Grindr: Joel Simkhai

Hey, before we start the show, a question for you. Do you ever get nervous when performing or speaking in front of an audience? Because I definitely do, and I have to stand in front of a lot of big audiences. Well, I recently interviewed Ellie Golding about being shy on stage. And even though she's a music superstar who's performed at Coachella and a royal wedding, She told that She finds ways to break through the anxiety and be present in the moment. You can hear my conversation with Ellie Golding on my other podcast. It's called The Great Creators. Just search for The Great Creators with Guy Raz wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to thegreatcreators.com. And now

On to today's show. I remember people always telling me, you know, hey Joel, uh nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free. Yeah and no one's gonna ever pay for an app. And I said I'm actually not an app. I'm a

Essentially a dating business, and people have been paying for dating for centuries. You're a matchmaker. I'm I'm a matchmaker. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it'cause we're providing a lot of value. Unfortunately I was right.

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They built. Guy Roz and on the show today, how Joel Simkai wanted an easy way to meet other gay men, so he built Grindr. And helped it grow into one of the most popular dating apps. In the world.

Grinder changed the way people meet. If you don't know it, it was started as a dating app, mainly for gay men, and today it's used by around twelve million people a month. In two thousand nine, when it launched There was no Tinder, there was no Bumble. Yes, there was internet dating, but Grinder was different. First of all, its founder, Joel Simkay, was unapologetic.

He called it a hookup app. Plain. But secondly, and most importantly, Grinder was the first dating app to use geolocation. It meant you could see how close another grinder user was in real time on the app. But what's probably most remarkable about the rise of Grinder

Is that Joel didn't really know what he was doing. At least at first. He wasn't a programmer or a software engineer. He wasn't an expert in marketing. But he was a gay man who knew how hard it could be to meet Other gay men. and he wanted to fix that problem. The answer came to him in 2008.

That year, Steve Jobs made the iPhone open to third party apps. And in the iPhone and the app store. Joel saw an opportunity. Grinder would go on to become one of the most successful but Also one of the most

polarizing dating apps ever created. Sometimes it even put its users in danger, but We'll get there. Joel Simkai was born in the mid-1970s in Israel, but his family moved to New York when he was three.

And as long as he could remember He struggled to fit in at school. Yeah, so I was mostly friends with girls. And uh I wasn't very atletic, I was uh small kid. I play tennis and I I you know my parents, you know, were very good in giving me opportunities and

you know, encouraging me to do things and But um I was not very good at sports. I was not uh my hand eye coronation remains to this day not very good. And so it wasn't something that I excelled at at all. When did you start to feel like

You know, like he maybe When did you start to feel different from other boys? I mean you mentioned the sports thing, but Did you get teased as a kid? I did get bullied. Um You know, luckily I had a you know great family and my cousins and and so that was really who I connected with as a child. I didn't quite connect as much with people

At school. I I knew I had these feelings, but I didn't quite understand them and I I vividly remember once I was uh part of the swim team in in high school. And I was teased and uh someone called me a faggot. And then I said, No, I'm not. I'm I'm not gay. I'm not gay.

And for the first time I I said to myself, Wait a minute. What if I am? Maybe I am. And so You know, it took me several years to realize that that I was gay.

One of the things that was very helpful for me was uh online. So these were the days of CompuServe and AOL chat rooms. And so I was able to Connect with people. Uh online. Hm. So all right, so you

are kind of exploring your your own identity. You go off to college, you went to a Tufts in Boston. And while you were there. Did you start to feel more comfortable coming out or would you still

Quiet about it. So I was pretty quiet about it still in in college. I had a girlfriend or had several girlfriends But I also was started to kind of date guys And uh all of this was kind of secret. This was kind of my you know, I would go on AOL and you know, meet guys in Boston.

And then I would over the summer and I was back home That allowed me a little bit more freedom where I was going to bars and going to clubs and Leading uh you know more of a gay life. Um when I was back home in New York. Um when you finished college, I I read that you worked very briefly in investment banking and then and I guess you worked at a dot com startup. uh or like right before the the dot com crash in in the early two thousands.

That's right. Um and I know that like after nine eleven you you ended up working in media at NBC for a couple of years. Um Uh doing some translation work. At the time you were living in New York, and I guess it it seems Like you didn't quite know

Like what you want to do next, but but I guess you you'd figure out that you didn't want to work in a in a like a corporate environment. Like that that wasn't gonna work for you, right? No, not at all. Yeah. And and by the way, in terms of your personal life You know, this is still Early internet. era but you know, internet dating is starting to gain traction and

Um, I mean, how was your sort of social life in New York? Were you Yeah, in New York, you know, right after college I remember just a great time. You know, this is I just come out and now, you know, everyone essentially knew I was gay, maybe not uh at work, you know, not something I advertised at work. Um and so I just, you know, would go out, I would uh go to clubs, bars, uh restaurants, and would still use online. You know, Craigslist became very popular.

There was another website called Connection, which was more uh more dating based for gay people. And uh I met a One of my first boyfriends on on that. But I kinda had a healthy mix of online and meeting people offline and you know being quite social. Yeah. Did you always in your mind think that you would start a

business I mean your dad had a business, he sold diamonds. And so you know, it' maybe it's in your DNA, but did you see yourself as like somebody who could Hang up a shingle and start something? Yeah, I mean I always thought that I would want to do something of my own. I remember my dad would always say to me.

People out there. Have become very, very successful in selling shirt buttons. Selling shirt buttons? Yeah. So he'd point to the buttons on my shirt.

Yeah. And say that there's millionaires. By selling buttons. And it might not be glamorous.

But uh it's a great business for a bunch of people. And so that ethos was always very much part of um my upbringing. You know, we were not the a lawyer or doctor kind of family. We were uh Go find your own success. Um but I had started selling um magazine subscriptions online. And so I started uh you know a website that sold subscriptions.

And so So how did you even find out about was this like a like a multi level marketing thing? Um Uh I remember I was what I went to go buy a subscription to something. Yeah. And I I went online

An eBay and I saw that it was like Really cheap. cheaper than you would get it if you went bought the magazine directly. Yeah. And so I said, Huh, how do these people sell these magazines so cheap? And then I found out that you could buy these subscriptions through these clearing houses. the mechanics of the business is these um

these magazines are eager for subscribers because that's how they get their advertising base. And so they often would sell it, uh the subscription at a discount just to get the subscriber. And so I set up a website, contacted some clearing houses and started selling magazines. And you would sell subscriptions to which magazines? Uh all kinds of magazines. Um almost all of them. Time Newsweek.

