Grindr built a wildly successful dating app. Will its push into AI finally get Wall Street’s attention?

Wall Street has a hard time understanding Grindr, a gay dating and hookup app whose yellow mask icon and distinct notification sound is like a Bat-Signal in the gay community. 

Grindr is perhaps best known on the Street for performing better than its publicly traded peers. Match Group — which owns Tinder and Hinge — and Bumble are both down flat in the past year, while Grindr is up nearly 30% during the same period. 

“Most investors don’t use our product at all,” said George Arison, CEO of Grindr. “We are very big in a certain set of users, but everybody else does not know our product at all.”

Arison sees his app as a distribution engine for other business opportunities, with a vision for Grindr that is something like what Tesla is today. Grindr recently launched a telehealth platform, Woodwork, that offers erectile dysfunction medications, and the company has more ideas in the pipeline.  

It’s also developing AI-powered features, like Wingman, and is integrating machine learning into its internal operations, with about 20% of code written at the company now being automated. I sat down with Arison to talk about how he’s turned around the company since joining in 2022 and where he sees Grindr going in the future. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sherwood News: Grindr recently reported earnings, which showed revenue and profits up year over year, yet the stock is down from its peak in June. How would you describe where the company is right now, and do you think there’s something Wall Street is missing?

George Arison: I can’t really judge what the Street is going to do; it’s not up to me. But what I do know is that in the long term, usually the market is pretty accurate in how it evaluates companies. So I’m very focused on the long term and I think things are going to be great because our results for the year are going to be great, and that’s based on what we reported a week ago.

I really try to not pay too much attention to what happens with the stock day in and day out, because that’s not very helpful for anybody. I try to tell my team the same thing. 

Sherwood: You’re working on some AI-powered products like Wingman and A-List. At the same time, you read a lot about people being turned off by the idea of inserting AI into aspects of their life that are more personal. How are your products different?

Arison: First, anything we do with AI, as with any other product, people need to opt in. I’m not going to force them into that product. So I have no worries about that, and I do think we overdo it on that compared to most other companies because our users do have privacy concerns for understandable reasons, given the kind of data that we have, so we take that very seriously. 

I tend to not pay too much attention to commentary and I pay a lot of attention to what actually happens with products out there, and the reality is that Anthropic and OpenAI are some of the fastest-growing technologies that have ever been launched in human history, which would imply that hundreds of millions of people very much want to use these technologies. 

They’re stand-alone products. I don’t think anyone but a very few set of companies have done a very good job integrating AI into the product itself. X has done a very good job on that. 

I think that people will be very excited about what we’re doing, but again, I totally understand that it will not be for everybody. Over time, we’ll see how valuable it is to use it or not. If we create things of value, that’ll be really good, but we won’t know if it’s of value or not unless we try first and see how it goes. 

If you had asked people in 2005 to describe their ideal phone, the chances are the iPhone would not be that phone, right? Because most people could not conceive that you could do things that the iPhone started doing in 2007 in the way that it was. It was science fiction. 

I don’t think we can fairly ask people to project what AI can do because they don’t know what AI can do — and neither do I. The best way we’ll know is by trying it, putting it out there, seeing how users use it, and going from there.

Sherwood: Can you tell me a bit about your timeline for rolling those features out and also how and when you see that translating into more revenue?  

Arison: We’ve rolled out A-List to a portion of our Unlimited user base already and it’s been with them for a long time, and I think feedback on it is actually very positive.

The next big feature is going to be around Discover Tab, which is an area where you’ll be able to discover new users and new people that you don’t normally see on Grindr because they’re in areas outside of where you live. They’ll be recommended based on our own recommendation engine that we’re building.

Thirdly, a product that we’re calling “insights” — that might not be the brand name; the branding will come later — will tell you things about users that are not obvious from that profile, but that we can deduce. And again, only available to people who opt in to this.

The timeline would be that we want to have all three of these in some form of beta out to the market this year. As far as how to think about monetization: I don’t think of each specific product and how much money it makes.

With a la cartes, you can see how much a specific feature made, but a lot of the other stuff we’re building is meant to make the product a lot better and, hopefully as a result of that, one of two things happens, or ideally both: more people choose to pay for Grindr, or people who pay for Grindr today are willing to pay more for it. 

The way we are envisioning it is a little bit similar to what Duolingo has done over the last couple years: exploring creating a new tier that it will be higher priced than a tier that we have today at $40, and really offering up a lot of our AI features and functionality in that premium tier. That’s the kind of broad vision of what we’re aiming for in 2026 and that is only possible because of the AI features that we’re building. 

