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
We had the entire executive team. I don't talk about it, but since you know the story, I'll say, I don't know how you sound now, by the way. We try not to talk about this. But there was one point where... The entire executive team, unbeknownst to me, went to the board and basically said, if Sean doesn't come back in the CEO role, we're all quitting. I found that very flattering.
I think definitely like a crazy moment for me personally. The translation, what I took away was that the team was saying that product management and engineering isn't everything. The other parts of the organization equally matter. In fact, every part of the organization equally matters.
And maybe it was a mistake on my part to say, I'm gonna maybe play favorites and give a little more love to this part of the organization and as a leader outsource another part of the organization. And I think the truth is that the learning that I had is everything matters equally. You know, unfortunately, the team didn't come tell me that.
They sort of just threw up their hand and said, come back or we quit.
Yeah. So international expansion was one of the hardest things because, first of all, building a global organization is not easy. Building a global team and making people in another country feel like they are part of the team, even though the executive team isn't there, you know, sitting with them.
That's not an easy thing, but it was particularly difficult around the Tinder product because in the beginning, in the early days, we thought localization meant that the language of the app had to adapt to the language of the user.
But localization is much more than that because particularly around social human connection and relationships, there are cultural differences in everywhere in the world, which means the product had to adapt. to meet those cultural differences, which means Tinder was slightly different as a product in every country, which means we had many product organizations servicing the same core product.
I'll give you two stories. In Korea, group dating, that's like the socially accepted norm. It's actually very rare that I would go out one-on-one. It's usually friends or double dates. Like we're going out as a group. So group dating was a huge thing. Which like, so we need to like really think about that experience, like reorient Tinder as a group dating, not as a individual dating.
But then what was interesting is we, as we reoriented that, it got us thinking like, well, could that be a thing everywhere else? Maybe that's actually more effective means of connecting. So can we bring group dating? Can we make that a thing? Can we make that easy? I mean, naturally, a lot of times we go out with our friends, you know, and
But, you know, we didn't really double date until it's later into the relationship. So that was one thing that was interesting to tackle. Another thing was that in India, it was not really a system of dating and marriage that was very much curated by your parents. Your parents decide. And I think that was a moment in time where we were like, hey, we could we could adapt the product to that.
But actually, no, we're not going to because we believed in empowerment and we believed that you should be in control of your own fate when it comes to law. So that was actually sort of a moment where like, no, we're not changing the product, even if it means we're going to have less users because it was socially less acceptable.
So it's like unique things like that, where it's like, wow, the social norms and the dynamics are completely different.
I'll give you two lessons there. I would say the Tinder team was maniacally good about focus and prioritizing and saying no and keeping the product simple. We believed in simplicity. I think if you look at the Tinder product, it's very simple. I would always reiterate the Albert Einstein quote, which is like, if something isn't simple enough, it's because you don't understand it enough.
The more you get to the essence of something, the simpler it actually becomes. And it's like fools make things more complex. So prioritizing and picking our battles was very critical. That became a little harder as we scaled. In the early days, we were very much one team, all building towards one product. Everyone was involved in one release. We all knew what everyone was doing.
Even by the time we were like 100 people, that was still the case. And then our server point, once we expanded, you had to sort of divide and conquer and you had more capabilities and you had more teams. So you wanted to feed them with projects. So you lowered your bar of what you would do. And then I think the clarity and focus started to dwindle.
And then we had to figure out how can we divide and conquer, but all map towards one cohesive vision, which became the next challenge. We had an environment where we really wanted to give people freedom to execute. Like I hated the top-down bureaucratic approach to creation. Now I can come to the company and say, here's my vision. Here's where I think we should go, but I'm not going to solve it.
Everyone sort of bottoms up, come up with solutions and take ownership. So we really wanted to instill that bottoms up, everyone has a voice, the best ideas will win merit, meritocratic culture. And then sometimes the bigger you get, that could lead to a little bit of drift and people doing things that maybe they shouldn't be doing or they have no or the company has no business doing.
As you scale, you have to build new systems to protect against drift.
In the early days, very few people know this, but we had every user sort of got to a point where they had a lot of matches, where it was almost like you would open the app and you're like, I don't want to meet someone new. I need to make sense of all the people who already want to connect with me. So we started shifting our focus to like post-match.
What we wanted to do is create more moments where you could get to know your matches and find opportunities for connection. So we created this product called Moments, which was sort of Instagram stories before Instagram stories. You could share a moment, like something you're doing in the real world.
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