Tinder CEO Elie Seidman on Discovering Love During Pandemic

Tinder and its parent company Match Group have battered the COVID-19 pandemic well, considering everything. User engagement has increased, like interest around new product features, like video calls. Over six years after its launch, Tinder is finally introducing a one-on-one video calling feature that will be heavily moderated for content and safety. Also, Tinder CEO Elie Seidman says they are concentrating on how to bring young people to the app and how they can build digital relationships inside of it, especially as in-person dates slow down. Elie Seidman shared his opinion while talking to The Verge.

The journey of Tinder during Pandemic

We break it into two parts. There's the business side of Tinder, the part of Tinder which is the financial engine. Then there's the engagement side: the majority of people who are using Tinder.

If you look at the engagement side, what is the entirety of the community doing there, yeah, you see very clear positives around engagement. Longer conversations, a lot more conversations.

We've seen big increases from young women, women 18 to 30 has been a big area of increase for us. We have 6 million subs paying subs and that's certainly a part of the business. It's harder to predict given the financial component, but that part has held up pretty well all things considered.Engagement on Tinder after pandemic?

I expect that we'll see that part of the rebound of, "Oh, now [let's] get out of the house and get back to our physical world social life."

So that's a part which I think is really interesting. We've been working on it for a while and thinking about it a lot. The other part is the physical world — I do want the person to be a mile away or two miles away.

It's interesting because there's a bigger idea here. We span really two types of connection. One is the kind of connection we can have digitally — that's really important. We've been thinking about that idea for a while.

"IT'S THE STORY OF THE INTERNET, WHICH IS, 'HOW DO I FIND MY PEOPLE?'"

We actually started early this year [working] on a feature that's about to come out, which is Global Mode. Global Mode says, "Hey, I can get a connection from somebody who's not a mile away or around the corner, five miles away. I can get that connection — and those connections are meaningful and validating, I'm seen in those connections — even though the person is 1,000 miles away."

[That's] actually an old story. It's the story of the internet, which is, "How do I find my people?" It's interesting when you apply that to Tinder, a big global community, and within that, there's a set of people who say, "I want to be seen, I want to feel validated and valued — maybe I can't find that person right around me, or maybe it doesn't matter if they're right around me."

Tinder a Global Mode

In my view, there's two waves of dating apps, and we're actually entering the second wave. We're coming out of the first wave.

The first wave is — go back to 2012. Tinder is launched on US college campuses. At the time, it's very, very unusual — stigmatized, really, is the right word — for an 18-, 19-, 20-year-old to use an app, [or to] use a website, probably more likely, to meet new people, although the technology had existed for a long time.

But we're still using dating app[s] the way we met in the regular world, if friends would introduce you, [or] you met somebody in college, you met somebody at a party. You'd meet somebody, and then a week or two later, you'd hang out one on one. That's kind of how we've used dating apps: you come to Tinder on a Sunday night, you find somebody, and the goal is to hang out with them a week or two later in the physical world.

"YOU GET THAT DIGITAL CONNECTION, MAYBE IT JUST STAYS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD."

More About Tinder

Yeah, I would say there's two parts. Product design is super important. If you don't get the product design right, I think the best idea just stays as an idea. So we're proud of our ability to do that well. I think we do that really, really well. We take ideas and don't just leave them on a piece of paper, they become product ideas that are elegant, that are simple, that are fun, that are delightful.

"IF YOU THINK ABOUT THE FIRST WAVE OF DATING WEBSITES, THEY KIND OF FELT LIKE A JOB INTERVIEW."

The other part, which is more complicated, but I think we understand pretty well, is how do you make these things acceptable in social culture? How is it okay to hang out on a Sunday night? And there you've got to tell the story in a way that's fun and accessible and exciting, that people want to do it, that it's not a chore. If you think about the first wave of dating websites, the early websites, they kind of felt like a job interview. It felt like work.

Here's all these things you got to say about yourself. You're like, "God, this is not fun at all." Our members, more than half of them are 18 to 25, they're in Gen Z. This is a fun time of life. It's supposed to be a fun time of life. We want to facilitate that, not make it a job interview.

People Hang Out on Tinder

Well, because I think it's an interesting place to actually get to know — it's much less intense than I swiped on you, I matched with you, and now the next step — this big jump — the next step is to be on a 1:1 physical date. What we see is this is not a new idea. I think this is a new idea if you're maybe in your late 20s or your 30s. In a sense, the idea of hanging out is already happening with our Gen Z members.

The important backdrop is over the past 10 years, you've not only had the growth of dating apps, of course. You've had the growth of the entire social internet. That's been a huge growth. We have now 3 billion people on the social internet. The social internet is the third one, after the commerce internet, and before that the information internet.

So information internet, commerce internet, social internet: you now have 3 billion people. Then specifically Gen Z — the 18-, 19-year-olds who arrive on Tinder today — they've grown up with the social internet. They've had that in their life from a very young age. So when they arrive, they've already hung out in digital environments. It might have been Fortnite; that could have been the place where they were hanging out with their friends. So the idea of hanging out and developing a relationship and developing a connection and letting it unfold in a digital environment is not a new idea.