Whatever. Yeah. Hm. And so The business grew. I mean it was um

You know, I don't remember how big it it grew to, but This was my main business for a number of years. Um And You know, it grew to a point where I s I actually couldn't handle it anymore.'Cause it was just you, right? Uh I no, I actually had uh other people. Uh there were uh you know, there's a marketing component into it. So we we had people helping with the marketing and then people uh some people helping with the customer service and the operations. So it wasn't a very complex business.

But you know I was uh able to uh work from home and run my own business. Alright, so you're doing this. magazine subscription website. Um but I guess I I from what I understand it it the the business kind of plateaued around two thousand eight and And you decided to close it down and

and make a major move to uh to Los Angeles. Why why LA? What What were you gonna do when you got there? Um I had no idea. Um But I remember at this point

You know, I had I had for a number of years been kind of trying to think about how can I meet guys in a more efficient manner and how can I use technology. And I remember the founders of Foursquare, before they started Foursquare, they they started a company called Dodgeball, I think, and it allowed you to um connect with people using uh SMS.

And so I remember I reached out to them and I said, Hey, can I use your platform? And I thought this would be a great way to meet guys. This was something that you'd been thinking about. Like while you were doing the magazine. subscription business. You were thinking

I have a hard time meeting Other guys. 'Cause presumably like You know, you might meet somebody or see somebody and You wouldn't know if they were gay. They might be gay. You wouldn't necessarily know. You wouldn't know if you could approach them or talk to right? I mean there are probably things like that too.

Absolutely. I mean that that's I think every queer person walks into a room and, you know, wonders who else is just like them in the room and so Yeah. That's our big challenge. I mean I think for straight people, Uh exactly. You just you just assume and and so This nagging problem was always there. and and then right, you know, a few months after I'd moved to LA

Steve Jobs announces the second generation iPhone. And remind me what What w what made the second generation of iPhones special? Yeah, so uh this iPhone now would have three things. One was the app store and so now uh developers could develop third party apps.

Secondly, they could distribute those apps in the app store. Uh and third was that they would add GPS to the iPhone. In some ways I felt like jobs had built this phone for me. because it was exactly, you know, what I needed. Uh there was no hesitation in my mind.

Uh this was the moment I was waiting for. Almost immediately you think this is a platform that I can build something Some kind of dating or or meetup. App on. It wasn't almost immediately, it was immediately. You know, the the second he said this, I said I need to build an app that lets me meet guys on it.

Yeah. So I had this idea. The big problem is I had no no skills to to make this happen. You were not a coder. Not a coder, uh and uh you know, I don't have any design skills. I don't know how to build, you know, I don't know I don't know technology. Um and Back then there was no uh ecosystem for uh iPhone developers. Yeah. Not clued into

uh the tech community, I wasn't included into development and anything like that. So what I did was I went to You know, the first generation iPhone had a uh jailbroken app store. where third parties would uh develop software for the iPhone and this wasn't sanctioned by Apple. And just to clarify, these were

apps that people developed for the first generation of iPhones. Um but I guess the phones had to be As you say, Jailbroken they had to be like internally hacked in order to run these applications. That's right. Okay.

And you knew that there's a website where you could like download these Yeah, so there was a uh an app store, um the jailbroken app store, I think it's called or was called Cydia. And uh they had, you know, a number of different apps that you could download. Uh

Well the ones I remembered were some mapping apps. Um this was again before any uh Apple up maps or Google Maps. Right. And so I reached out to each of those developers. And I said hey um I'd like to develop an app myself and I was wondering, you know, would like to hire you to uh build this app for me. I think I said it was an app for you know dating. I think I probably had said it's a dating app.

But I was a little bit cagey about what it was because I didn't want them to steal my idea. And and How long did it take before you got a response? I don't remember how long, but um I didn't get many responses.

So uh a gentleman out of uh Denmark, uh Morton. Got back to me. And uh I think we had gone on the phone. And I kind of pitched him my idea.

And he was all very excited and you know, he W what did you tell him on the phone? Well, at first I was kinda I didn't mention the gay part right away. Um, but eventually When I told him I you know, I wanna build an app uh where I can meet people using location, I wanna see, you know. Who's nearby? Um

By the way, you know, uh I'm gay and I think this would work really well for the gay community and so I'd I'd like this to uh at least f initially focused on helping me find other uh gay people. Yeah. And what he say. Great. That sounds perfect.

And he was, you know, very excited by it and uh he thought that that made a lot of sense and He thought it would be a great market to launch us at. Alright, so let's just for some perspective here, we're two thousand eight. You get in touch with this Danish guy Morton. Who knows how to build an app.

First of all. How are you gonna pay him? Did you have any money to pay him? No. And so that was the other part I said to him, and by the way

I don't have a lot of money. And he said. Okay, well, we'll figure it out. This sounds like a very good idea to me. I think it's gonna do well.

We'll figure it out. Did you design what you wanted it to look like or did you like what kind of direction did you give this Coder. In Denmark. So the other thing I did at this point was ask a lot of my friends for help. I said, you know, I need a name, I needed uh you know, I needed the logo, I needed to design this app, I need there's a lot that needed to happen.

And uh I reached out to my friend Scott Llewellyn and he was a graphic designer uh and he um You know, we were friends, he had a full time job. I asked him to help me and he he was excited by the opportunity and And the three of us worked on this app?

And I remember you know one day looking at my photo album on my phone. I said, Hey, wouldn't it be great if these were the guys around me? And so that was really the inspiration for the user interface of Grinder uh and it still remains today is a it's a grid of people. The first person would be me. And then the next profile to the right would be the closest person in nearby.

And then the next person to their right would be uh a little bit further away. And that's how we would display all these profiles of the people Uh nearby. All right, so you're LA. And

The plan is to launch this app and Like did you think of this as a fun project or did you think of this as a potential like significant business opportunity. I thought of this as

Something that I needed. In my life. And that put me at the center. Uh and I remember many times talking to people online.

And they would say, Yeah, I'm gonna you know, you d hit off and say, Okay, great, when can you meet? And they'd say, Oh yeah, I'll be in town in a few weeks. And with the power of GPS, uh I wanted to meet the guys who were nearby. Alright, so You're working on this idea and the name you come up with this name grinder. So tell me about

About that name. So we came up with the name, uh, you know, kind of brainstorming various uh names and We didn't want it to be something that uh was all about being gay or queer. But we want it to be something distinctive, we wanted it to be something that was unique. And grinder was one that we liked. Uh we also looked at, you know, mixer and blender, and we really like this idea of kind of you know, mixing people together.

