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Tinder CEO's First Comments Since Settling Sex Harassment Lawsuit: 'Be More Inclusive'

This article is more than 9 years old.

The mobile dating app Tinder has been famous lately more for the explosive sexual harassment lawsuit by early employee or cofounder Whitney Wolfe than for the runaway growth of its service that has attracted the intense interest of investors.

Now, the lawsuit has been settled, and cofounder Justin Mateen, with whom Wolfe had a relationship, has resigned. At the same time, Tinder, majority owned by IAC, is reported to be in talks with Benchmark Capital for a round of funding that would value it at $750 million. Lots of news!

So an interview with Tinder cofounder and CEO Sean Rad this morning at the TechCrunch Disrupt startup conference looked to be interesting. He didn't reveal much about potential funding rounds or how it will make money, but it's clear he thinks Tinder could have handled the maelstrom inside the company much, much better. Some of his paraphrased comments:

Q: You just settled a lawsuit with your early employee Whitney Wolfe. What’s going on with Justin?

A: Justin is and always will be a cofounder of Tinder and he is my best friend. Justin decided to resign.

Q: What is your definition of a cofounder?

A: There are so many definitions of a cofounder. My advice would be to be more inclusive.

Q: Where does Whitney stand?

A: Whitney was hired early on to work on marketing. She did a phenomenal job, particularly with respect to executing our strategy on college campuses.

Q: That’s a little bit of a skirt, but whatever.

A: It’s factual.

Q: What would you do differently?

A: Omigod, I’d do so many things differently. Justin and Whitney were my best friends. Creating boundaries early on would have been healthy.

Q: Has your attitude toward working with friends changed?

A: It’s just about everyone having a clear understanding of what their role is. Collectively we’re all working towards building a better Tinder.

Q: How is Moments, the newest product [essentially selfie posts to connections], going?

A: We’re blown away by the results. It’s exceeded what we originally thought. We do 1.2 billion swipes a day and we create over 13 million matches a day. We’ve created 3 billion matches so far.

Q: How can you use Tinder better?

A: Be yourself. People want to post model headshots. That’s not what people connect with.

Q: How’s Tinder going to make money?

A: You’ll find out.

Q: Tinder’s a more intimate app on my phone. To throw advertising into that would be upsetting to people, so how are you thinking of inserting that?

A: If we’re going to charge for something, does this help users even if we didn’t make money? We can add value to the user experience and charge for it and people will be willing to pay for it.

Q: By the end of 2014?

A: No date. We’ll get there when we get there.

Q: Define the relationship between Tinder and IAC.

A: Every company has shareholders. There’s always a controlling group. Sometimes it’s founders, sometimes it’s VCs. We’re all aligned from the board down and that’s what’s important.

Q: Investors want in on Tinder. Are you going to raise money or not? We hear Benchmark is interested in investing at a $750 million valuation.

A: Rumors. We’re in the fortunate position where we have internal sources of funding We don’t need to raise outside sources of capital, but it’s something we think about often.

Q: How important is it to have a tiger in your photos?

A: That’s our revenue model, actually. It’s weird.

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