I'll actually give you an interesting anecdote here. We do a lot of talking to our young members and in one of the conversations, we kept referring to like "IRL, IRL, IRL" — in real life. One of the members we were talking to said, "You guys keep talking about digital experience and then IRL, as if IRL, the physical world is my real life. You don't understand, my digital social experience is my real life. They're both my real life."

And that's a really simple idea, but a profound one. So the idea that you can hang out on Tinder is already happening as a concept.

About Tinder U

The short answer is yes. I was talking to somebody about this the other day — what does back to school look like when there's no physical school?

"WE'VE REFERRED TO JOINING TINDER AT 18 AS A RITE OF PASSAGE."

We've referred to joining Tinder at 18 as a rite of passage, and it's become that. It's an important one. We're an 18-plus app, we work very hard to keep people who aren't 18 off the app. So when you turn 18, that's a rite of passage and of course, we think of all the other rites of passage that relate to going to college, and Tinder U is solidly in there. So what can we do? How does that map over to the virtual world? What is the festival mode when the festival isn't in the physical world, isn't in real life? So yeah, we've migrated over there. It's a really important area of our innovation, and inspiration is the youngest members of Tinder.

Video Chats on Tinder

I'll give the broad answer. The thing that video does — video is not about video. Video is about live, and video is about the ability to get connection. It's more broadly about this second wave of the evolution of dating apps, of connecting apps, of networks where you're there to meet new people. So it's a really important technical tool.

All of us are doing this now in our work environments, and we're able to get a lot of what we get from a connection perspective and a signal perspective. So it's a really powerful thing.

I think when we do it on Tinder, the positive side is we bring to bear all of our experience with safety. The things that are completely off-platform. We have, in most cases, zero ability to do anything about. They happen outside of our purview. So there are a lot of benefits.

The second thing, which I think is related to the idea of safety, is people often want a certain amount of privacy as they're developing a relationship, as that relationship is forming, and they don't know where it's going to end up. They don't know if it's going to last. So giving out your FaceTime, your ID, your phone number, giving out your Snap handle, et cetera, giving out all these other things may not be what you want. You may want to be abstracted a little bit. Those are really more for people you know really well, your friends and family.

So I think we have a lot of roles to play, but the core place it starts is around human connection and the emotion of that, and video is powerful for that.

Tinder one-on-one video calling

This was on the list, but it was lower on the list than the things we've been talking about, which are these broader themes of hanging out. We think this is an interesting feature. It's coming. The first of our members will see it in June. So it's been on the list. It just wasn't at the very top of the list because the other areas which are the themes behind Swipe Night, for example, were higher on the list.

"WE WILL DO EVERYTHING IN OUR POWER TO BLOCK SCREENSHOTTING VIDEO CALLS."

Tinder vs Facebook

We're big. We're not Facebook scale at either Tinder or Match Group. I feel that we have sufficient scale, both in terms of signal from what's happening to learn on — and not just in English, but across many languages. We've got sufficient financial resources to take the human moderation side as seriously as it can be taken. I'll say, for us, we're very specific. We are not a broad-based social community. We're a social community with a very specific intent, which is to find that something more we were talking about. I feel very good about our ability to do it even though we don't have the Facebook scale.

OkCupid vs Tinder

Yeah, it's a good question. I'll frame it from the Tinder perspective. The CEO of OkCupid today is a very, very sharp guy, and he would want to be able to answer the OkCupid-specific questions. But I'll frame it for how we think.

I think this is broadly true both within Match Group but really across the entire category, [Tinder is] the only one that is focused entirely, with all of our energy, on 18 to 25, on Gen Z, on how it shows up when you're really young. It doesn't therefore mean that there aren't members who are over 25 on Tinder. There are lots, but that's the unique place we play.

Ashley, you were saying it with regards to Tinder U, there's a reason why we do all the stuff we do for US college kids. That's not the entirety of our audience. We're much, much bigger than just the US college student population, but it's a place where we derive a lot of inspiration for our innovation and that's when we have in mind a member, we're thinking about them.

When I was the CEO of OkCupid, that was not the member. Ariel [Charytan] as the CEO of OkCupid, he'd have to tell you how he thinks about it today. But having been in both roles at different times, I very much conceptualized who I was building for, who we as a team thought about, quite differently.

Tinder vs Match Group

Shar Dubey is the CEO of Match Group, and she and I have worked together closely now for four years. She's fantastic, very, very brilliant, super experienced in all things dating online. She's been doing this for a long time. She was at Match.com, running Match.com for many years. We've started to take sharing of specific knowledge bases more seriously.

Ashley, you were talking about trust and safety. It's an area where we absolutely don't want to reinvent the wheel. It's really important that we take the knowledge developed at Tinder, or the knowledge developed at OkCupid, or at Match.com, and apply it for the benefit of all of our members, independent of which one of the communities they happen to be in anywhere in the world. There are other examples of that around that which start to get more technical.

There are technical resources where Tinder teams are working with OkCupid teams or other teams, Hinge teams, etc, to bring to bear very specific technical know-how. It tends to be in areas where the knowledge that you need is very specific to what we do versus very general computing knowledge., where honestly, the company that knows best is like AWS or Google Cloud, for example. When it's specific to the world that we're in, then the sharing is pretty significant.

I've been with Match for four years now. First at OkCupid — now at Tinder for two and a half years and OkCupid for one and a half before that, and I've seen us increase that a lot over that time, and that's very intentional.