in 2017 and they bought the rest of the company... that gave them a path to buy the rest of the company which they did at the end of 2018.

It's evolving. You know, there's a brand new CEO, Spencer, who just started and I think he's taking a fresh look at some of that. But you know, up until very recently, the company has and still today really the company operates pretty independently like Hinge. We're in New York. We pretty much have our own space. We have our own product teams, our own engineering teams, our own marketing teams that operate very independently. We share learnings across the platform. We use shared services like accounting and legal and things like that. But for the most part, the company has its own independent culture, has its own independent mission, product road maps, marketing strategies, all of that.

We certainly share learnings, right? Like especially on things that we don't really want to compete on like safety or modernization or things like that. So there's certainly that and there's sharing for safety purposes. That's the main ways that we share.

No.

So, first of all, I'll just say that we don't really think too much about Tinder as Hinge's competition. We think about them in very different psychographic mindsets. Like Hinge, you come because you want to really take your time, be intentional, be thoughtful, find your person. Tinder has been much more casual, younger, like anything can happen kind of mentality. And so that was like a very intentional portfolio strategy decision that Match made back when they acquired us back in 2017, 2018. So no, we don't think about it like that.

It's a bit... yes, from the outside that would make sense. It's a bit nuanced because there's very different brand reputations like people... we like to think of Hinge pretty independently and I think so do our users. So there's no popup in Tinder. It's like maybe it's time to cool it and download Hinge.

That's also been evolving over time. And you know, we've... and we're still relatively, by the way, a small company with about 350 employees. And we moved from, you think about the evolution of Hinge growing from one person to the first like 150 people. Originally, it was very centrally run. And there was a lot of tight, very tight coordination, a lot of direction coming directly from me and my executive team. And then as we started to go beyond 100 people, and I would say a lot of the technology was relatively stable like social, mobile, big data. How do we keep optimizing and iterating around this? And we became a pretty decentralized organization where we had principles around like pushing decision-making down to the lowest levels possible, keeping it really on the front lines. We had pretty independent cross-functional product teams that would work on their individual little missions or surfaces. We kind of oscillated back and forth between that and people felt like they had a lot of autonomy and that was kind of the main ethos of the company. And then I think with AI over the last couple years and feeling like whoa, we really need to make a pretty big shift. Like I said, risk of disruption is high. Very big opportunities to shift the product experience in a new direction. It requires now pulling decision-making back in towards the center a bit and giving a lot clearer strategic direction to the team so that we're all working together in concert towards one thing together because the whole app really has to move together. Different parts of the app have to talk to each other in ways that when we weren't going through much change, it wasn't as essential. That said, we still have very highly cross-functional product teams where product managers sit with a dedicated designer, researcher, data scientist, tech lead to attack very mission-oriented problems.

That's what I mean, surfaces versus missions. Like I think we've sort of gone in different directions. There's never really a clear line one versus the other. Do you own the discover tab where you discover new people or is your job to help people find the right person and then you have to think sort of more cohesively about operating across different surfaces or parts of the app? And now we have kind of... we think about our teams operating less as individual surface units and more as part of a cohesive dating outcomes team where people feel a bit more flexible moving around to different surfaces.

Yeah. I can mess with all the squares is really hard, right?

That's why we have strong kind of director, VP levels who oversee an overall mission like a head of dating outcomes or a head of growth who's coordinating a set of PMs. And we again we ask our PMs their primary identity is as a dating outcomes PM not as a discover PM or a profile PM or something like that. And while day-to-day most of their work may focus on like the profile and identity work, they see themselves as very much operating as part of this team.

