YouSaid · the spoken record

Joel Simkhai

lines on the record: 108
first: 2023-07-17
most recent: 2023-07-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This is a tough one because it's hard to tell. I'm not a huge believer in luck. I don't actually really know understand what that means. I'm also very fortunate, and I grew up with parents who were supportive financially and emotionally and in many, many different ways. I don't know, is that luck in some ways? Sure. I had a lot of people who come up to me and said, hey, I had that idea too My response to all of them is always the same thing. It's like, well, what did you do about it? The answer always is nothing. I go back to what I said earlier, and that's I believe in myself. I don't let other people tell me what to do or to validate me, and I figure it out. And just understanding that I may be right, I might be wrong. But at the end of the day, I'm a happy guy.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so motto is essentially a hookup app for 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 100% real community. And it's essentially an experience kind of more like hinge. You get a batch of people every day at 5 p.m. And you get react to their profile. And you get to reach out to people. And it's meant to be a lot more straightforward. And a lot of it was built in reaction to the problems of the current hookup apps. Not just Grindr, but the other ones as well. But at the end of the day, this is, I think, I had this benefit of sitting there and saying, hey, now what does the hookup app look like if you build it from scratch? 2009 and 2008 was Grindr, and that was the app for then. And then motto was, I think, the app for today.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I was very, that's certainly a mixed feelings, right? But the main feeling I had was kind of proud of myself for building something that got acceptance from Wall Street to some extent. I was very proud of that and I was very proud of the queer community that this was a successful business that served the queer community and it was a success story of the queer community.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Brendan and I are now married. And interestingly, I've asked him and I said, you know, I don't think I would have taken you very seriously if you were still the CEO of Grindr. I don't know that this relationship would have worked. And I think for myself also, I think I was able to prioritize him and relationships in general. And that created the space for me to fall in love and get married.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This, you know, I think starting a business is a very emotional thing. And I think it is something that I dedicated myself to and I had many lonely nights, I had many difficult days and nights. You know, it took all of me. And I was helping my community, helping them meet, helping them find great sex, finding love. There were people who 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 a combination of all those things, 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 finally left, I met a guy in New York. And we started dating.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Politely ask you to set aside. Yeah, listen, it was very contentious and not the way I wanted to go, but we ended up settling it and we came to an agreement.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think we didn't have the best relationship. The honeymoon was very short. We got hacked soon after the deal closed. 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. And they wanted us to really become the number one in China because there was another app that was gaining very significant traction in China. I try to look at it from their perspective. They're sitting there in Asia. They're seeing that someone else is becoming the dominant player in Asia. They're worrying about that. But I'm sitting here in Los Angeles and I'm saying that's not the end of the world. Even if we don't get China, that's fine. I'd rather lose China than lose, have the business be hacked and lose all our data. And so that became very contentious.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, and we had a mechanism for that. It was essentially a three year. At that time, we set ourselves, okay, likely be out in three years, but maybe not. I think I probably fooled myself in some ways and thought that I would, if I wanted to stay, I could stay. If I wanted to go, I would go. And from an external perspective, you're right. Hey, you sell control, you lose control. But I know that I fully understood that.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, so they come in and they buy 60% steak. And the other side to it is, did part of you want to just eventually get out because when they take a 60% stake, eventually they're going to take a hundred percent steak.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there were two main things that were going on at this point. One was the technology we were still struggling. We were 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 were just firefighting. 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 part of it. The other part was that 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.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. That was a problem. I think it remains to be a problem. And after leaving, I think I now have a different perspective on that. I think we should have been a lot more involved and guiding of our users and letting them know that certain behaviors was just unacceptable.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, each of those are different But I think on the bigger picture, I think the answer is that with every technology, there is negatives. One of the good things we had was we had the location of these users. So if someone committed a crime, we would turn over to the law enforcement and say, here's where you can find them. But this was one of my, I think, my challenges at Grindr was not taking maybe seriously enough some of the other issues that we could have dealt with, that we could have helped. People spend an hour a day on Grindr. That's a long time. That's not very good for you. And so thinking through how could we have better help without all these negative things, without the racism, without the transphobia, without all these other negative aspects of the community?”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also would say how far you were on Blender. And that made Winnie uncomfortable. So overall, the failure of Blender was the failure of understanding what were the needs of women. And part of it was we didn't have women. Mostly were gay men on the team and we didn't have enough straight women. And we thought we understood the market, but we didn't.