Hinge CEO Justin McLeod says dating AI chatbots is 'playing with fire'
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Hello, and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Hinge, co-founder and CEO Justin McLeod. Hinge is one of the biggest dating apps in the United States. It's rivaled only by Tinder, and both are owned by the massive conglomerate Match Group, which has consolidated a huge chunk of the online dating ecosystem.

Fair warning here, I've never actually used a dating app. The algorithm that matched my wife to me was the university housing lottery that put us in adjacent dorm rooms in the fall of 2000. And my wife is now a divorce lawyer, so playing around with these apps, even for research, seems a little bit risky. So I always end up approaching conversations about dating and dating apps at a little bit of a remove. And actually, I asked Justin what it's like to be the married CEO of a dating app company who doesn't use his own product anymore.

Especially as Justin's own personal romantic journey is very intertwined with Hinge. The entire idea for the company and how it's evolved over the years has a connection to Justin's personal life and his decision to reconnect with his college girlfriend just a month before she was to marry someone else.

It's a wild story. In fact, it's such a good story that it was turned into an episode of Netflix's Modern Love. You'll hear Justin talk about that experience and how it's connected to his vision for what Hinge is really for and the company's values and culture, and how all of that is geared towards helping people find lasting connections. Hinge bills itself as, quote, the app that's designed to be deleted, an idea that's in deep tension with how mobile apps and services traditionally grow users and revenue.

Of course, Justin and I also talked about AI. Hinge, as part of Match Group, is using AI both internally and within its product, just as Tinder and other competitors are. There's AI coaching features to help you improve your profile, pick better photos, and even catch inappropriate messages before they get sent.

But pull the string on all these ideas and you get to a place where people might be talking to AI all the time, even falling in love with it. Or having AIs date each other before meeting in person. Justin has some pretty strong feelings here about the importance of real human connection and encouraging people to put their phones down and go out on dates in the real world. Justin also called the idea of AI companionship "playing with fire" and compared those kinds of relationships to junk food.

There's a lot more in this conversation. We also talked about the Trump administration and how seriously Hinge is taking the data privacy of its users during an unprecedented crackdown on queer rights. We also talked briefly about Apple and the App Store and what happens now that companies like Epic Games and Match Group are free to send people to the web to process in-app transactions. Hinge has some plans here. You'll hear Justin talk about them near the end. It's a little bit of a scoop. There's a lot going on in this one. You might even fall in love. All right, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Here we go.

Justin McLeod, you're the founder and CEO of Hinge. Welcome to Decoder. Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk to you. I got to tell you, this is one where I kind of feel like Jane Goodall or a sociologist of some kind. Like I'm old. I'm married to a divorce lawyer. I can't even download this app. It's like too risky.

You know? So, like, I'm watching through the looking glass here a little bit. I asked my younger staff for their Hinge feature requests. Don't worry, I got a million of those. Great. Excited to hear those. Like, when TaskRabbit's on, I'm like, I booked a TaskRabbit. This is, like, very different. When was the last time you actually used Hinge as a user? Over a decade ago. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

What's that like? What's that like trying to run this team? Is it all just data-driven for you? Because there's a real element of dogfooding here. Yes, definitely. We have a lot of single people on our team at Hinge, so there's a lot of internal dogfooding for sure and a lot of opinions. Yeah, the relationship is different. So I started the company in 2011. 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 years.

married and kids. Did you get back together on Hinge? No, 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 she was about to get married to someone else. She was living in Switzerland. I flew over a month before the wedding. She called off her wedding and moved back to New York. Led to the whole reboot of Hinge. The whole story is very interconnected. You can...

I feel like I should throw my questions. Yeah, we should just do an episode of Call Her Daddy right now or something. That sounds very complicated. It's been a ride. And an incredible ride. And very intertwined with Hinch. But...

Back to your question, 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 request that would matter to me and not to the whole population. So it's evolved. It's more about helping others than it is about helping myself, which was probably the original idea of Hinge. How do you think about...