We chose Grinder because One, I was uh I liked that it was edgier and I also liked kind of these it wasn't quite sex, but it was sexual and i I thought it was unique and and you know and masculine also. So was this all you were doing? Was it like Your entire focus or were there other things you were doing were you like Doing a day job, for example.

I didn't have a day job. We were just working on this. There's there was a lot to be done. To me this was a race, a race to launch first, because I you know thought to myself, you know, if I have this idea, I'm sure there's lots of other people who have this idea. I I don't remember quite'cause you know, the iPhone was announced in June. I don't I don't quite know when the App Store and you know the the distribution started. But it was starting already, uh, and people were starting to to get these new iPhones. And so I realized it was just a matter of time before, you know, someone else would do this. And so

But the challenge was, you know, Morton and Scott were both had full time jobs and That made things to you know go very slowly. Yeah. At least in my mind. And how I mean, even things like Even though Morton was working for very little money, but even things like s filing for, you know, a trademark and And looking for a lawyer to help you do that and That still costs money, not that much, but it still costs money.

How are you financing that? I mean, did you have savings? Yeah, I I had a little bit of money. I see. Um I think uh we had only spent a few thousand dollars. Um we say we, it's me and sc you and Scott. Yeah. And do you remember feeling stressed out at that time, at at the pace of things? Yeah, I was v I was very frustrated with the pace, uh, you know, because m Morton was working part time and I you know, or actually you know, he had a full time job and Understandably not his first priority. And I wasn't really paying him that much, so I wasn't in the position to be very demanding. But

Fortunately there were no other apps and I would remember I would check often to see, you know, I would type in gay into the app store to see what would come up and I remember at the time also before we launched, I reached out to some of our competitors. I said to myself, how am I gonna get this and how am I gonna distribute this? How am I gonna get people to know about this? Yeah. I don't have the money to do a marketing campaign. I I just don't know how to do that. And so my idea was, you know, why don't you go work it with the incumbents?

And private label grinder was like white label it for match dot com or one of these other who who was out there, do you remember? So Manhunt was the big uh incumbent. Uh they were the dominant player in the United States, a multi-million dollar business. Yeah, that's the website that Gay Man would use. And uh I remember I went to them and They called me actually the day we launched and said

We're not interested in doing a partnerships but we'll we're interested in buying you. Hm. So this was m March twenty m I think you launched March twenty fifth, two thousand nine. That's right. The day you launched you got an acquisition offer. Was it a significant offer?

Twenty five thousand dollars. And so that wasn't gonna happen. And and just to Well it it was a lot more than I had. Uh it was a lot more than I had spent. Uh I'd spent probably a few thousand dollars, so it would have been a decent return. And I remember him calling and saying, uh Manhunt calling and saying, you know, we just uh commissioned a study, you know, we spent a few hundred thousand dollars on this study. And we asked our users, and location was not at the top of their list of importance. But we're still interested in, you know, buying you. We think it's interesting. Let me call you back tomorrow. I want to talk to the boss.

and um called me the next day and said, you know, we'll pay you t I actually they said twenty five to thirty five thousand dollars. And I said, you know, listen, I think that's you know very nice of you, but I'm gonna turn you down. And I many years later I told him, you know, hey, um had you offered me the two hundred thousand dollars that you had uh paid for this study of yours.

I would have taken your offer. When we come back in just a moment, why Grinder began to blow up. Even though it was prone to crash. and kept getting one star reviews. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's March of two thousand nine. Joel has just launched Grinder. He's turned down a bargain basement offer to sell it.

And he's now anxiously watching the app store to see how it's doing. I remember I was alone in my house at the point. I had no marketing plan, I had no budget, I had there was no uh launch party, there was no celebration, there was no champagne. It was almost just like any other day except for this phone call I got. So

Before you hit the launch button or, you know, whatever, the proverbial launch button and it went live. What was the plan on how it would make money? Was there a plan? So we added ads. There was the provider ad mob which would serve ads. Uh and then it would just suck in whatever ad You know, the algorithm pulled in and you would get pennies or

On that ad or something like that. Yeah, that's right. So initially when you open the app on March twenty fifth, two thousand nine, Tell me what you would see. What it what what could you do? What's the first step? Yeah, so I w I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to sign up and to get onto the app.

So we didn't even require an email address, uh, no phone number, nothing. It was just uh we had used the device ID. You could log on and you didn't have to even create an account, which later became a problem, but uh initially you could just log on and Photos were not required, they were optional. Yeah. And so the idea here was two things. One is that, you know, not all gay people are gonna be comfortable, so let's not make a lot of requirements. Number two, let's make this as frictionless as possible. Uh and

Very, very simple and straightforward. And was just gonna be free. There was no paid model initially. That's right. Yeah. So it was just like you know, grid just like your photo album. The first photo essentially was the closest person. You would look at their profile and it would say, you know, so and so is, you know know, five hundred feet away, you know, five miles away, whatever the distance was, and then you could chat with them. And so you would hit the chat button, uh, send them a message. I think at the time you might have been able to exchange photos. I can't quite remember if we launched with that or not, but eventually you'd be able to exchange photos and chat.

So when you launch the app, I mean this is a time where there were probably only like 10,000 apps in the app store total. So discovery was just much easier. And was it just discovered? I mean, was it pretty soon after you launched it? Did people start to find it because there weren't many first of all Gay hookup apps, if any. And probably even not even that many dating apps yet.

But certainly if you would type in gay into the app store, you wouldn't come up with much. You know, what we decided to do was to have parties, uh, and we would go to uh local gay bars in LA. and you know, throw grinder parts. June was, you know, Pride Month. I remember we went to different Pride and I remember going to San Francisco Pride and what we would do is we would hand out uh little business cards, you know, download grinder. And the reaction was very, very positive. Anytime someone at that time heard that there was an app for gay people, they were really excited. It was a free app. And so we would got it probably about a thousand downloads a day.

At what point though did you have to figure out a way to get money? I mean, every a thousand downloads a day e even in the first month, like at a certain point You've gotta build out a team to support that. So Did you get a loan? Did you go to a bank? Did you c ask family, friends? Like what did you do?