Yeah, that's also hugely evolved. I mean, everything I've learned, right, I've learned through doing all the wrong ways first and then eventually getting to the right way. And when you're a founder and you have a small team of 10, 20, 30 people, you're kind of just making decisions by the seat of your pants, like what feels good, what feels right. You're just using your own gut. As we started to get towards 100 people or so, then we started to move towards a world where what I noticed was I would be making different decisions on different days that weren't always consistent. And it was kind of based on my mood that day or whatever data was in front of me or what I just last read or whatever. And I was just finding that I was getting pretty inconsistent. And so what I started trying to do is write down my whole management algorithm. So I started putting it in a Google doc like here's how I make decisions. Here's what I believe is true and I started publishing that to the whole company so everyone could just read it so we would just be very transparent about how we made decisions. It was around that time that I think I read Ray Dalio's book Principles and the idea of just like getting super dialed on like how do we make decisions? What are our principles? What do we believe is true? And then I opened it up for everyone to just comment on. So we would have long debates in the margins of comments, you know, comment margins of a Google doc form to think about everything from our product strategy principles to whether Hinge should have a dress code, like just literally anything, it was all just there so that everyone could debate it. And we had hundreds of principles. And then as the company got even bigger and we got to like 300, 400 people, it was very hard for everyone to... one, you just can't have these endless debates in Google Docs anymore. And also what happened was that the principles started to stabilize. There wasn't as much debate and churn anymore and then it actually became an exercise in distilling down what is the most essential things to communicate about what our culture is. And then I worked a couple years ago to actually write an internal book called 'How We Do Things' which distilled down to like four or five principles, like what are the most fundamental things to understand about how we make decisions here and then individual teams and individual projects will then write their own principles that are more specific to what they're doing at any given time. But we do have and one of our meta principles of our four now is 'decide with principles.' Meaning that we don't want decisions getting made based on some random person's opinion that if tomorrow this person leaves the company, we rehire someone else, they're going to come with a completely different set of ideas about how to do something. We really try to maintain that we define our principles first. We agree on those and then we see how our work maps to those principles. So that is the... and I'm happy to talk about what the other three principles are if you want but that's the kind of framework that we use to make decisions now.

Sure. So the next one is 'love the problem.' Meaning that what I would notice is we would get an inclination around a user problem maybe not even validated 100% then we'd start getting feature ideas and we'd be very attached to a feature and sometimes the feature would even drift and not even be solving the original problem that we were trying to solve. And what I found is that if you spend much more time with the problem really understanding like what's the why behind and the why behind the why. Like what's really going on here? Can we really get deep into our users, into the data, into our user experiences? And if you want to build breakthrough innovation product features and products, you have to go to that level to get insight that just isn't available at the surface and then stay really committed to that problem. And that's what again allows innovation. Like I think a lot of Silicon Valley and other people I notice will kind of the strategy is just to throw feature ideas against a wall and kind of see what sticks and let's see if this works. Oh, it doesn't work. Like throw that out. Let's try something else. When you have a lot of deep conviction around a user problem and you really know you want to solve it, then you have the resilience to try and try again to solve that problem even if your first or second iteration doesn't make it. And so the first, one of the most foundational is 'love the problem.' Like fall in love with the problem. Don't fall in love with the solution and be willing to give up the solution at any given time if it's not solving the core problem that we're trying to solve. So that is 'love the problem.' Next is 'keep it simple' meaning that I think the best solutions are always the most elegant solutions that overall we want to keep the product very simplistic and minimal like our colors are black and white if you look at the Hinge product today it's just like it's very clean it's very simple we're always stripping away features that don't make sense. And there's just recognizing that there's complexity, there's cost of complexity every time you add a feature so even if you add a feature if it's only marginally beneficial. The cost of the complexity and maintenance of maintaining that feature versus the marginal benefit it adds will end up gunking up the app over time and slowing you down over time, which is a hard conversation to have with product managers because they'll work for months on a feature and they'll ship it and they'll be like, 'Yeah, and it didn't harm the user base and we like it and oh, it even moved this metric over here by 2%.' And you're like, well, the cost of complexity is high and so we need to focus on things that are actually going to have major impact.

I haven't heard that before. I don't necessarily think that way, but I do just think in constantly re-evaluating like what's in the app, what needs to stay, and having a high bar for when you build a new feature, does it actually accomplish what we needed to accomplish and is it worth the complexity cost. So that's the third one now and then the fourth, the last one is 'tend to trust.' I just find that like trust is the lifeblood of an organization. You have to do a lot of work to proactively cultivate and tend trust by creating strong interpersonal relationships by creating lots of opportunity for transparency at the...