The connection between what the data is telling you, the data about what Gen Z daters are doing versus millennial daters, which is the cohort you started with, versus the very emotional experiences people have on this platform that are sort of out of your control, right? Yeah.

Eventually, you just – you got to take the meat sack to the bar and look at the other person and not fuck it up, right? And like Hinge can't solve that problem, but that's like the heart of the whole enterprise. How do you connect those two in your brain? 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 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 is it comes down to the people on the platform. And so what we're trying to do is obviously 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. That's definitely the art and the nuance of trying to build products.

dating app like we've built it. One of my big criticisms of social media apps generally right now in 2025 is that they've all become marketing platforms in some way. Yeah. At the end of the rainbow, Mr. Beast is trying to sell you an energy bar like that. That's what they're for. And, you know, smaller creators are trying to get their first brand deals or whatever it is. But there's a real organization around just marketing. And the platform is trying to encourage people to create content for a whole number of reasons.

But the reason for being is advertising spend and then a lot of the content creation on the platform happens for marketing purposes. You can just see it how it goes. Hinge and other dating apps are kind of different, right? You're trying to incentivize content creation. You're trying to get people to talk about themselves, talk to each other.

And the goal is kind of to market yourself. Like, how do you divorce that from the actual thing you're trying to do, which is have people, like, fall in love and into stable relationships? 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, and 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 are.

of that is they're 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. 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're looking at social media and they're like, "What's your daily over monthly? How much people are time spending an app? How many sessions per day?" We were 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, right? 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

of Hinge because a lot of the other apps in the industry were based on that, based on engagement and retention and just getting people back and there were more entertainment platforms and Hinge became a utility. And we started growing through word of mouth and

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.

The interesting thing about that business model, it's in the tagline of the company. I always laugh when you all put out a press release because it says, here's the app designed to be deleted. And then there's a little trademark logo every time you say it, which is just very funny. I appreciate that you have to do it, but it just makes me laugh every time. That sort of means you're trying to graduate users, right? You're a utility. You pay until you're done, and then you're out. Yeah, precisely. And that means you constantly have to find new users. Like, you have a different –

kind of churn problem, basically. How do you think about that lifecycle? Yeah, we think about it in terms of good churn. We want people churning off the app for the right reason. We don't want people churning 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. What does it mean to find somebody on Hinge? Like you're married, you've gone on three dates? It's different for different people. When we did the reboot, our core market was definitely like 25 to 35 and very much people who were, I would say, looking to

find their person and get off the app for most people. 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 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

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

like 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. But there's a difference between get off the app and go on great dates and delete this thing.

Right. Forever. Yes. There's some exit ramp that's like very different than the other exit ramp. Not to keep comparing it to social media, but again, I feel like I'm just like viewing this from the outside. So it's all matter of course for me.

You know, Mark Zuckerberg is terrified that young audience will just abandon his core – whatever the core social media dynamic is of the time. This is why he bought Instagram. You can read his emails over the course of these trials. He's like, there's another mechanic. I need to buy it before they overtake us. And he keeps going down the line, whether that's stories or reels or whatever the next thing is. You have the same problem, only you don't get to keep the old users on the old mechanic, right? You don't get to run Facebook and buy Instagram. Right.

How do you think about reinventing the app for that new, younger cohort that has different dynamics on the internet? 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 like a legacy user base. So we have to stay on top of culture where it's going, continually evolving the app, whether it is...

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 another big thing that came out during the pandemic actually was 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. Do you feel the same sort of existential pressure? The idea that some cohort of people will delete the app, right? The old millennials will be married or tired or whatever it is they're going to do, and you've got to go get a bunch of new Gen Z users or Gen Alpha users, which is frankly terrifying. How do you think about, okay, we've got to break the old model because it's existential for us if we don't capture the younger user? Or is it more of a gradation?