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we predated Tinder by quite some time. Our failure was in the architecture of what we did. And so if there was a woman, she would get hundreds and hundreds of messages. We also allowed people to exchange photos. And so women would get unsolicited nudes. That was a problem.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I mean, beyond that, we had straight people. I mean, a lot of people Yeah. Hey, this is before Tinder. Hey, why can't I meet someone on my phone? We need a better way. We got that feedback from all corners.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, a couple of things we did. One was we had messaged our users and told them not to put their faces in their profile, not to publicly declare who they were. The other thing is Grinder is all about location, so you see how far away you are from somewhere. While using that data, the police are able to find where you are. So in Egypt, we turned off that ability so you couldn't see how far you were from one another. It's a tough call when you think about these places and you say to yourself, should we make this service not available? And from my perspective, what I realize is that this was 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's largely their access to other queer people.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It happened. So, yeah. I mean, on the one hand, it was probably this incredible opportunity for these very closeted, fearful men to meet other men, but on the other hand, it put them at risk. What could you do to fix that or to mitigate that? Anything?”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years. I mean, it took us a few months to really solve the crisis. But it's an ongoing battle. It's a whack-a-mole with spammers to fight them.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the customer experience was horrible. You would go on and people would spam you. Imagine getting your inbox without the spam filter. It's just impossible to communicate.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, absolutely. And 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 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.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know that we had a lot in terms of credit card hacking, and Apple would process our payment, so we didn't have any of those types of problems. But we had spam. Spam was, you know, visit my website, go download this, go download that.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had the financial, we could support ourselves. So there were certainly points where we could have used the money, but I was very stubborn about this that I didn't want. And I also didn't, the other things I didn't want someone to push me to an exit. I just said to myself, hey, I don't know when we're going to 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 valuations, headcount. And to me, those were vanity metrics. Those were not metrics that were important. The only metric that was really important to me was my daily active users and how many messages people sent. And what impact were we making? That's what mattered to me.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't like the answer out of other people. And I felt that if I would take venture backing, I would essentially become a monkey to them and that I would need to essentially work for them. And a lot of them were straight men who I felt like didn't understand my business. And I didn't want to answer to straight corporate America.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No response. And it was ridiculous, right? How many Olympians are there? A few thousand? How many of them are gay? Maybe a few dozen or a few hundred for them to be able to crash our servers when we had hundreds of thousands of users and daily active users and millions on monthly was simply ridiculous. But that became part of the urban legend, I guess. And one of the things I realize also is that our outages actually, we had a lot of outages, and we would actually see that anytime we would have an outage, our traffic would go up afterwards. And anytime we would have a negative news article about outer outages, our traffic would go up and we'd get more downloads. And so one of the things I realized here was that even Bat Press, you know, quote-unquote bad press might be good.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What do you remember about that? Yeah, so this is right before the Olympics had started, and the athletes had just arrived at the Olympic Village, and we got an email from one of the tabloids in the UK. They said to us, hey, we noticed that Grindr went down 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 Grindr had crashed because Gay Olympians has essentially crashed. The servers.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, you know, I still have conversations with my future self. What advice does he have for me? 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. And so it's hard to say he doesn't know what he's talking about or that kind of thing.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell Well, I remember the first phase of the first year was actually quite a lonely time, starting from the development until maybe after launch, until I actually had invited people to come work physically at my place. It was a very lonely time because AI was so busy working on it, so my social life had become essentially nothing. And this is going to 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?”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, you know, size matters. I think that even was our tie line for a while. And for a location-based service, when you're meeting people, it's really all about you want people nearby. And if someone's not nearby, that's not a great experience. And so we had the first mover as advantage. We had the network. And we were growing very quickly. And so that was fortunate for us that we had the network and that was our”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. And initially, I think ads were 80% of our revenue and the subscriptions were 20 and eventually it would flip to the opposite where most of the money came from subscriptions. And we had a lot of users. And for me, this is a network product. And so from my perspective, 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 have worked.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our ability, we were able to achieve everything we were able to achieve because our marketing costs were virtually zero. We had a number of people who helped with these grinder parties. But our marketing spend was essentially zero, so our cost to acquire new users was essentially zero. I mean, that's what allowed us to grow. If I had to spend money acquiring users, we would not have been able to achieve what we achieved.