Sean Rad
speaker
161 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Sean Rad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Product market fit isn't one moment in time. Product market fit is a constant iterative process. When I was there, we had a rule that every year we had to redesign the entire product because we didn't want people to get bored and stagnant and we didn't want to become complacent as a team. Every lesson we learned, the lesson was always focus. Focus on your mission. Focus on what you're good at.
Stop trying to be something you're not. Every company needs to continuously fucking relearn that.
It's really hard. In my case, I sacrificed so much. Not only it was my identity, it was sort of all I did for a big portion of my life. So when you walk away and one day that's no longer your identity, it's really existentially rocking to your core. How did I deal with that? It took me a while to recognize that is not my identity and that is actually not healthy to make that my identity.
And founders are better when their company is not them. Because it's not about you. It took me a while to sort of step away and see that. And actually reflecting back, our most successful moments when we were a little detached and can see the bigger picture beyond the individuals. And I think it's really important. I mean, a company is a group of people that are on a mission to solve a problem.
You need to take the individuals out of it. That's when companies perform the best work. When there is sort of, to some extent, an all for one, one for all mentality, but we are here to accomplish a mission. We are all aligning against that mission.
We understand our individual contribution to that mission, but we also have the humility to understand that none of us are significant enough or matter enough to success. And if we did, then that's actually a problem. We haven't built a great organization that's greater than us.
You know, to me, leadership is when you sort of try to abstract yourself away. If things are dependent on you, then you haven't really achieved something. You haven't really been a great leader and given to the next generation, shared your talents and empowered other people.
So I think truly great leadership, the greatest CEOs are the ones that are there, always available, killing, pushing the company forward, but are building organizations that if they step away, can run without them. Because that's when you have a healthy organization. You can't have any individual be the source or single source of success or failure.
And you haven't matured the organization and that organization will never outlast you.
Before I started Tinder, I'd just sold a company and was thinking again, what is next? Reinvention. Around that time, the iPhone had just come out and been in the market for a few years. And it was really obvious, maybe this was a little early thought at the time, that this thing is going to change everything.
I saw very early that as much as the phone was connecting us, it was also separating us from the real world. You know, I'd sit at restaurants and I would just like observe. My friends were, you know, heads down in their phone. It was the weirdest fucking thing. We're all together in a table, but everyone's heads down in their phone.
And so for me, I was obsessed with this notion of how can the phone actually empower the real world and not take us away from it? So I had this insight one day, just kind of hanging around, looking at my friends on their phone at a restaurant. I'm like, how can this phone help me connect with people around me? And I realized there was a group of girls at the table in the restaurant.
And I would probably not walk up to one of the girls that I was looking at because it would be inappropriate in that setting. I would have to really put myself out there. I run the risk of getting rejected, looking desperate. So I sort of wondered what if I could just tell the phone that I like her? And what if she also would tell the phone that I like her, that she likes me?
And if we both like each other, now the ice has been broken. And now that fear of rejection is gone. Now we can connect. That what we call the double opt-in was the revolutionary thought behind Tinder. Every system of connection prior to that was riddled with this emotional angst and barriers to connection.
No, no. So when we released it, nothing happens because no one knew about it. So it was a very anticlimactic moment. But what we started doing at a certain point, sitting with the team and it's like, hey, we built this great product. We know there's something special here. What the fuck do we do? And I think as an entrepreneur, you sort of have to like work with the resources that are around you.
You have to make the most of what you have. And for us, it's like we all had friends. So I was like, all right, let's just start there. Everyone take out your phone, text 300 friends. And I think the thing that we texted was download this app and thank me later. Sort of wanted to create this like FOMO mysteriousness. And I think in total, we texted 500 people.
Over the course of a few days, we had, I think it was like 700 signups. I sort of looked at the team like, did anyone text anyone else? Like, where did this additional come from? And we realized that it started going viral amongst our close group of friends.
And then what we started to see, which was sort of confirmation of this thesis that we had, that we could uncover connections that would have never have existed if we removed these barriers. We started hearing that friends who already knew each other were now getting together. So I would have friends calling me like, oh, I never... you know, shit, I never knew she liked me.
We never put two and two together. I'm going on a date with so-and-so. And it's like, whoa, we've been in the same friend circles for years, but neither of you expressed that interest. So, you know, it was that like confirmation, like, okay, this thesis that we have that we're walking about our lives, not maximizing the potential of our relationships is true. And it was working.
That was the initial spark.
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