If you look at the history of this, relatively brief history of this industry starting in like the 90s, 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 niece 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

A few different technologies started to come online altogether. One was mobile, one was everyone, the 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 unseat themselves from their way of thinking about the world. It's a very classic disruption problem. 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 VR, AR, things like that, I just didn't see, 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.

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 a more of an evolution. 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. We have to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

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We're back with Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Before the break, we were discussing the ways a dating app like Hinge is and is not like a traditional social network, and the different kinds of pressures that exist for those kinds of products. But now, I wanted to dig into the decoder questions with Justin. In particular, I wanted to know what it's like being owned by the same parent company as Tinder.

I want to talk about AI with you, but you mentioned Match. So I think this is a good time to talk about the decoder questions. You're part of Match Group. You sold to Match Group. Match Group owns all of the dating apps, minus one, which is a little contentious. They don't own Bumble. There's a lawsuit. We can set that aside.

What's it like being part of MatchCrip? You sold your company. What was that decision like for you? 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. 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. 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 than 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 and that gave them a path to buy the rest of the company, which they did at the end of 2018. What's that structure like inside of Match Group now? It's evolving. There's a brand new CEO, Spencer, who just started. I think he's taking a fresh look at some of that. But...

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 roadmaps, marketing strategies, all of that. You said you shared some central services like accounting and finance. Is there any product or data that you're sharing?

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. There's sharing for safety purposes. That's the main ways that we share. So if you're like a young and carefree single on Tinder and you graduate to Hinge, you don't get to just bring your date along for the ride? No. No.

Again, I'm just looking from the outside. Tinder is interesting, right? The CEO of Tinder just stepped down. Your new CEO at Match, Spencer, stepped in to run Tinder for a minute. In any normal circumstance, you would be on the attack, right? If Tinder wasn't part of the same company as you, this would be a moment to say, OK, there's some strategic weakness over there. We're going to go get them. We're going to put the screws. Are you allowed to do that inside a match group?

So first of all, I'll just say that we don't really think too much about Tinder as the hinges 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. I mean, that's why I asked about the data and the lifecycle question, right? There's a time in your life where you might use Cinder. There's a time in your life where you might use Hinge. It seems from the overall umbrella company perspective, you want to move that user around your family of apps. But it doesn't seem like that is actually happening at the top level. Yes. From the outside, that would make sense. It's a bit nuanced because there's very different brand reputations there.

We like to think of Hinge pretty independently, and I think so do our users. So there's no pop-up in Tinder that's like, maybe it's time to cool it and download Hinge? There's not. Okay, feature request for you. What's your org chart like? How is Hinge structured?

That's also been evolving over time. And we're still relatively, by the way, a small company with about 350 employees. And we moved from, if I think about the evolution of Hinge growing from one person to the first 100, 150 people, originally it was very centrally run. There was a lot of 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.

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. People were felt like, you know, autonomous, like feeling like they had a lot of autonomy and a lot of was kind of the main ethos of the company.

And then I think with AI over the last couple of years and feeling like, whoa, like 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, you know,

Product managers sit with dedicated designer, researcher, data scientist, tech lead to attack very mission-oriented problems. And when you said services and missions, is that expressed as just the tabs at the bottom of the app? Is that how it's broken down, or is it actual user journey missions?

That's what I mean, surfaces versus missions. 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...

We think about our teams operating less as individual service units and more as part of a cohesive dating outcomes team where people feel a bit more flexible moving around to different services. How do you think about assigning product managers to those teams? Because product managers, at least in my experience, they're like, I own this square and I will mess with this square to make this number go up as much as I can. But I can mess with all the squares. It's really hard, right? Yeah.

Yes. 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 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. That feels like something you evolved to. You're also a relatively young founder. I think you founded right out of Harvard Business School.

How has your decision-making framework evolved? How do you make decisions? That's also hugely evolved. I mean, everything I've learned, right, I've learned through doing all the wrong ways first and eventually getting to the right way. 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, 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.