We have always been very transparent about where the organization is. So much so in fact that we had to make all Hinge employees Match Group insiders so they couldn't trade Match Group stock except during the trading windows because we would be so transparent about where we were, what our financial position was. Like everyone should know that all the way down to any position at the company. So that I think is also that trust building that you create both interpersonally and from the leadership down to the rest of the organization I think is absolutely essential and just saves you a lot of headache when it comes to internal politics and all those types of things.

Certainly the release of like whatever that version of ChatGPT that kind of like sent a shockwave through the world was a pretty big wakeup call. I mean obviously we'd already been using machine learning and things like that in trust and safety and our algorithms and our recommendation algorithms but I think it was the sort of shot across the bow that came from the release of ChatGPT whatever it was 3.0. So that really woke us up to the potential capabilities here and realizing that this could be a major disruptive force in a way that we hadn't seen really since we started Hinge. And it took a bit for us to get our strategy clear about like what our thesis is on how this is going to affect matching and dating in the future. It wasn't immediately apparent, but I think we have a pretty clear thesis now when we started to organize the company around that thesis.

That there's two main vectors that AI is going to impact dating and matchmaking. And it's essentially that I think the big story is it's going to move much closer to the experience of working with a personal matchmaking service and much less an experience of feeling like you are joining a social platform on your own, you know, kind of trying to find your person. So what does that mean? Two big pieces. One is personalized matching and the other is effective coaching. So the personalized matching front is we should be able to move much further beyond the world we are in today which is our users speaking to us in essentially Morse code with their likes and passes trying to communicate to us what they like and what they don't like. The idea that they would be able to speak much more directly to us about like here's what I'm looking for. Here are my values, here's my personality, here are my interests. Us being able to listen to them and their preferences and even integrate things like relationship science to understand what types of people are compatible and what types of people are not long-term compatible and introduce you to a much more curated higher quality less quantity list of people where you have much more trust that if you're introducing me to this person and this is probably someone that I want to go out with. We've already seen big gains, by the way, just by using the power of LLMs to drive more of our recommendation systems using the data we already have. But we just released a new algorithm a couple months ago that increased matches and dates by like 15%. And that's just using the same data. But now we can start to use much more of that unstructured nuance data, people talking to us in their own voices about who they are and what they want that we can use very effectively. So that's the whole personalized matching front. And then there's the effective coaching front which is a lot of our users struggle to get out on that first date and they often don't know why. And I've got, you know, even I have friends that are incredible people and they'll ask me to take a look at their Hinge profile and I'm flabbergasted like this is their attempt at like putting themselves out there. And so we're starting with pretty basic things training a model for example on you know Hinge has these prompts which are short questions designed to get you in a conversation and you put them on your profile and a lot of people write great responses to prompts but a whole lot of people write not so great often just like one-word responses to these prompts that don't work and we found it's just incredibly effective to have trained a model on good prompt responses and give people feedback back to ask them to like can you say more about that here's you know

A little bit more specific and tell a little bit of a story and help you know good answers kind of invite another question back or get a conversation going and so we can give people those nudges so they write good prompts so that they choose good photos. If we notice you know we have a team called Hinge Labs which is always looking at why some people succeed, why some people don't on the app. And some of it is again building product features that help solve those problems. But part of it is just giving guidance and notes to people about how they could be using the product better. And we traditionally have published those in date reports. We publish them to the press. We put them in the help center. But people just for the most part don't read those. But the idea that we could take this body of knowledge we have about how to succeed on Hinge and then look at how our users are using Hinge and then deliver the right piece of advice at the right time to the right user. I think is going to be pretty transformative for a lot of people.

Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about this. I think there's actually quite a clear line between providing a tool that helps people get better at something and then there's a line when it becomes this thing is trying to become your friend. It's trying to pretend like mimic like it has emotions. It's trying to create emotional connection with you. That I think is really playing with fire. I think that we are already in a crisis of loneliness and a loneliness epidemic. And if you look at you know it's a complex issue and it's baked into our culture and it goes back before the internet. But if you look at just since 2000 over the last 20 years, the amount of time that people spend together in real life with their friends has dropped by 70%. Young people and it's been almost completely displaced with the time spent staring at screens. And as a result of that, we've seen massive increases in mental health issues, in people's loneliness, in anxiety, in depression. And I am highly concerned about people who believe, and I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, like most people don't have enough friends, but you know, we're going to give them AI chat bots that believe that AI chatbots can become your friend. I think that's honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is like someone being there to say all the right things to you at the right moment. Having a friend is as much about the most rewarding parts of being in a friendship are being able to be there for someone else to risk and be vulnerable to like actually just share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think that while it will feel good in the moment like junk food basically to experience someone who says all the right things and is available at the right time, it ultimately just like junk food will make people feel over time like less healthy, more drained and will displace human relationships that they should be out cultivating in the real world.