Yeah, I got a a loan, about a hundred thousand dollars from my parents. Um, fortunately I wasn't paying Scott, he was working for equity. Morton was was getting eventually what would the deal I had with Morton was a rough share on the ads that would come in. So he would get paid as as ads would come through. And it was just the three of us, really, so the costs weren't that high other than And the serving costs were were not that much at first. Yeah. But quickly the complexity kicks in and um We needed to to find ways to monetize. So how did you I mean

So I hear this idea. Okay. And my instant reaction to this is What a brilliant idea, you know. Gay man Have a hard time meeting other gay men.

and you're gonna come up with a solution to it. But I have to imagine that a lot even me in two thousand nine, if you would have told me this I might have said, Ah, I don't see how this is gonna work. You know, from the vantage point of twenty twenty three, it looks like a brilliant idea but But did you have other people say to you?

You know, I just don't think people are really gonna use this. I don't see this working. Yeah, I mean I I was met with a lot of doubt. And I asked a lot of people to help me. I mean I asked some friends, hey would you come work with me on this? A lot of people turn me down. you know, when we were launching this and I was looking for beta testers. I had reached out to my friends and I said, Hey, can you help me beta test?

A lot of people didn't respond to me. What was a reason? For why this wouldn't work. Yeah, I mean I think it was, you know, some of the uh the the responses that I got from the competitors that the iPhone wouldn't take off. That you know, the now we understand how important location is. But back then that was not the assumption. There was no Uber, there was no Foursquare, there was nothing like that. And so

Our minds at the time were not oriented around location. Yeah. My mind was oriented around location because I was a guy who would go online and would have to talk to people who were nearby. Yeah. And so for me, my my struggle was all about location largely. Now you realize, hey, I wanna order some food. Of course I wanna order food to exactly where I am. I wanna order a car, uh, but none of that existed at the time and none of that was done through your phone. The other question I have for you, Joel, and and I'm

one of the things that is so hard about starting a business, right, or or having an idea. Is hearing no. you tell somebody your idea and they poke holes in it, or they tell you this is why it won't work. And It just in our interaction. Like you don't

come across as like a hustler or like a wheeler dealer type. But are you would you consider yourself to be confident and Good at kind of presenting and selling? Um You know, what I do know is that

I have one skill, really. I don't know how to program, I don't know how to design, I don't really have any hard skills. The only skill I have is to figure it out. And to know that everything has Uh

Every problem has a solution. Especially with technology. And so Surprisingly To me that's always been my

greatest skill. And the way I'm able to do that is being able to work with people and leverage people and to get people to to execute kind of my vision. Alright, so it's clear after you launch this app, right, that that you're getting some traction. People are downloading it, right? That's right. And and like you said before, I mean they weren't a lot of people out there at the time who who even knew how to make iPhone apps. So

So so this guy you were working with, this guy Morton I mean He just kind of figured out on his own how to create this and and and make it all work? Yeah, he's you know, the the beautiful thing is he's a hacker. And so he essentially figured this out. But uh Morton was a developer, uh an iPhone uh developer on the front end.

What he wasn't was a developer on the back end. Um those skill sets of front end and back end are very, very different. And so that was, you know, soon after launch became our big challenge was How do we scale and how do we deal with all this traffic? Uh him and me and none of us expected the scale we would get. Uh, I remember when I had this server before I would I would I'd go on once a day and I'd have to restart the server to kinda flesh out I don't remember exactly why, but

Um it was not built for scale at all. And I mean I have to imagine that the d I mean at a uh d at a certain point, like early on, did the ads start to generate Some revenue to keep you afloat?

Yeah, that's how we we funded the business was through ads. Maybe a few thousand dollars the first month and um imagine the f the first year we probably made a few hundred thousand dollars in uh in ads. And you weren't you don't have like an ad sales team, it was just like whatever would come in through this server, ad server. Yeah, that there's no cost to us. It's just a check at you know, uh wire or deposit into your account once a month. Couple pennies every time there was a little ad and it could be an ad for Whatever. I mean this is probably still

early days when it came to like. targeted ads, like. So not necessarily like ads that would be targeting gay men. Yeah, I mean I think that you know th this was in the early days, so these were very general ads, and most of them I don't think even were location based ads at the time. Right. Uh these were just very you know, ads for other apps too, right? Right. Uber at one point was a big advertiser, so other apps would advertise. very clear. This was not A dating app, if people met somebody and they dated, great, but this was really you described it as a hookup app.

Yeah, I mean I think, you know, various times uh I thought of it in different ways. But yeah, essentially I see it as a hookup app uh and I I But even you know, if you peel it a little bit more. I just thought this is a way to meet someone, right? This is just a way for you to meet someone nearby and whether you go have sex or you go whatever you want to go do. The whole point is to go meet. And that was something that was not really happening on iPhone at the time. So it was probably super viral right away. Right, because once you're on it, you're telling your friends about it and then

That's how it spread. Yeah, so our strategy was twofold. One was these grinder parties. And the other was press and and to reaching out to uh the press. And so You know, I didn't have a PR firm. I would just pitch them and then just sent them a short email. Reporter?

Yourself? Yeah. I would just look up who's covering the space or who was I don't know, and would find any reporter I could, email them, said hey, I'm just launched this app And that's how, you know, we got the word out. So At a certain point Apple they enable you to sell the app, right? And that's

That essentially allowed you to create Two tiers. A free tier. And what did that What was the difference between those two options? Yeah, so the the paid version you could see more people, you could block more people.

Because remember, every time we would show you a new profile, that was a call to our server. And you know, we were our our architecture was not very good. there was an added expense for each new profile you saw. So we essentially started charging for that. And did did you find pe a lot of people paying for it? We got a good amount. And I remember people always telling me, you know, Hey Joel, uh nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free.

Yeah. Um and no one's gonna ever pay for an app. And I said I'm actually not an app. I'm a essentially a dating business and people have been paying for dating for centuries. You're a matchmaker.

I'm I'm a matchmaker. I'm not an app. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it'cause we're providing a lot of value. Unfortunately I was right. Okay, what about W let's go back to the sort of the the technology side. I mean getting a thousand download a day and then Just the virality of it.

That's putting more and more pressure on The back end. So From what I've read, the user experience. In the first couple years sucked, like it would crash all the time. Like what was going on?