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. Literally anything. It was all just there so that everyone could debate it. And

And we had hundreds of principals. And then as the company got even bigger and we got to like 300, 400 people, it's very hard for everyone to... One, you just can't have these endless debates in Google and Google Docs anymore. And also what happened was the principal 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? Then I worked a couple of years ago to actually write an internal book called How We Do Things, which distilled down to four or five principles.

like what are like 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 like 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 like we don't want decisions getting made based on some random person's opinion that if tomorrow this person leaves the company and 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. Yeah, talk about them a little bit. There's a beautiful website. We'll link to it. It has scrollytelling. It's well done, but tell people what the other three principles are. The next one is love the problem, meaning that you

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 what's the why behind the why behind the why, 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 and try again to solve that problem, even if your first or second iteration doesn't make it. And so one of the most foundational is love the problem. 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...

that there's complexity, there's like 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 it like we like it and you know oh it even moved this metric over here by two percent and you're like well you know the cost of complexity is high and so like that's we need to we need to focus on things that are actually going to have major impact are you all the way at you know two features out for every feature in do you think about it that way i know some founders do

I haven't heard that before. I don't necessarily think that way, but I do just think in constantly reevaluating 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 need it 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 organization. Like we have always been very, very transparent about where the organization is. So much so, in fact, that we had to make all Hinge employees transparent.

match group insiders so they couldn't trade match group stock except in trading windows because we would be so transparent about where we were, what our financial position was. Everyone should know that all the way down to any position at the company. So that trust building that you create both interpersonally and from 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. Let's put this into practice. You obviously made a big decision to refocus on AI. How did that come about? Did you wake up one day and say, oh boy, it's happening? Match Group put out a press release with OpenAI saying, we're going to work together. Did you read that and say, I've got to figure this out? How did this come about? Certainly the release of whatever that version of ChatGPT that sent Shockwave through the world was a pretty big wake-up call. Obviously, we'd already been using

machine learning and things like that, interest in safety, no recommendation algorithms. But I think it was the sort of shot across the bow that came from the release of the, of chat GPTs, whatever it was, 3.0, that really woke us up to the, to the potential capabilities here and realizing that like,

this could be a major disruptive force in a way that we hadn't seen really since we started Hinge. It took a bit for us to get our strategy clear about 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. We started to organize the company around that thesis. What's the thesis? That there's two main vectors that AI is going to impact dating and matchmaking. And it's essentially, 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, kind of trying to find your person. Yeah.

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, then 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%.

That's just using the same data. But now we can start to use much more of that unstructured, nuanced 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...

I have friends that are incredible people and they'll ask me to take a look at their Hinge profile and I'm flabbergasted. This is their attempt at putting themselves out there. So we're starting with pretty basic things. Hinge has these prompts, which are short questions designed to get you in a conversation.

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

to ask them to, it's mostly like, can you say more about that? Yeah, don't just put no in those fields. Yeah, and be a little bit more specific and tell a little bit of a story and help 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, we have a team called Hinge Labs, which is always looking at why some people succeed, why some people don't on the app.

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 can be using the product better. And we...

Traditionally, I 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. There's a pretty fine line between that

And what I see lots of people doing all day long already, which is just talking to ChatGPT, just hanging out. We have the CEO of Replica on the show, Eugenia. She was like, my plan is people are going to date AI bots. That will coach them up into being fully formed people and then we'll release them into the dating pool and they will have confidence and self-assuredness.

Again, a fine line between we're prompting them and coaching them inside of Hinge and we're coaching them a different way in a more self-contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on virtual girlfriend inside of Hinge? 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 or do something and then there's a line when it becomes...

this thing is trying to become your friend. It's trying to 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, 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 and people's loneliness and anxiety and depression.

I think Mark Zuckerberg was just quoted about this, like most people don't have enough friends, but we're going to give them AI chatbots that believe that AI chatbots can become your friend. I think that's honestly an extraordinarily reductive view of what a friendship is, is like someone being there to say all the right things to you at the right moment. 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. - How do you compete with that? Because that is the other thing that is happening. It is happening, whether it's good or bad.

