Photo Illustration: WIRED
Sean Rad, founder of the red hot dating app Tinder, has been removed from his role as CEO of the company by Tinder’s parent company, IAC. Rad will stay on as president of Tinder and a member of the board.
According to Forbes, which first reported the story on Tuesday, Rad was thoroughly blindsided by the news when he found out just a few weeks ago. The decision coincided with the launch of Tinder’s new premium service, the dating app’s first paid product. In light of that move, it seems IAC is hoping to bring in a more experienced CEO to lead the company through its next phase. As Rad put it to Forbes: “We’re looking for an Eric Schmidt-like person.”
The news is yet another example of the chokehold that IAC, Barry Diller’s media conglomerate, has over the online and mobile dating industry. Its Match Group, which includes platforms like Match.com and OkCupid, is quickly becoming a key driver of IAC’s overall revenue, responsible for raking in $230.2 million in the most recent quarter. Recently, Match Group grew even larger after acquiring another dating company, HowAboutWe.
But of Match Group’s children, Tinder is undoubtedly the golden child. The company has achieved 600 percent growth over the last year. It has 30 million registered users who swipe through 1.2 billion profiles a day. IAC doesn’t want anything messing with its mission to make money from that gargantuan audience.
Lately, however, there’s been plenty of turmoil among Tinder’s original leadership, after a former employee, Whitney Wolfe, sued her ex-boyfriend and former Tinder CMO Justin Mateen, charging him with sexual harassment. The case was settled out of court, with neither party admitting fault. And yet, it seems, IAC would rather keep a safe distance from such distractions.
IAC has owned Tinder all along, but Rad had the freedom to run the company like his own internal startup. Now, that will be up to IAC, and the problem with that is that in the past, when IAC has acquired fast-growing dating companies—from Match to OkCupid—they tend to stagnate and lose their luster. That’s one reason why, in recent years, there’s been relatively little excitement and innovation in the dating industry–that is, until Tinder came along.
To replace the person who built that excitement—and to do it at the very time when you’re trying to convince customers to pay for a free service for the first time—is a risky move by IAC. It’s riskier still considering Tinder spawned a wave of similar apps in the mobile dating space, including formidable competitors like Hinge. If IAC messes with Tinder’s success, there are now a slew of other apps that will be more than capable of taking its place.
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