Yeah, I'm starting to think about it very much about taking it head-on. I mean, we want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real human-to-human in real life relationships because I think they are an essential part of the human experience and they're essential to our mental health. It's not just because I run a dating app and you know, obviously it's important that people continue to meet. It really is like a deep personal mission of mine and it's I think it's absolutely critical that someone is out there championing this because it's always easier to race to the bottom of the brain stem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment but leave people worse off. That's the entire model that we've seen from what happened with social media. And I think AI chatbots could be frankly much more dangerous in that respect. So, you know, what we can do is to become more and more effective and help support people more and more to make it as easeful as possible to go out and do the harder thing, which is and the riskier thing, which is to go out and like form real relationships with real people who can let you down, who might not always be there for you. Because it ultimately is a much more nourishing and enriching experience for people and we can also champion and raise awareness as much as we can. I mean that's like why I'm you know another reason why I'm here today talking with you is because I think it's important for people to be putting the counter perspective that we don't just reflexively think AI chat bots can be your friend and not think too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means. And if you think about it, I think about it like analogous to we keep going back to junk food, but like people had to start waking up to the fact that like this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that like drinking Coca-Cola and eating fast food is like detrimental to your health over the long term. And then as people became more aware about that, the whole personal wellness industry started to grow up. And now that's obviously like a huge industry and people spend a lot of time focusing on their diet and nutrition and their mental health and all these other things. And I think similarly we need a like social wellness needs to become a category thinking about not just how do I get this kind of junk social experience of social media where I get fed outrage news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff but I actually start how do I start building a sense of social wellness where I can build enriching intimate connection with important people in my lives.

I'm worried about this. I want to say that I'm worried about this and so it's just not a winning strategy. That said, do people ask advice and little tweaks? They do it today. They ask their friends like how should I respond to this text message or whatever. So in some sense I don't see it that differently because you will have to meet up with this person eventually and show.

That already exists. That's called 'Are you sure?' That's AI driven to make sure that people send in appropriate messages. But yeah again the right nudge at the right time because I think if we build the right tools within Hinge that are appropriate for dating then people will then use it less to like run out to ChatGPT to use it in ways that probably are less appropriate. Nudging people to say hey you guys have been chatting for a bit you know that most people after they exchange this many messages usually just go on and move to a date or hey it seems like the conversation has died. Here's like something interesting that you may not have noticed on their profile that you can ask about. Little things like that. Certainly.

I think there are we're not there yet. We still have a lot of work to do just to get people out to the first date. And at the same time, I do think there's actually a lot of opportunity to help coach people through that experience. How to show up on a first date, what to talk about on a first date, how to build intimacy over time, how to ask about the right things to determine compatibility. So, I think there are definitely opportunities for that. It's not on the 2025 road map, but certainly something I'm thinking about.

We have a very robust trust and safety team that is thinking two three steps ahead about how to mitigate things like that.

There's so many signals when it comes to creating a dating profile from the phone number you use and the email you use, your IP address, all the things like that that we have a very multifaceted way of determining the authenticity of profiles. I'll say that.

We use different models for different things. Sometimes we build them internally completely. Sometimes we're using you know I think it's yeah as you said public that we have a relationship with OpenAI. So it's just we use different things for and are always balancing cost and performance and ability to build in house versus not.

I mean, one, we've seen the cost of the frontier models like just decline precipitously. Which is pretty interesting to watch. But I'll say that like there are models even like the prompt feedback model is like a very very specific and discreet model that we can essentially mostly build kind of internally to understand.

I don't actually know. I think that's in the cloud. I'm almost positive that's in the cloud. That one.

Obviously we have like very very sensitive data that we have very very clear protections around. And we haven't seen anything like that.

No.

No.