And you've got a – Hinge is – you're offering a harder path. And so you say like we've got to get people out on dates. Like I honestly wonder based on the younger folks I know, sometimes they're just like, I just want to leave the house. Like I'd rather just talk to this computer, right? Like I have too much social pressure just leaving the house in this way. That's what Hinge is promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are you marketing that directly? I'm starting to think about it very much about taking it head on. I mean we want to continue at Hinge to champion –

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 our

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 brainstem 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 yeah,

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 to, and the riskier thing, which is to go out and like, uh, form real relationships with real people who can let you down. It may 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 chatbots can be your friend and not think too deeply about what that really implies and what that really means. 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 people, as people became more aware about that, a 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 other types of, 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 outraged news and celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but I actually start focusing.

How do I start building a sense of social wellness where I can build enriching, intimate connection with important people in my lives? We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back. Support for Decoder comes from .techdomains. When you're creating a startup, you spend a long time crafting a brand name and image. But unfortunately, when it's finally time to launch, you can end up with a domain name that's pretty meh.

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We're back with Hinge CEO Justin McLeod. Before the break, we were discussing the role AI is now playing in dating apps and what that role might look like in the future as more people turn to chatbots for companionship. Now I wanted to ask Justin about some of the ways AI might be misused in online dating and what plans Hinge has to stop it. The connection between the wellness industry and the rise of social media is a whole other podcast and maybe a PhD thesis.

There's a whole lot there to unpack. I take your point though, right? That maybe using our phones in healthier ways is the future. It will make us better and that will be a reaction to the negativity that we see from phones today. Literally as we speak, I'm sure Elon Musk and Donald Trump are continuing to tweet at each other in an unhealthy way or maybe the future of the entire planet. But you've got to use AI today, right? You have prompt feedback running in the app today. You're helping people pick better photos today.

The flip side of that is, well, they might just use AI to generate the content. Can you detect it if your prompt feedback says, hey, that's not a good answer, and someone runs away to Gemini or ChatGPT and comes up with a better answer that doesn't actually reflect them? I think about this kind of like extreme photo filters, which used to be popular in Instagram back in the day, which is that

Ultimately, you are going to have to go meet up with this person on a real date. And so you want yourself to come through as best that it can because obviously you're not going to bring ChatGBT on your date with you. I'm worried about this. I want to say that I'm worried about this. And it's not a winning...

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 up as the real you. Would you add that kind of feedback inside of HandChanger, obviously, as messaging features? Were you going to add a little coach into the messaging feature to say, hey...

- Don't be a dick. - Well, that already exists. That's called are you sure? That's AI driven to make sure that people send inappropriate 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 run out to chat GPT to use it in ways that probably are less appropriate. Nudging people to say, hey, you guys have been chatting for a bit. Did 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 something interesting that you may not have noticed on their profile that you can ask about. Little things like that, certainly. MARK MANDEL: One of the interesting dynamics here is you'll add more and more AI to the digital experience people have with each other to make them perform better or act better or be more interesting, whatever it is. And then they'll go on a date. And then they might leave your platform, right? They might switch to iMessage or call each other on the phone. I don't think Gen Z is calling each other on the phone. They'll do something else. They'll go on Discord.

How do you bring that experience along for the ride to say, we're going to continue to stay here and help mediate you and coach you through this relationship? 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 roadmap, but certainly something I'm thinking about. Do you worry that people are going to just upload like full AI avatars on the hinge and catfish each other to death?

We have a very robust trust and safety team that is thinking two, three steps ahead about how to mitigate things like that. I have spent too much time talking about watermarks and AI and SynthID. There's lots of episodes of the show that are deep in the AI watermarks game. And it has effectively come to nothing so far. There's just a lot of problems there. Are you in it to say, okay, we can detect a full AI photo here?

