Grindr Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026

I was actually telling somebody that I've now been to this conference seven times total, and this is my fourth for Grindr and three before.

All right. Grindr is the largest network of gay and bi people anywhere in the world. We have about 15.5 million monthly active users around the world. The total number of people who during the course of the year use Grindr is actually much larger than that, but some of them use it for just for part of the year rather than all the time. We actually don't report users, we report devices. So that's an important consideration when you think about the number that you see. We've been around for a long time. Grindr got started in 2009, and took off like weeds and never did any marketing. The fact that it was on mobile and on iOS made it grow.

Grindr was owned by Kunlun for a while and was then bought out by a group of investors under Asciphius's directive in 2020, right in the middle of COVID, and then went public in 2022. I've been at Grindr since 2022 as well. The way we have thought about our journey since then is in the following kind of phases. First, we wanted to make the product a lot better, and I think we have done a lot of that, and we can talk through how we've done that. While at the same time driving increased monetization by getting more people to pay for Grindr. We've gone from sub 6% pay penetration to over 9% pay penetration, while MAU has grown by several million users. If you stabilize MAU for where it was in 2022, we're actually over 12% pay penetration now, which is fantastic.

Secondly, by developing new products that will drive monetization even beyond that, and we'll talk about that in a minute as well. Thirdly, by investing in new opportunities that can drive growth by capturing more of the wallet of our users outside of the connections experience.

Yeah. That's been kind of the journey that we've been on.

We've fundamentally transformed the team. Only about 20 people who were at Grindr in 2022 are still at Grindr today. It's been a complete rebuild from that perspective. We invested tremendous resources into rebuilding the technology. Most of our code base is rewritten now and all new. We've been very early in adopting AI in how we work. About 80%-85% of our code base is now AI generated. Our engineering productivity has 2.5x-ed in the last year, which I think is fantastic. For the first time in my career in technology, engineering is no longer the problem in terms of like, "Hey, I can't get something done." It's more, we don't have enough product resources to actually manage all the work that engineers can do.

We've also been really early in adopting AI in the product itself and the experience that people have. It's been a really fun and awesome journey, and we still have a ton of opportunity. Our kind of goal every year is to grow 20%+ with certainty, and I think we've done that, and I believe we can continue to do that for the next many years.

There's definitely a tailwind behind Grindr in terms of more people being willing to say that they're gay, more people coming out and being comfortable, and as a result, more people being willing to use our product. That was true in the U.S. in the time when Grindr launched, obviously with gay marriage and acceptance increasing significantly. It's now true in other parts of the world, whether it's in Latin America or Asia or India. That opportunity is pretty significant, and it's a huge tailwind for us. That helps with users. It doesn't necessarily help with paying users and/or revenue because obviously in the countries where you see that benefit now, you don't have as much of an income opportunity for people, and so their ability to pay for the product is lower.

When it comes to the market opportunity from the revenue perspective, when I started at Grindr, what everyone focused on is your pay penetration is 5%ish, matches with Tinder is at 25%. If you get it to Tinder levels, the business is going to grow massively. That made sense to some extent, and we've done a lot of that so far, as I described. But what you realize along the way is that if you keep doing it, you'll actually end up with a product that no one wants to use.

Yeah. Because the free product will degrade dramatically, and that will not be good for anyone.