How two straight guys bought Grindr and made $2B

The app store rating, Jeff, I was it one point eight. And remember, one star is the minimum, so it's really zero point eight is the was the rating on the app. And how are you doing a hundred million a revenue and forty five million a profit with a one point eight star rating? So we look at this And we just see opportunity. Basically how we got here was Sean and I were talking about Grind, I think last month and like how there was like this amazing story behind it and we found out that you were the two guys who bought it and took it public and made it this home run. But Sean is good friends with James Courier. Rick, I've had a bunch of run ins with you early on in my career. And then same with you, Jeff, and we were like we got to get these guys on because you guys have been a little bit behind the scenes. You don't talk that much. You're just kind of quietly behind the scenes, but you've had some major successes and Like I I thought it would been cool, uh it would be cool to like kinda give you a platform and like tell the story because I don't think you guys have told a lot of these stories publicly, uh, maybe ever, have you?

Not a lot. No. We um we we we've d we've done a couple here or there, um, but no, we have not been out there publicly and talked about what we did at Grinder, but we're happy to today. So let's do story time. How did you two guys end up owning Grinder? What is the story of Grinder before you? And then how did you guys get involved and what happened afterwards? I want to hear the Grinder story. Grinder was created founded by game a guy named Joel Simkay about 15 years ago. And Joel um is a gay man who wanted the ability to create an app to find other gay men GPS enabled, kind of like Uber, right? Uber really existed once the iPhone became ubiquitous and people could, you know, see where you are

The proximity uh it became, you know, really tight. So he created Grindr. Grinder took off and he ended up selling it to a Chinese company uh called Kun Lin. And then a few years later, Cyphyus, the committee for foreign investment in the US, forced the sale of Grinder. Okay. So they were worried that. that the uh the data that grinder was collecting could be used for you know, in n negative ways, uh by the Chinese ownership. Was that first sale a big sale? Like was Grinder considered like a big success at the time? Because I know some of the dating apps traded like for not that much money early on. Yeah, so I I believe Sam, uh I'm I I believe uh sorry, Joel sold it for I I wanna say two hundred and sixty million. Okay. Uh so it was a great sale and he owned ninety percent of the company. Very few um others had equity. So he did very, very well. And then Syphist forced the sale, right? So that's it true.

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