Yeah, our our app store ratings were w you know, one star. We had horrible reviews and uh it doesn't seem like it affected downloads. No and user time. I mean people were using the app for hours. Uh but giving you one star reviews. That's right. And why were they giving you one star reviews? What would happen?

uh the app would crash, you would have to wait to for the profiles to load. Uh you know, it just wasn't a very good wasn't very good software. Right. But um My real problem was I didn't have a technical. So I didn't have anyone who had a deep understanding of what was going on, technically. Uh Morton probably at this point had left and I had hired someone else. And so I had another friend childhood friend Ivet Pascua who uh worked at a consulting firm down in Costa Rica.

And so eventually I turned to her, I don't know exactly what I can't remember exactly what year that was, but it was fairly early on. And through her consulting shop. They developed the app. They had developers for the iOS eventually. Android and Blackberry. Uh and also the back end. You outsource the maintenance.

of the app to this group of code developers in Costa Rica? Uh, that's right. That's right. So that was um very efficient.

But did you ever think, you know, I just gotta get an office, I gotta get everyone in this office, I gotta have all these people here, staff, employees. Or was it just Did it make more sense to you to just kind of do patchwork like a we'll outsource this, we'll outsource that, we'll you know, just patch these holes like that. Yeah, for you know, I was very reluctant to get an office. Uh I was working from home, I was very happy I would uh you know, I remember I had uh

maybe eight people they would come to my house. At a very small house, the neighbors would complain with all the people parking on our small street. And how were you as a even with a small team, I mean, how are you finding yourself as a boss? I mean, did managing people and Projects come easily to you? No, I I was not very excited uh about managing. Uh but at some point it became a business. Yeah.

And I was kind of reluctant for it to become a business in some ways. I really kind of loved it as a a small project something that was that I could kinda do from home. I remember at this point we were getting people interested in investing'cause we had been getting quite a bit of attention. Uh and they wanted to see my financials and so we didn't I d I've said about financials, I don't have financials, I don't have projections, I don't we know what who knows. You had not uh you had investors coming in wanting to like look at your data room.

Yeah. And I said, What are you talking about? I don't I don't have a business model. I don't have a business plan. I don't have a marketing plan. I don't have a data nothing. You know what you see is what you get. Yeah. And uh you know, my my collegehood friend, uh her husband was uh wasn't working at the time, and so Carter McJunkin, who ended up being our COO uh later on. he came in and uh he helped me put my projections together and so he would consult and Yeah, I said, How much do you want to say a hundred dollars an hour. And I s I almost fell off my chair. Uh that's crazy expensive. That's a lot of money. Yeah. And then so a few months into the the project with Carter, I think he understood

that this was gonna take off. And he called me and said, Listen Uh, I need to move from he was out in uh Maryland at the time. I need to move in Los Angeles. I need to work on this full time. And we need to build the business here. you could tell that this was on a good very good trajectory. Uh I remember when uh in

I went to San Francisco Pride in June. Three months after we launched. I was out in the handing out cards and someone said to me, Joel, Stephen Fry mentioned you on top gear. Steven Fry the Great Obviously British comedian. Yeah.

And uh I went back to my hotel room. And we got ten thousand downloads. Steven Fry was on top gear at obviously the racing show on the BC, and he talked about How he had grinder on his phone? Yeah, so Stephen Fry went on top gear, which uh at the time was the number one show on the BBC. Right.

And you know, Stephen Fry is a bit of a tech geek or tech you know, tech lover. Yeah and so Jeremy says to him, Oh, uh, you know, do you have any favorite apps? And he says um Yeah, I have two apps. One is this uh app where you can play music on it. And the other app is this app called Grinder. It's a gay cruising app.

And they pan to the audience and you can see their reactions. Like clutching their pearls going through the case. Exactly. And he then goes out and takes out the app and he basically gives a demo. Wow. And and so that was a huge moment for us where everyone in the UK at this point knew about Grinding. And this was and it was possible to download it in the UK too, like the location service would work just the same. Absolutely. So we launched we launched around the world and it was available everywhere. One of the things about one of the early criticisms that you got

was critics writing, Oh, this is so superficial, it's just like torso shots of guys with six packs and you know, bulging muscles and It really is.

All about looks. And And your response to that was Yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, I mean I think that tha yeah, that's right. I mean I think um

The way I I had always thought of it was, you know, you walk into a bar And what is it that you first see as you first see that person? You walk into any situation. And so that is actually mimics real life in some ways. Well, that's what you see. You see you don't know anything about the person before you meet them. Right. All you know is what you see. And so for me, this was not very inconsistent with uh how we meet people normally. Now One of the things that um

the app did not have was um like any kind of sexually explicit photos. Like the photos were If they were real. Uh but there were no they could not put any no one could put like a sexually explicit photo up there. Well, so the way I viewed this was what I try to do with Grindr was I try to mimic real life as much as possible. And so what we thought about is that that there is a public space and there's a private space. And so with grinders there's the public profile. And in your public profile, you have to keep it PG thirteen.

Uh in their chat, which is a private chat, you can g discuss whatever you'd like and you can exchange whatever photos you'd like, uh as long as it's legal. Uh because those are private. And so that's how if you wanted to exchange uh explicit photos, you could. Um and that was a very, very popular feature. Uh and to you know, that was uh in our private space and that was in compliance with Apple and Google's guidelines. And and that's What people did? So

I mean sounds like You guys started to bring in. Revenue, or maybe even profit. Even if it was small from ads. Pretty soon after you launched in two thousand nine.

Uh, we didn't bring in profit. I don't think we were profitable maybe till year Maybe three or four. But we you know revenue did come in. uh maybe 2010 we probably may did a few million dollars in revenue. So But it was, you know, break even and trying to grow the team and

pay for the servers and you know, those were of too big cost. And you know, we ended up using Google App Engine. And uh at one point, this is later on, They increase their pricing and they and almost killed the business because What's a Google app engine, sorry. Google App Engine was the our hosting provider with the uh Google uh w web cloud services, essentially. Oh and they raised the prices and you did not and that almost killed the business? Well, because you know, the the our costs went up dramatically, um and we simply couldn't afford what they were gonna charge us. Eventually we went on we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive. Um but largely because we had um

implemented them in a not a very efficient way. So we weren't you know we weren't profitable for a number of years, but we were fortunately making uh revenue. So that could float the business in a for a while. Yeah. Our ability you know we were able to achieve everything we were able to achieve because our marketing costs were virtually zero. We you know we had a number of people who helped with these grinder parties. But um you know, our marketing spend was essentially zero, so our cost uh to acquire new users was essentially zero. I mean that's what allowed us to grow. You know, if I had to spend money acquiring users, we would not have been able to achieve what we achieved. You were spending no money on user acquisition. That's right.