Sherwood: Earlier this year, you went from using Ex-Human to Anthropic’s Claude and Amazon’s Bedrock to power these products. Can you tell me a bit about how that came to be and also how it’s affected the product? 

Arison: We wanted to be able to use a model that we could control as quickly as possible in deploying AI. And at the time when we were working on this in mid-2023, you could not use large language model companies’ models in a privacy-first way, the way we would have wanted to. So putting the model in our code base made the most sense, and that’s what Ex-Human allowed us to do.

That was a great way to get started and we gained time on that, because we don’t have the luxury of setting things to people’s APIs and then not knowing what happens to the data. Over time, Bedrock became much more effective in terms of protecting privacy. And the specific thing that we need to do is just ensure that our data is in no way used by somebody else for their own purposes, because our users expect that from us.

Anthropic made sense because it was easiest to get going on Bedrock quickly, but over time we added other models to our back end and we’re using more than one model for everything we’re doing today, including some Llama models. Just recently, we deployed a new, open-source model for some other internal projects, and the quality of what it’s producing is actually way higher than anything we’ve done so far. 

I think being multi-model and being multi-cloud is actually really critical for what we’re doing because with these models, there’s going to be no one winner in the near term — they’re all going to be competing with each other constantly. And to ensure that we have the best user experience, we need to be able to move between them.

Sherwood: You’re building a suite of products on Grindr leveraging the audience already on the platform. I wrote about one of them, Woodwork. You described Woodwork as a startup within Grindr. How does that make it different from a typical product launch or new subsidiary?

Arison: Our strategy is to make the core experience a lot better by investing in many intention-based use cases. The second pillar is to use AI to make the experience a lot better in the core business and also in transforming how Grindr works day to day. Thirdly, we’re building out a half dozen or so businesses that are tangential to Grindr, oftentimes services or products that they already do buy and use from other companies.

We laid out three buckets of space where we could go after things: health and wellness, travel and luxury experiences, and local discovery. And we’re going to pursue business ideas in all three of those buckets as well as some others. Woodwork is the first one in that bucket of things that we’re going after, and is meant to serve as the health and wellness platform on which we will build many other things.

We started out with ED medications because we felt that was very directly connected to Grindr and made a ton of sense as the first one to do. But it’s not going to be limited just to Woodwork.

I’m a very lean operator. I aim to have very lean operations around me, because I think those are the fastest-moving operations. They don’t get slowed down by bureaucracy and by people not having the drive to work very hard. So there’s a bit of a hardcore nature to how I expect people to work. Not quite as hardcore as Elon Musk — I can’t try to do even near that level, but in that vein of operations.

I don’t want people to be talking about, “Hey, I’m going to do this massive balance between my work and my life, and at 5 o’clock I’m done and I’m not thinking about work anymore.” That is not a viable way to function in a fast-growing business. I think it’s really important to be integrating work and life together and being very flexible for people’s needs, but we don’t shut off at 5 o’clock and never open a computer at night. That’s just not how the team works. 

We want to extend that to this startup, as well. That’s how most startups work. So my big push for our new business initiative opportunities has been for people to very much be constrained in how many people are working on that and not have a hope that the parent company will rescue them. You have to stand on your own two feet as a startup would. A startup gets a certain amount of finite time to prove things out based on how much capital they raise. That creates drive and entrepreneurship, and that’s why startups tend to become successful. So that’s the culture I need our startups within Grindr to have. 

Sherwood: Do you think that comes at a sacrifice? I know Woodwork is only available in a few markets.

Arison: When you’re testing and learning, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed that might get hidden because the total number of signups looks really high or revenue looks really high, but that’s only because you’re exposing it to a huge number of people and your conversion funnel is not really good, as one example.

But a startup would never be able to do that because it has to buy ads to have any conversion funnel, and it couldn’t afford to buy ads at scale. So I want them to go and figure out their unit economics, and I want them to have by far the best conversion funnel, etc., and that is a big reason why we are pushing them in that direction.

I was very, very clear in announcing Woodwork to not expect any updates for many quarters on purpose, because we want to give that team the time, as a startup would, to not have to operate in the public eye. So it’s by no means that we are de-emphasizing it. We are actually really happy with how things are going, but we’re not going to be talking about it until we are ready because we want that team to have the space and the drive to be very successful at execution, like a startup would be, and deliver results that are good for users and shareholders.