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 those things like that, that we have a very multifaceted way of determining the authenticity of profiles. I'll say that.

Running these models is costly. There's lots and lots of different kinds of models you can run at different costs. Are you using lots of models? Are you sending everything to GPT-4? How does this work for you? We use different models for different things. Sometimes we build them internally completely. As you said, Public, that we have a relationship with OpenAI. It's just we use different things and are always balancing cost and performance and ability to build in-house versus not.

Do you see that trend shifting over time? I'm very curious about what the frontier models can do versus what the cheaper, more efficient models can do. Have you seen that shift over time as you've started to deploy these tools? In one, we've seen the cost of the frontier models just decline precipitously.

which is pretty interesting to watch. But I'll say that there are models, even the prompt feedback model is a very, very specific and discrete model that we can essentially mostly build internally to understand. Do you run that in your cloud, in your data center? Or are you running that on people's phones? I don't actually know. I think that's on our data. That's in the cloud. I'm almost positive that's in the cloud.

The reason I'm asking is to do any of this well, you need more and more data from people, right? And you're kind of asking them to generate more and more data. Like that's not a good answer. Tell me more about yourself is more data. And it's data that you're now storing. It's particularly data about gender, sexuality, dating preferences. That stuff, like the government suddenly has like a very unusual and somewhat threatening interest in.

Are you worried about that, that the Trump administration or some future administration would show up and say, "Tell me all of the transgender people on your platform?" Obviously, we have very, very sensitive data that we have very, very clear protections around. We haven't seen anything like that. You haven't had any of those incoming requests yet? No. The Trump administration has also said they're going to start scanning social media profiles for references to Palestine, for comments about Trump himself.

When you talk about matching people and values, like those things come up. Has there been any request for hinge profiles from DHS or ICE or any of these other parts of the Trump administration that are doing this kind of social media scanning? No. The reason I'm asking is you're –

The amount of data you might collect that is very, very personal seems like a rich target. Have you thought about the planning for how big of a target this might become as you prompt people to input more and more data with AI? Certainly. I think we'll have to handle those things as they come. We're obviously in a very uncertain time right now. But I will say that primarily we are a platform about creating...

intimate one-to-one connection. 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. 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 for

Relative to social media, people are posting and blasting thousands, millions of people with ideas like this. Our platform is not about one-to-many posting and conversation. It's about intimate one-to-one connection and one-to-one conversations. I think I would warn you that having a data pool of that kind might make you a target. I'm curious how that plays out.

Over time, particularly in this administration. There's some platform dynamics here as well. Like iOS and Android exist. They are platforms. They are also themselves rich targets for the government. Overall, there's a push for the platforms to do age verification themselves. There's laws now in certain states. There's laws in other countries. The Apples and the Googles of the world have pushed back against this in various ways.

Do you think they need to do it? Do you think that it's at the iOS and Android level that needs to do the age verification? Because this is a core component of bringing people onto Hinge. It's not for children. 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. There are arguments in response, you know, when you listen to Apple and Google push back against these laws is that it would be too hard. They would create some sort of censorship regime that, you know, the app vendors need to be liable for this. Have you seen any movement in that dynamic? I mean, this is

I think at the highest level, this is one of the big dynamics of how we might regulate platforms in the future. I'm staying much closer to the product development and where we're going with AI right now than I am to that. Your monetization is obviously Hinge Premium. I think it's $55 a month. There's another tier that's $45 a month.

The big news in the platform world is that Apple is no longer allowed to prevent alternative payment systems. Match Group, in particular, has been leading this fight. It's in all the press releases. Has that changed the dynamics of Hinge for you? I don't know if it changes the dynamics, but it's certainly going to...

So having more flexibility and giving users options to be able to pay different ways, I think is good for everybody, for sure. Have you launched an alternative payment service yet? We have not. Are you going to? Yes. How soon? Certainly by the end of the year. Is that going to be a match group payment service or a hinge payment service? How do you think about that? These are things that we're figuring out, but most likely hinge.