I mean it's like a it's like a dream business. Absolutely. And you know, initially I think you know ads were eighty percent of our revenue and you know the uh subscriptions were twenty. And eventually it would flip to the opposite where you know most of the money came from subscriptions. And you know, we had a lot of users.

And for me, you know, w this is a network product. And so from my perspective, uh we wanted to have a lot of free users because we wanted the network. And that's the power of the app. You go on and you see someone nearby. And so if we had to charge everyone, it simply wouldn't work. I have to imagine that not that long after you launched it, There were competing apps that would pop up. Uh oh yes, absolutely. How did you kind of create the moat around Grinder given that the user experience was so bad in the first year or so?

If other Competitors were coming on board. I have to assume that some of'em might even have had How did you guys They all had a better app. So how did you manage to

Compete against them? What what was the reason? It's the size of the network. Uh just'cause you were there, I think. Yes, you know, size matters. Uh I think that even was our timeline for a while. And

You know, for a location based service. when you're meeting people, it's really you know, all about you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. Yeah. And so we had the f you know, first movers advantage. We had the network and we were growing very quickly. And so that was uh fortunate for us that we had the network and that was our moat. In in in that sort of year, first year, year and a half. I mean, you know, you come across as a very kind of quiet and and even keeled guy.

Do you get stressed? Did you get angry? Would you like you know, with the team around you like, We gotta do we gotta fix this? Would you ever panic? I mean Tell me a little bit about just kinda walk step outside of yourself for a moment and who who was who was Joel at that time? Well, I remember the first phase of the first year was c actually quite a lonely time, you know, starting for the development, uh, until maybe uh after launch until I actually had invited people to come work uh you know physically in the at my my place.

It was a very lonely time because A, I was so busy working on it, so my social life had become essentially nothing. And this is gonna sound very cheesy. But I remember I was so, so lonely and I was so depressed and I said to myself, You know what, Joel?

I had a conversation with my future self. And I had my future self tell me, Joel Keep on going. You need to persevere. And you need to just keep on the hard work, keep on the perspective, and keep on going.

And that was very helpful for me and And you know, I still have conversations with my future self. You know, what is what advice does does he have for me? What is what perspective does seven year old Joel have for current Joel? The other beautiful thing about it is that you can't really argue with your future self because it's yourself. Uh, and so It's hard to say he doesn't know what he's talking about or that kinda thing. Uh and so that's kind of a mechanism that I've I've employed in my life. So all right, so

One of the things that I think was a really Interesting. that I I think I can remember hearing about Grinder was

By September of t twenty eleven you had like two and a half million users. Which is Quite amazing. I think it was twenty twelve, right? Summer of twenty twelve.

Uh you had the Olympics in London. Hm. And Basically for some reason. The app

Crashed. Yeah. Yeah. Somehow a rumor started that this was coincided with the arrival of athletes in London. At the Olympic village. Tell me.

the story. Did you plant that story? Did somebody plant that story? What Yeah, so uh this was right before the Olympics had started and the athletes had just arrived at the Olympic village and we got a uh an email From uh one of the tabloids in the UK. They said to us, hey, you know, we noticed that grinder went down. Uh

right around the time the Olympians had arrived. Is there any correlation? And I remember I turned to The head of marketing and I said,

Don't respond. And they ran with the story without comment from us that Grind had crashed because uh gay Olympians has essentially crashed while The the servers. No response. No response.

And it was ridiculous, right? I mean h how many Olympians are there, a few a few thousand, how many of them are gay, maybe a doz a few dozen or a few hundred. For them to be able to crash our servers when we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of users and maybe daily active users and you know millions on monthly uh was simply ridiculous. But that became part of the, you know, the urban legend, I guess. Yeah. And one of the things I realized also is that, you know, our outages actually we had a lot of outages. And we'd actually see that. Anytime we would have an outage, our traffic would would go up afterwards. Uh and any time we would have a a negative news article about out outages, our traffic would go up and we would get more downloads.

And so one of the things I realized here was that even bad press, you know, quote unquote bad press. Might be good. When we come back in just a moment. Grinder starts to get even more attention for all the other problems it has. From uncontrollable spam

To critical concerns. over privacy. Stay with us. You're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2013, four years after launch, and Grinder has about five million total users. And at this point, Joel starts getting calls from people who want to invest in the app.

But He says no. He's not interested. I don't like I answer other people. And I felt that if I would take

Venture backing. I would uh essentially become a monkey to them and that I would need to Essentially work for that. And a lot of them were, you know, straight men. who I felt like didn't understand my business and uh, you know, I didn't want to answer to straight

Corporate America. And also I mean your revenue started to become significant, I think by twenty thirteen. twenty five million dollars. That was a combination of subscribers and ad revenue.

Yeah, we had the the financial, you know, we could support ourselves. So There were certainly points where Uh we could have used the money. Uh, but I was very stubborn about this, that I didn't want And I also didn't the other thing is I didn't want someone to push me to an exit.

I just said to myself, hey, I don't know when we're gonna exit and what that's not what it's about. This is about Building the business. And I think the other part of it is, you know, I'm a person who doesn't look for external validation. And I think one of the ways that founders get caught up in validation is with uh valuations. Valuations, headcount. And to me those were Vanity metrics. And they w those were not metrics that were uh important. The only metric that that was really important to me was my daily active users and how many, you know, messages people sent. Yeah and what impact were we making.

That's what mattered to me. has the app gotten more and more popular, you also get Um Scammers. Yeah.

credit card information or, you know, and and and All kinds of scams. When you found out about that, how did you To handle that. I don't know that we had a lot of in terms of credit card hacking and you know Apple would process our payments, so we didn't have any uh of those types of problems.

But we had spam. You know, spam was you know, visit my website, go download this, go download that. You had spam profiles. Uh oh yes, absolutely. So going back to the initial founding of the app, we didn't have accounts. Essentially anyone could message anyone. And that was because I wanted to, you know, make it very easy for someone to be able to use our service. That made it a perfect opportunity for a spammer to be able to Spam our users.

And so you would go on and you would start talking to someone and they would send you a marketing message. And it was very hard for us to solve this because we didn't have accounts. And so This was one of our moments where I thought I could lose the business. Because'cause you weren't clear how many accounts was s w were fake. Well no, you the customer experience was horrible. You would go on and people would spam you. Uh imagine getting your inbox without the spam filter. It's just impossible to communicate. And so we had to to fight the spammers. Yeah.