Sherwood: Touching on your expectations of workers at Grindr, there was also some tension a couple years ago among some workers regarding the return to office, which led to some turnover. You just described the kind of the culture you’re trying to set there. Do you believe you’ve achieved it or that you’re on your way there?

Arison: A culture is always a work in progress. I don’t think any company is ever “done” with its culture. 

In 2023, when we started to come back to the office and told people that we would be doing that, there were folks here who didn’t want to make the change and thought that they could basically force us to go back on that change, and I think they didn’t appreciate the resolve that we had in ensuring that we execute on what is best for the business and ensure that we have the level of productivity that we want to have. 

What I do know is that our productivity has jumped massively over the last two years. There’s no perfect measure of productivity, but the things that we do measure have improved dramatically. Does that mean there’s not a lot more improvement available to us? Of course there is. And none of that actually counts any of the AI productivity that we’ll see over time as well, with people being able to utilize AI synthetics a lot more in their day-to-day work. 

I think we’ve made a lot of really good progress in building the culture that we want and that our users and our shareholders should expect from us, which is a very hard charging, very productive culture where performance and execution are paramount. 

We have a really audacious mission here, which is to be the global gayborhood. At the same time, you have this incredible opportunity where if the business is successful, you dramatically and positively impact people’s lives every day. Whether it’s because you enable two people to meet each other for the first time and build their relationship, or because through our support and our pressure we can drive change, like getting gay marriage to be recognized somewhere in the place where it wasn’t, or drive decriminalization of being gay in a place in the world where it wasn’t allowed before, or working with the US government to ensure that we continue to maintain HIV preventative or treatment funding around the world.

It’s a very big mission, and our business success can very directly intertwine with that mission. So people who come here need to be really bought into that, and want to really go after it and make this business be really successful so we can do more to advance the mission that we have. 

We’re one of the highest revenue-per-employee public companies in the world, and that’s something that we should be very, very proud of and be able to maintain that ratio. It was not a ratio I was actually thinking of tracking at all when I got here, but it’s just the reality of it. 

Sherwood: What are some other things you didn’t expect to run into when you started?

Arison: I did not expect the culture to be what it was when I got here.

The company was being prepared to go public, so I thought that we’d have more of a set of expectations laid out for people in terms of what is expected of a public company and a public team versus not. So that was one really big change that we had to go through. 

I also did not expect that there wouldn’t be as much desire as I thought we’d have in people wanting to use AI in their day-to-day work. That was surprising to me because I came from startups where when new stuff comes out, people really jump on it and get really excited. That is not where we were. And we have had to transform that very dramatically, and now the team’s actually really psyched about AI tools and AI capabilities.

About 20% of the code that we’re writing now is written by AI, we had our first fully AI-written PD that happened this week, which was really exciting. So I think we are doing really well in that, but it did take a significant amount of work to change. 

Sherwood: What companies, either public or private, have stood out to you recently? Who is doing something you find really interesting?

Arison: I think that what Brian Armstrong was able to do at Coinbase — and I’m not a massive crypto guy myself, to be honest — is pretty incredible because it’s very much a mission-driven business, but it’s also very focused on being a business-first mission-driven business and has been able to maintain extremely strong productivity performance through very difficult times. That is incredible to watch and very impressive. Frankly, a lot of what I’m trying to do at Grindr is very similar to what happened there, because we are in a very similar way a very mission-driven company, but business-first. 

Our culture will not be the Coinbase culture by any means. There are going to be pretty significant differences between them for many reasons, including just the kind of user base that we serve. But I think the broad approach is very, very similar, and I really admire that. So I think that’s been really very effective to watch and see what happens. 

I think Duolingo and Robinhood have been able to communicate with the Street really well about what they’re doing, and over time, you’ve seen the Street respond in a very positive way.

Now, they’ve been public longer than us and I think their products are easier for investors to understand. Most investors don’t use our product at all. We are very big in a certain set of users, but everybody else does not know our product at all. 

A lot of what we’re doing is trying to do something very, very similar in that sense: getting people to understand our business, how technology-forward our business is, and what impact that’s going to have on the bottom line eventually, and on the user base, in terms of positive value. 

And — for whatever you think of him, his strengths and weaknesses — I think Elon Musk is among the most important entrepreneurs in human history, if not the most successful and important entrepreneur in human history. I think the way he’s able to go from zero to as successful as Grok is today is pretty incredible. I always admire watching that and learning from that. I will never be anywhere near as good as he is at that, but if I can be 10% as good, I think a lot of people will really benefit, including all our shareholders.