For about 20 minutes, Madonna turned Times Square into a club, hosting a pop-up concert this month to promote her 15th studio album. To help spread the word, her manager reached out to Grindr.
Grindr, the dating app used mostly by gay and bisexual men, bills itself as “the global gayborhood in your pocket.” When the service started, in 2009, it was novel to use smartphone geolocation to identify people near you. Grindr, which predated dating apps like Tinder, Hinge and Bumble, was early to that strategy.
Despite becoming a mainstay in the gay community, the company failed to keep up with the latest in online dating. The app’s user interface looked tired, and it loaded slowly. It cycled through executives and owners, including the forced sale by its onetime Chinese parent company after U.S. regulators said the app could be used to blackmail or influence American officials.
In 2022, Grindr hired George Arison as chief executive, to help the company go public that year.
“Grindr was great as a product and had great profitability and good revenue,” Mr. Arison, 48, said. But the vision for the product and the coherence of its story for investors were lacking, he added, “even though the company was going public”
Mr. Arison, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur who co-founded the ride-hailing app Curb and the used-car site Shift, was an early adopter of Grindr. In fact, he switched from a BlackBerry to an iPhone in 2009 in order to be able to use the app.
Under Mr. Arison, Grindr has evolved from mostly a hookup app to one that also focuses on social connection more broadly for gay men. He has also restructured how the company operates: All but 20 of the company’s 180 employees have come aboard since he took over, and he pushes them to use A.I. agents to augment their work. The company aims for artificial intelligence to eventually produce all of its new code, and Mr. Arison says the company will become “leaner as time goes by.”
The platform has more than 15 million monthly active users and increased revenue nearly 30 percent last year, to $440 million. Mr. Arison recently added chairman to his titles and received a multimillion-dollar stock award, with the company citing “a time of growing momentum.”
But Grindr’s stock has had a rocky ride since it went public in November 2022. It is down more than 30 percent over the past year as investors sour on dating apps and weigh whether Grindr’s reinvention will take hold.
The Madonna concert was an important moment. Grindr engineers livestreamed the concert — a first for the company — and more than 110,000 viewers tuned in on the app.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Grindr says it is turning into an “A.I.-native company.” What does that mean?
Most of the start-ups that are being created with A.I. are for enterprise, not for consumers. I felt like that’s a huge opportunity for us. We can shape the A.I. revolution and be one of the first places where people experience products that are born in A.I. mode.
Grindr has 180 employees. I think we can even be leaner as time goes by. I don’t think I’m going to let people go, but we might not add as many as we would otherwise because of the productivity gains that we’re seeing.
What made you think that approach was necessary?
I host a dinner every few months with different A.I. founders. I would talk to these five- or 10-person companies about how productive their engineers were. We are nothing like this.
As in, your engineers were behind?
Yeah. Then I got myself an A.I. tutor.
Like, a person?
A guy named Evan. He is a young engineer who joined an A.I. company out of college. I hired Evan to coach me on what gen A.I. can and cannot do.
With him, I thought about what it would take for Grindr to be as aggressive at using coding agents as some of these companies that were very young.
How did you get your employees to start using A.I. so aggressively?
I just imposed it. I got a lot of opposition. Then we hired a new head of engineering in May of 2025, and part of his charge was to make this company be at the very forefront of adapting A.I. and how it writes code. In July, we hosted a team off site and brought in tutors for A.I. After that, it just clicked for people.
Have there been any setbacks in rolling out A.I. so widely? If so, what did you learn from them?
We learned that A.I. agents learn off the code base that you have. Because that code had so many bugs in it, it put similar types of bugs in as it was writing code.
We had to dramatically reduce the amount of lines of code. There was a lot of dormant code that was no longer necessary.
How do you personally use A.I. in your role as a C.E.O.?
I put all my content in ChatGPT: all my documents, stuff that’s shared with me, stuff that I create, the emails I draft.
When I get things from team members that imply confusion, I can easily input that and say, “Here’s my five bullet points, and now write me a really clear email that explains what I want done and what I don’t want done.”
Grindr these days sees itself more as a social network. I think many people still think of it as a hookup app. How do you move the perception of the company?
The first big product that we built when I got here was Right Now, which very directly leads to a hookup. I say this because people sometimes say is Grindr changing, but if we’re not very good at the core, then nothing else is going to work.
But people were already using Grindr in many, many other ways.
Grindr has always played a really big role in health information for gay people. PrEP would not be where it is in terms of adoption and acceptance if Grindr hadn’t put on its profile for every user: Are you on PrEP or not?
We maintain a Grindr Health portal, which is often the only place in many countries to access information about gay health and sexual health. We think Grindr Health is going to be a huge part of our company story over the long term.
What do you think investors are missing about Grindr? The stock is down significantly over the past year.
There are investors who probably want to be in, but within their partnership or firm there is a reluctance to invest in dating products. I also think there’s a gay stock discount, honestly. We totally suffer from that.
It gives me a lot of pride that we’re one of the most profitable companies in the world and one of the most lean businesses, because that tells people what’s possible for this community.
Do you see space for advocacy for the gay community in your role as a business leader?
My husband and I have two kids. Bringing surrogacy and IVF costs down is one very important project for me. At Grindr, we cover up to $300,000 of costs to have a child.
We’re actively working to get legislation passed to get those expenses down.
Do you think other business should play an active role in politics?
You need to choose your lanes. I don’t comment on politics to just randomly comment on politics. I think your policy views should be tied to what your mission as a business is.
Tell me about your upbringing.
I grew up in Georgia — the country. When I was born, it was the Soviet Union.
My dad is a nuclear physicist. He spent years in Siberia working on nuclear weaponry. He would give me lectures about how the Soviet Union would collapse one day and there were only two ways to survive: Speak English or be really good at shooting a gun. Since he didn’t expect me to be really good at shooting, I had no choice but to be good at speaking English.
How did you make your way to America?
In 1988, an American couple came to Georgia. They had created an organization called Project Harmony, which is still around, that took American kids to the Soviet Union on two-week exchanges, and then brought Soviet kids to the U.S.
I was about 11 and got to know them. They left me a book of prep schools. I wrote letters — applications to these prep schools — via fax machine. I got into a couple of schools and got full rides, and went to school in Maine.
I learned a lot about making things happen out of nothing.
How did coming to America, without your family, at that young age shape you?
A gay kid shows up in 1992, but pretty much all I’ve got going for me is that I speak English. Now I’ve run two public companies, and I’m married to a guy and I have two kids. That’s pretty incredible, and nowhere else is that possible.
You’re one of the few openly gay C.E.O.s of a large company. Have you always been comfortable with that part of your identity?
I took me a while to come out. It took years to tell my dad. In 2018, my Wikipedia page said that I’m gay, but my dad and I had not had this conversation. I’m with my soon-to-be husband. We have embryos frozen and surrogates identified. We have our wedding date scheduled — and my dad still doesn’t know.
But he handled it super well. He came to our wedding, and he lives with us now.
It’s time for the lightning round. What’s something that you’ve learned from your youngest employees?
I definitely have a hard time with some of the fashion choices, like the very baggy stuff. I find that not to be super appealing, but I’m being told that it is very appealing.
How do you sign off your emails?
“Thanks.” I say thanks even when there’s no need to thank somebody.
If you weren’t doing this job, what would you be doing instead?
I would probably be starting another company.
What’s your advice for running effective meetings?
Pre-reads. Meetings are way more effective when materials are sent out in advance.
What are your most productive hours?
I’m very big on doing my homework at night. I work a lot from 9 until 1. After my kids are in bed, I read everything for the next day.