So how did you do it? Yeah, so it's you know, it's you know, creating accounts. So everyone has to have an account, you have to verify your email address. Uh so at some point if you didn't sign in with your email you would lose access. Which wasn't a problem because people would do untentionally anything. You know, they had put up with so much uh giving an email address was not gonna be a challenge. Yeah uh but you know you also go through messages and you do message detection where You look for keywords that people are you know, the spammers and you shut down the spammers. How long did it take?

Uh, years. I mean, and it took us uh you know a few months to really g you know solve you know the the the crisis. But y you know, it's a c ongoing battle. It's a wack a mole with spammers to to fight them. So There are obviously always unintended consequences to any technology, right? This is normal.

And one of those unintended consequences was that The app Did put some people in danger. Right, particularly gay men in countries where Homosexuality is illegal.

Afghanistan and you know, Ghana, Iraq, Iran. I don't know if it is today still in most of Saudi Arabia where it's it's punished. Egypt um Yeah. the state authorities use the app to track It happened. So

Yeah, how did I mean on the one hand it was this probably this incredible opportunity for these Very closeted, fearful men. But on the other hand, it put them at risk. What could you do to fix that?

Or to e or to mitigate that. Anything? Yeah, well, a couple of things we did. One was we We had messaged our users and told them not to put their faces in their profile, not to um Not to publicly declare who they were.

The other thing is, you know, you know, grinder is all about location, so you see how far away you are from someone. Well, using that data, the police are able to to find where you are. Yeah. So uh in Egypt we uh turned off that ability so you couldn't see how far p you were from one another. You know, it's a tough call when you think about these places and you say to yourself, should we make the service not available? And from my perspective What I realized is that this was uh the only kind of gay bar for a lot of people in a lot of places. And to take that away from them, I thought would be the wrong decision. Because for them that that's their that's largely their access to

Other queer people. And as this became more and more successful I mean your market was gay man, which is a big market, a lot of dollars. But did you think I mean I know that there were people coming at you saying, Hey, this is exclusionary, it's only for gay men. What about gay women? What about nonbinary folks, trans folks, et cetera?

I mean, just from a business perspective, and I hope this doesn't come across as cynical, from a business perspective, it might have been a good opportunity to just expand the user base, right? Yeah, and I mean beyond that we had straight people. I mean a lot of people asking to get on it. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I this is, you know, before Tinder. Hey, why can't I meet someone on my phone? We need we need a better way. And yeah, so absolut we got that feedback from All corners. And so

One of the ways you address this was with another app. called Blender that you created. That's right. And was I mean Spoiler alert here, but Blender did not. do quite as well as Grinder by any stretch. Was was it already too late when it came out? Was Tinder already

Kind of the dominant App. No, we we predated Tinder bulking. Well our failure was uh was in the architecture of what we Did and so

You know, w if there was a woman, she would get hundreds and hundreds of messages. Uh, we also allow people to exchange photos. And so women would get unsolicited nudes. That you know, that was a problem. We also would say, you know, how far you were. Uh and that made women uncomfortable. So

Overall the the failure of Blender was the failure of understanding um What were the needs of women? And part of it was we didn't, you know, uh we didn't have women. We mostly were gay men on the team and We didn't have enough straight women and and we thought we We understood the market.

But we didn't How did you cope with the the occasional criticism or more than occasional criticism you would get, you know. Media stories about Underage, but Boys going on and signing up.

men in you know, country you know, endangering themselves in countries where it was illegal or You know, like how did you personally deal with that? Did you just Was it just For you it's Just the price of doing business? Or did did it ever get to you?

Well, I mean each of those are different yeah. But I think on the bigger picture, I think the answer is uh that with every technology that there is negatives. You know, one of the good things we had was we had the location of these users. So if someone committed a crime, we would, you know, turn over to the sp the the law enforcement and say, you know, here's where you can find them. But

You know, this was one of my I think my challenges at Grinder was not taking maybe seriously enough some of the other issues that we could have dealt with, that we could have helped. You know, people spend an hour a day on Grinder. That's a long time. That's not very good for you. And so thinking through how could we have um better uh you know help without all these negative things, without the racism, without the transphobia, without all these other negative uh aspects and uh aspects of the community.

And I guess it was mentioned that there was Quite a bit of that. There were Right. I mean there are men who are saying I don't date This kind of personality, that kind of personality. Or even even in chats.

Quite. explicit in their racism. Yeah, absolutely. That was that was a problem. Uh I think it remains to be a problem. And uh you know, after leaving I think I now have a different perspective on that. I think we we should have had been more a lot more involved.

and guiding of our users and uh letting them know that certain behaviors was was just unacceptable. In twenty sixteen Um You announced that you had sold a sixty percent stake in the company. This is after many years of many suitors and investors coming at you.

And you turning them down. Um this was a Chinese Video game. developer uh called Kunlan. Kun tech company. And they took a sixty percent stake and

that deal valued Grinder at a hundred and fifty five million dollars. Um so you guys got ninety three million dollars at that point. What was the reason what changed? Like why then did you say, you know what, let's bring it on now? I think there were two main things that were going on at this point. One was uh the technology we were still struggling. We were uh still just dealing with our scaling issues, we were not shipping updates, we were not releasing new features. And so

I just realized I was essentially a firefighter, and our team was just fire fighting. We were fighting fire after fire. And we just didn't have the expertise that we needed. And so I thought, you know, what if I can find a partner who can help me scale this and grow this and someone who really Understands technology. So that was one one part of it. The other part was it uh I had no idea what my business was worth.

So I said to myself, you know, why don't we go out there and find out what the business is worth? And then we got to the point where Hey, this is a lot of money and this is life changing amount of money. So Uh we found uh Kun Lun who um they had a lot of experience with mobile gaming in uh in China and also China at the time we uh want it to break into China, so they would be the perfect partner to help us with the China. And

This partner is gonna help us where uh where we were weak, and this will finally be kind of this technical co-founder that I've never had. Alright, so they they come in and they buy sixty percent steak and The other side to it is Did part of you wanna just eventually get out because when they take a sixty percent stake.