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, because our cost went up dramatically, and we simply couldn't afford what they were going to charge us. Eventually, we moved to Amazon because they became so expensive, but largely because we had implemented them in a not a very efficient way. So we weren't profitable for a number of years, but we were fortunately making revenue.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We didn't bring in profit. I don't think we were profitable maybe until three year four But revenue did come in maybe 2010. We probably did a few million dollars in revenue. But it was break-even and trying to grow the team and pay for the servers. And those were our two big costs. And we ended up using Google App Engine. And at one point, this is later on, they increased their pricing. And it almost killed the business because...”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 there is a public space and there's a private space. And so with Grindr, there's the public profile. And in your public profile, you have to keep it PG13. In your chat, which is a private chat, you can discuss whatever you'd like, and you could exchange whatever photos you'd like as long as it's legal, because those are private. And so that's how if you wanted to exchange explicit photos, you could. And that was a very, very popular feature. And that was in a private space, and that was in compliance with Apple and Google's guidelines. And that's what people did.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, one of the things that the app did not have was any kind of sexually explicit photos. The photos were... They were real, but there were no, they could not put any Noah could put like a sexually explicit photo up there”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's what you see Don't know anything about the person before you meet them All you know is what you see. And so for me, this was not very inconsistent with how we meet people normally.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think that, yeah, that's right. I mean, I think the way I had always thought of it was, you know, you walk into a bar and what is it that you first see is you first see that person. You walk into any situation. And so that is actually mimics real life in some ways.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 bulging muscles. And it really is all about looks. And your response to that was, yeah, that's right. That's exactly what it is.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. And he then goes out and takes out the app and he basically gives a demo. And so that was a huge moment for us where everyone in the UK at this point knew about Grindr”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Stephen Fry went on top gear, which at the time was the number one show on the BBC. And you know, Stephen Fry is a bit of a tech geek or tech, you know, tech lover. And so Jeremy says to him, oh, do you have any favorite apps? And he says, Yeah, if two apps, one is this app where you can play music on it. And the other app is this app called Grindr. It's a gay cruising app. And they pan to the audience. And you can see their reactions.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a lot of money And so a few months into the project with Carter, I think he understood that this was going to take off. And he called me and said, listen, I need to move from, he was out in Maryland at the time. I need to move in Los Angeles. I need to work on this full time. And we need to build a business here You could tell that this was on a good, very good trajectory. I remember 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 Topgear.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And my collegehood friend, her husband wasn't working at the time. And so Carter McJunkin, who ended up being our COO later on, he came in and he helped me put my projections together. And so he would consult. And I said, how much do you want to? He said, $100 an hour. And I said, I almost fell off my chair. Because that's crazy.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I said, Nato, what are you talking about? 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 data. Nothing. What you see is what you get.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I was not very excited about managing. But at some point it became a business. And I was kind of reluctant for it to become a business in some ways. I really kind of loved it as a small project, something that was that I could kind of do from home. I remember at this point we were getting people interested in investing because we had been getting quite a bit of attention. And they wanted to see my financials. And so we didn't say, well, financials, I don't have financials. I don't have projections. I don't know what knows.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for, you know, I was very reluctant to get an office. I was working from home. I was very happy. I remember I had maybe eight people that would come to my house at a very small house. The neighbors would complain with all the people parking on our small street.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. So that was very efficient. But did you ever think, you know, I just got to get in office. I got to get everyone in this office. I got to 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 we'll outsource this? We'll outsource that. We'll, you know, just patch these holes like that.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The app would crash. You would have to wait for the profiles to load. It just wasn't a very good software. But my real problem was I didn't have a technical co-founder, so I didn't have anyone who had a deep understanding about what was going on, technically. Morton probably at this point had left and I had hired someone else. And so I had another friend, childhood friend Yvette Pasqua, who 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 iOS eventually, Android and BlackBerry, and also the backend.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm a matchmaker. I'm not an app. And so I expect people will be willing to pay for it because we're providing a lot of value. Unfortunately, I was right.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And no one's going to ever pay for an app. And I said, I'm actually not an app. I'm essentially a dating business. And people have been paying for dating for centuries.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got a good amount, and I remember people always telling me, you know, hey, Joel, nobody pays for apps. Apps are all free.”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so 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 our architecture was not very good. And so there was an added expense for each new profile you saw. So we essentially started charging for that”
2023-07-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Grindr: Joel Simkhai · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT