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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Appearances
You know, so drugs have a great retention and they're really good at retaining people, but are they actually driving meaningful value? I would argue no. Facebook and social media is really good at retaining users and almost against your free will and hacking your desires and keeping you there. And they do that because they make money through advertising.
And the more time they have with you, the more ads they can put in front of you. But is that truly enriching my life? Is that truly creating value? Or can you look at that and saying, well, that's actually distracting me from a lot of other shit that is more meaningful and more valuable. So we were always very careful.
Like there was many times a desire to look at retention as sort of the end all be all metric. And by the way, we have fucking phenomenal retention. We had retentive powers beyond social media platforms. But what you were doing on Tinder, I always thought was 10 times more meaningful than kicking back and watching content. You were actually connecting with human beings.
And I think to me, all we have is connections. All the other shit is just noise. All we want is to experience love with other human beings. Remember I told you, as things scale, right, new problems form. They take a new shape.
If I was still at Tinder, and in fact, while I was there, this was sort of a metric of success I always drove home for the team, is that retention and the number of connections isn't as important as the quality of connections.
So the natural course of Tinder, I always saw, is actually we're moving to a world of no swiping, where Tinder is so smart that I could just say, Harry, I have the person for you. And why don't you focus on that? And if I was wrong, great, I'm happy to introduce you to someone else. Technology becomes, I think, the better it gets, the more human it gets.
And to me, the ultimate archetype was the matchmaker. Could we achieve the success of the human brain matchmaker who was able to say, Harry, here's the girl for you. Again, I'm not going to judge what you want to do. I'm just going to introduce you guys. You can do whatever you want.
Once the core team left, I think that promise, that mission was maybe replaced with a desire for retention, a desire for revenue. The sort of intention of why we created that company, what we were trying to achieve got lost. So over time, the quality of the product decayed because no one's actually sitting there and saying, how do we scale the impact of the product?
Everyone's saying, how do we scale the metrics of the product?
Look, you could make the argument that everything dies. It's just a question of when. Companies are organisms, just like humans. Humans die, companies die, and it's just a question of how long. And what is the longevity? And I think if you don't keep disrupting and you don't keep setting the bar higher and higher and higher, you will achieve complacency.
And complacency, which is a lot of big companies, die by complacency. You have teams who don't care. You have politics. You lose sight of why you are there. It's every person for themselves. Or you're not intellectually honest and you're not forcing yourself to disrupt yourself and question the mission and improve it. So I wouldn't say it's inevitable.
I think we've had organizations that have outlasted my lifetime, your lifetime. Maybe they'll outlast my kid's lifetime. So nothing's inevitable. But yes, I think everything has a natural decay or conclusion. The question is when. Nothing's forever. That's for sure.
To me, founders are really good at keeping and reiterating the mission because they care the most. Sometimes founder market fit, team market fit is essential. When it is your personal story, which it often is for founders, it's another level of storytelling. And it doesn't mean that the founder is the best person to execute it.
I actually think great founders put the company before themselves and are intellectually honest and self-aware enough to say, hey, you know what? Maybe I've taken it to this point and there's someone else better than me to take it to the next point. I don't believe that a founder is forever. I think the founder energy is required for success. And I think over time you can have different founders.
You have people who can come into an organization with a new vision, a better vision, and I think you would call them a founder.
What happened? So there was a moment in time where I think Tinder was growing so fast.
Users, revenue. We used to play this game where we would chart the growth rate and figure out how fast we would get to a billion users if we held the growth rate. If you charted the growth rate we experienced at a certain moment in the first year, we would have reached a billion users in three months. That's how fast we were growing.
Now, obviously we didn't sustain that growth rate, but the product was growing fast. The organization was growing fast. Revenue was growing fast. We were growing so fast that we couldn't even solve problems with humans because we couldn't hire humans fast enough. We had to get creative at solving problems. But at a certain point, I felt like I need help. I felt like I wanted my Sheryl Sandberg.
I wanted my partner who can help me scale the organization while I focus on product and technology. So we brought in very, very experienced people person. And I think the board sort of, he was ran a public company, very experienced. And I think the board sort of felt like, well, Sean, you know, maybe we should give that person the CEO title because they would carry more authority.
And then you do the same thing you're doing, but take president title. And I was like, okay, fine with me. But when I stepped out of those other functions where I kind of stopped being in the room for a lot of those other functions, it created a lot of issues in the Yeah, I don't know if this is about me or maybe the other person wasn't that good. But at one point there was like mutiny.
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