Certainly. I think we'll have to handle those things as they come. We're obviously in like a very uncertain time right now. But I will say that like primarily we are a platform about creating intimate one-to-one connection and so and that's people's very private lives where they should be able to express themselves in the way that they see fit and describe themselves and their own sexuality and their own gender and the way that they need to do that. And I view that as absolutely sacred and fundamental to our mission. And people feeling safe to do that is absolutely critical. So those would be our very highest priorities and I also imagine not top priority relative to social media. People are posting and blasting thousands millions of people with ideas like this is just that our platform is not about one to many posting and conversation. It's about intimate one-to-one connection and one-to-one conversations.

It's certainly not. Yeah, we're 18 plus and we have our own age verification methods, but yeah, we've been pushing for these platforms to do age verification themselves because they have even more robust ways to do it.

I am not, you know, I'm staying much closer to the product development and where we're going with AI right now than I am to that.

I don't know if it changes the dynamics but it's certainly going to having more flexibility and giving users options to be able to pay different ways I think is good for everybody for sure.

We have not.

Yes.

Certainly by the end of the year.

These are things that we're figuring out, but most likely Hinge.

I think it changes the equation on many fronts, right? Like it allows us to invest more in the company. It changes how we would price. So no, I think it could result in lower prices. It could result in more investment in the company or it could result in more margin. It's probably a combination of all three of those.

There has been back and forth and appeals and stays and things like that. I think just a couple days ago the appeal was denied. So I think that made it pretty real.

Certainly the day that the original ruling came out, we started to plan.

I mean just like anything else at Hinge, I think that we stay grounded in our principles. We look at the big picture. We look at the teams and the road maps and the things they're focused on right now and we think like does this new information change like and as we look at our growth team does it make sense to build the next monetization or expansion feature? Does it make sense to pivot resources over to this thing? And given as you said the 15 to 30% gain that's on the table it's pretty high priority.

A whole new industry I think will emerge. Well, not an industry, but certainly a suite of services will emerge around this to allow people to manage subscription payments, cancellations, like, you know, it's certainly nuanced.

I mean when you stack the credit card payment processing fees on top of the sort of fees around customer service and all the sort of nuance of managing those but I do think it comes down to like the 5 to 10% range.

I think we're very very focused on innovating for the future. Like I said it changes the equation. So it's on all three fronts. It's lower prices, it's higher margin and it's more investment in the company. And but it certainly gives us major opportunities to invest in the core product experience at a time when there's massive disruption. So it's a particularly critical time to be doing that.

Yeah, I'm thinking about it right now and you know I think we overuse the form factor of our mobile devices right now for all kinds of things that it doesn't need to be used for and I think a lot of those will be siphoned off into some other form factor especially I think audio and voice is going to be a very big piece of it. But I don't think that means that the form factor completely goes away. There are things that you need visual cues and references for where our screen is still going to be the dominant form factor and at least a piece of the dating equation is going to be that for sure.

No, I don't really think so. Like I think there are much better

I think in a very like abstractive reductive way you could say that but like that's not really what's happening like we are not trying to we're not simulating dates I think it's like a very expensive and inefficient way to do something that actually is much more straightforward.

Yeah I just think that that's a bit of a red herring for you know trying to map someone's psyche and guess how they're going to be and then judge how the date that adds a lot of complexity when actually you can just talk to people very very directly about who they are and what they're looking for and what matters to them and compare that against someone else and what they describe and actually make a lot of good connections and clear understandings to figure out who should match with who.

It really is the evolution of the product. Like I think that the shift to AI is going to be bigger than the shift to mobile for the industry. I think that we're going to be able to do things that, you know, if you think big picture about what mobile did, it just made the process more approachable, faster, more fun, easier, more approachable, but it was still the same fundamental experience of just, you know, trying like cruising for people, trying to find someone that, you know, based on very limited information, matching with them, trying to figure it out, going on a date, realizing this is not your person, trying to find the next date, moving to much closer to a world of really deep understanding of compatibility, being able to zero people in on the right person very quickly. It's going to be a very transformative experience that I think is going to very much change people's understanding and perception of the industry. So, I'm really looking forward to the next couple years because I think that we will see more change than we've seen ever in the industry before.

Yeah. Thank you.