Tinder fires a happy marriage, says dating app founder Sean Rad

The dating app is widely used to cheat on spouses but its founder insists it helps us find more compatible partners before we wed.

Tinder co-founders Jonathan Badeen, left, and Sean Rad in New York last month.

Sean Rad is fed up with being the punchline. “People try to joke about it all the time,” grumbles the 29-year-old entrepreneur. “They say: ‘Oh, it’s a little hook-up thing, yadda-yadda-yadda.’ They don’t realise how much Tinder has changed the world.”

Tinder, to the uninitiated, is a dating app credited with revolutionising casual sex. Users are shown pictures of those who are purportedly single and ready to mingle within a specified radius. If you like someone, swipe right on the picture. If you don’t, swipe left.

It may sound like an adol­escent game, but in the three years since Rad and his college buddies set up the site it has spawned six billion dates.

“If you think about it, those are six billion connections that would never have existed were it not for us,” says Rad. “In that way, Tinder is changing the world.”

The night before, Tinder had picked up still more awards at a gala dinner. Yet Rad is irritated. His ego was pricked by the comedian hosting the event, who blamed the site for spreading chlamydia — and for proving that “the most important quality about someone is not their personality but their proximity”.

“It’s not just about hook-ups,” protests Rad, artfully dishevelled in a denim shirt and skinny jeans ripped over the knee. “If it was then I don’t know what that says about humanity — because we have so many users.

“There is definitely romance that forms on Tinder, and all kinds of relationships. At the core, what we are doing is just connecting people. What they decide to do with that connection is up to them. It’s no different (from) me meeting someone at a restaurant or a bar.”

Rad is entitled to feel protect­ive of his creation. Tinder has removed the stigma attached to online dating. It evolved as an amusing tool for the young and the beautiful. Leonardo DiCaprio admits using Tinder to find girls. The actress Hilary Duff invited men to find her on the site after splitting from her husband.

“If you go to New York fashion week and set your radius low, you will see it’s all models. A lot of models,” says Rad.

During the last fashion week, he says, photographers, models and fashion designers used the site to set up business meetings and exclusive parties. “It became an underground thing like a marketing tool,” Rad says.

Other people use it to find friends to go hiking with or to find recommendations for the best bars or restaurants if they are travelling for work, he claims. “Obviously there’s a connotation about dating on Tinder right now. But you see how people are using it in a variety of ways. It’s the fastest way to meet somebody.”

That’s all fine. Yet Tinder has also spawned a whole other subculture — one where men send aggressively sexual and abusive messages to women who “swipe right” with them, expecting sordid sexual favours to be offered.

Critics say Tinder is further perverting the already porn-addled­ teen generation now enter­ing the dating game.

Rad says the company has a system to eject people who cause complaints. “Tinder is reflective of people and their desires, not the other way round,” he says.

That may be true, but no one would walk into a bar and demand­ sex from a stranger in the way they do on Tinder. “But they do things that are almost as creepy,” says Rad. “They won’t be that explicit. They will make it very clear that they want to hook up. They won’t be sweet.”

Tinder has faced its own alleg­ations of sexism. Last year, Whitney Wolfe, the only woman who was part of the start-up team, filed a sexual harassment and discrim­ination suit against the company after a break-up with co-founder Justin Mateen. It was settled out of court, reportedly for $US1 million.

Shortly afterwards the media mogul Barry Diller, head of Tinder’s parent company, oversaw a process that resulted in Rad moving from chief executive to president. A former Amazon executive is now the boss, with Rad left to oversee the creative end of the opera­tion and Mateen working as a part-time consultant.

Rad insists this is what he wanted all along and that he had already told Diller he needed someone to hold his hand, given the company’s breakneck growth.

Tinder is worth up to $US5 billion ($6.5bn), and Rad is believed to hold a 10 per cent stake. He talks about 2012, the year Tinder was conceived, as if it were decades ago.

Rad and seven of his pals were in a California restaurant wishing they had girls to talk to. “I said: ‘Well, there’s a table of girls over there and they’re cute’,” says Rad.

“That’s when it hit me. They’re with their friends — it might be weird, it might not be the right timing, I might get rejected.

“So then I realised the problem: there are all these opportunities, there are cute girls in the room and we’re not talking to them. There are all these missed opportunities.” Rad had just sold his stake in Adly, a social-media advertising service he had founded, for several million dollars. He had begun working for a start-up incubator bankrolled by Diller, who also owns match.com.

They created a prototype of Tinder, initially called Matchbox, at a day-long competition inside the firm. It then began with a soft launch at university campuses, where Rad and Mateen encouraged the good-looking party anim­als to sign up first.

The breakthrough came when athletes at last year’s Sochi Winter Olympics started using it.

Many trendsetting millennials say Tinder is getting past its sell-by date. They are turning to newer sites such as happn, which uses a phone’s tracking systems to link you to people who regularly pass by the same spots.

Rad is working on a search engine­ that will find matches by scanning common friends and “people who are similar to you on a number of metrics”. It will learn partners of your “type”, based on who you have swiped previously.

Another new feature in the works aims to address the problem of how to start a conversation with a stranger in the same room.

“It’s not just transformative for Tinder, it’s transformative for society­ if it works,” he says. “So we’re very excited.”

Rad says he has a “higher calling”. He has started working with some of the world’s top sociol­ogists to decipher the power of the tool he has created.

His case for the social benefits of Tinder is tortuous.

Surveys suggest that almost half the people using it do so to cheat on their partners; yet Rad claims that through Tinder he can reduce the divorce rate.

Thanks to Tinder, he argues, people always know there are plenty more fish in the sea. So they don’t need to settle for unhappy relationships that would lead to divorce.

“Courtship has evolved,” Rad says. “People nowadays are a lot quicker in getting to a conclusion on whether or not they have a strong-enough connection with someone. It all has to do with acces­s.”

When humans lived in small communities, we settled for what was available, he says. Now that more of us are globally connected, “there’s more optionality’’.

“(People) take their time and they don’t settle.

“We have so many people who email us to say: ‘I was in a horrible relationship, I was afraid to leave it, but I left and a few days later I was happy and Tinder has helped me meet new people. Tinder saved my life.’ ”

The Sunday Times