That would return somewhere on the order of 15% or 30% depending on how the billing works for you at your scale and recurring subscriptions and all that.

Is that just going to be pure margin? You're just going to get the money back? Oh, 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 some combination of all three of those. Just walk me through the... I mean, Match Group has been doing this fight for a long time, and you're already describing how you might change pricing or the lifetime value of customers. Yeah.

The decision gets – Epic fights this fight for like five years. At the very end, the judge says, I'm very mad at you. You can't do this anymore. Did you immediately start making plans that day or were you like, this is going to get appealed. We have to wait?

There's 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. And just to put the decision-making into practice, did you say that day, we need an alternative payment system? Certainly the day that the original ruling came out, we started to plan. What does that planning look like? Is it...

I'm going to call it Stripe. Put us in your shoes. That happens, someone comes to you, and you say, okay, we need to start to plan. Walk us through that moment. 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 roadmaps and the things they're focused on right now, and we think, does this new information change? And as we look at our growth team, does it make sense to build the next platform?

monetization or expansion feature? Does it make sense to pivot resources over to this thing? And given, as you said, the 15 to 30 percent gain that's on the table,

It's pretty high priority. There's an ecosystem of companies that might be building this stuff more centrally, that might be charging different rates. Am I kind of excited about that? It's wonky and boring. There's a reason we're ending the episode. Yeah, 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. It's certainly nuanced.

But at the end of that, what you want is rates to come down. Where do you think the rates should be? Because I know no one has ever thought they should be at 15% or 30%. Where do you think they should be with a little more market competition? When you stack the credit card payment processing fees on top of the fees around customer service and all the nuance of managing this, but I do think it comes down to the 5% to 10% range.

When you think about recovering that up to 20%, are you thinking, okay, I can use this to lower prices and grow, or I have to build many, many more AI features to compete against the coming onslaught of AI chatbots? I think we're very, very focused on innovating for the future. Like I said, it's...

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. 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. There's a lot of talk about platform shifts. You've talked about platform shifts here, right? People might be using Hinge differently because they have AI tools or because the AI tools are helping them find one another more efficiently or better. A lot of the platform shift I hear about is, oh, we're going to have new devices. We're going to have new form factors. People are, they are just going to talk to chat GPT in the bar.

We are – maybe we'll just have agents that represent us and they will go on dates for a while and come back and say you should go on this date with this other person we found on Hinge because the agents have fallen in love and now you just have to not screw it up. That kind of takes the screen away. That takes your surfaces and your missions and puts them in a totally different place.

How are you thinking about that level of shift? Is it even on your radar? Yeah, I'm thinking about it right now. 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 a 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. Do you think we'll get to a place where people's agents are just dating each other and then reporting back? No.

I don't really think so. I think there are much better... Isn't that what's already kind of happening in the matchmaking algorithm? In a very reductive way, isn't that sort of what's going on? I think in a very abstractive, reductive way, you could say that. But that's not really what's happening. We are not trying to... We're not simulating dates. I think it's a very expensive and inefficient way to do something that actually is much more...

straightforward. There's just a part of me that says, like, you're going to have some competitor that attempts this to happen, and we will all have to contend with it. I just think that...

That's a bit of a red herring for trying to map someone's psyche and guess how they're going to be. That adds a lot of complexity when actually you can just talk to people 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. This has been great. Tell people what's next for Hinge. What should they be looking for? It really is the evolution of the product. 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... 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...

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 changed people's understanding and perception of the industry. So I'm really looking forward to the next couple of years because I think that we will see more change than we've seen ever in the industry before. We'll have to have you back to check in on how it's going. Thanks so much for being on, Dakota. Yeah, yeah. Thank you.

I'd like to thank Justin McLeod for taking time to speak with me on Decoder, and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok and an Instagram. They're both at DecoderPod. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you hear podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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