Eventually they're gonna take a hundred percent stake. Yeah, I mean and we had a mechanism for that. It was essentially a three year we we you know, at that time we said ourselves okay, uh likely be out in three years, but maybe not. Um, I I think I probably fooled myself in some ways and uh thought that I would If I wanted to stay, I could stay. If I wanted to go, I would go. And

Uh from a external perspective, you're right. Hey, you you know. You sell control, you lose control. Uh, but uh I don't I don't know that I fully understood that. All right. This Chinese company comes in.

And What Did that mean? Did that did everything seem to stay the same, more or less, or did things start to change quickly? I mean sixty percent, they own a majority of the company now. Uh I mean I think you know, things uh you know, we we didn't have the best relationship. Um the honeymoon was very short Um

We've got hacked. Soon after the deal closed. Mm And I said, Great. You know, you guys are not great that we got hacked, but like you can solve this.

You can help me solve this. But you know, they weren't very helpful and they were very focused on us launching in China. Uh and they wanted us to really become the number one app in China because there was another app that was uh gaining a very significant traction into China. Yeah. I I try to look at it from their perspective. You know, they're sitting there in Asia. They're seeing that that they're you know, that someone else is becoming the dominant player in Asia. They're worrying about that. Right. But I'm sitting here in Los Angeles and I'm saying, you know. That's not the end of the world. Even if we don't get China, you know, we that's fine. We I'd rather I'd rather lose China than lose, you know, have the business be hacked and lose all our data.

And so that became very contentious. They exercise their option to buy the rest of the company out. About two years later. Exactly two years later. Um, bought it uh the rest of the company after a hundred and fifty million dollars. And I guess

At that point, Scott Chen from Kunlun. comes to run, comes the head of grinder. And They sort of politely asked you to step aside. Uh I'm not quite sure the word polite is the right word. Maybe impolitely, yes, you set aside.

Mm. Yeah, listen, it it was it was very contentious, um and um not the way I wanted to go. But um you know, we ended up settling it and uh you know, we came to an agreement. Joe, let me ask you this question. I mean and and it may sound obvious to some people may sound just st utterly stupid to others, but

You know, you'd been grinding away at this just t so to speak, um, since two thousand nine. It's now two thousand eighteen. And they've asked you to leave in a contentious way, and you are not happy about it. But you're gonna walk away with hundreds

Of value. That's a pretty great outcome. And You know, you're walking away from the stress of that. Business too.

So I guess my question is Who cares, right? Like why d why would it matter to you? And I'm not I'm not saying who cares, of course it is. But but why why Why did it matter to you that it was contentious and you you had to leave?

This you know, I think starting a business Is a very emotional thing. And I think uh it is something that I dedicated myself to and uh I had many lonely nights, I had many difficult days and nights. Uh You know, it took all of me.

And um I was helping my community. in helping them eat. uh helping them, you know, find great sex, finding love uh you know, there are people who uh have gotten married because they found someone on Grinder. And so such a tremendous impact and you know

something that I love more than anything is matchmaking and so I don't expect anyone to feel sorry for me because I made a lot of money. But

kind of ironically. A few months before I uh I finally left. Um I met a guy in New York. Um and we started dating.

And um Brendan and I are now, you know, married. And Interesting thing I've I've asked him and I said, you know He said, You know, I don't think I would have taken you serious seriously if you were still the CEO of Grinder. I don't know that this relationship would have worked.

And I think for myself also, I I think I was able to prioritize him and my you know relationships in general Um and that created the space for me to Uh fall in love and uh and get married. Uh I know that um after you stepped away, Joel, uh grinder continued to grow for some time, but it it it did have some challenges, and I know that the

The Chinese company that had bought it. Uh from you eventually sold it. and then the new owners took it public a few years later. Um and and for a time the market cap was like it was over like two billion dollars. And it's I think it's it's dropped quite significantly now. Um But w when you saw that, I mean at the time, right, the thing that you built.

was valued at two billion dollars. I mean it must have been quite amazing to see that. Yeah, you know, I was very um That's certainly mixed feelings, right? But the main feeling I had was kind of proud of myself for building something that got acceptance uh from Wall Street to a certain extent. Uh, I was very proud of that, and I was very proud of the queer community that this was a

a successful business that you know served the queer community and it was a success story. Of the queer community. Th the around the same time that Grinder went public, you launched A new

company new app called Motto. A new dating app. Which you now Is out in the world. Tell me Tell me about it. What what is it?

And how is it different from Everything else out there. Yeah, so M Mato is uh essentially a hookup app for uh queer people. you have to upload three face photos and so you see exactly who you're meeting. and we verify every single person, so it's a hundred percent real community.

And it's essentially an experience kind of more like hinge. You get a batch of people every day at five PM. And you get to react to their profile and you get to reach out to people. And uh it's meant to be a lot more uh straightforward and A lot of it was uh built in reaction to

you know, the problems of the the current hookup apps. Uh not just Grinder, but the other ones as well. But at the end of the day this is, you know, I think I had this benefit of of sitting there and saying, Hey, now What does a hookup app look like if you build it from scratch? Uh you know, two thousand nine and two thousand eight was was Grinder, and that was the app for then. Uh and then uh Motto was I think the app for for today. Yeah. Joel, when you think about the

Your whole story, you know, you're a guy who is not a computer scientist, not you know obviously very smart, but like you study international relations and You were not a coder, developer You had an idea, lots of people do, they go nowhere. But you turned it into a really big business and

you became very wealthy as a result of that and create something that has had a significant impact on on culture, certainly on on gay culture, queer culture. How much of

How much Time and And grind you put in and how much do you Do you tribute to luck?

You know, th this is a tough one because It's hard to tell, right? I'm not a huge believer in luck. I don't I don't actually really know understand what that means. Yeah. I'm also very fortunate and uh you know I grew up to parents who were supportive. uh financially and emotionally and in many, many different ways. You know, I don't know, is that you know luck in some ways? Sure.

But um I had a lot of people who come up to me and said hey, I had that idea too. And my response to all them is always the same thing. It's like, Well what did you do about it? And the answer always is nothing. Yeah.

I go back to what I I said earlier and that's I I you know I believe In myself, I don't let other people Tell me what to do or to uh validate me. Uh and I figure it out. Uh and just understanding that, you know, I may be right, I might be wrong.

But at the end of the day, uh I'm a happy guy. That's Joel Simkay. Founder of Grinder. and motto.

Motto, by the way, is still small. Right now it only works in New York and Miami. but with plans to expand far beyond in the future. Hey thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Cypher. Our audio engineer was Gilly Moon. Our production staff also includes JC Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, John Isabella,

Chris Massini and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening. to how I built this.

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