Fifteen Years After Founding Grindr, Joel Simkhai Has ‘Unfinished Business’

“Of course, we have Glow Job here,” said Joel Simkhai, Motto’s CEO and one of the bar’s older patrons. He gestured to a drag queen with a long pink wig and flower-shaped pasties, who was sprawled on the DJ booth’s ledge. Simkhai, 46, in a blue short-sleeved shirt with buttons undone to his midchest, bobbed his head to Kylie Minogue’s “Padam Padam”—the second of five times I heard the new gay party anthem that weekend.

“Motto is probably the 100th gay hookup app out there,” the founder admitted. But it’s trying to be a more premium version—a kind of Grindr-meets-Hinge-meets-Raya that authenticates people’s photos, serves up 20 profiles a day for people to browse, and filters users by desired kinks and sexual positions. Its most defining feature, in truth, might be Simkhai himself.

Fifteen years ago, Simkhai started Grindr, the near–billion-dollar behemoth of the gay hookup economy. The service, an early app store success story, never really lost its lead in the gay dating space, and the Israel-born Simkhai sold his stake in the firm in 2018, at a price that valued Grindr at nearly $400 million. The sale, to a Chinese gaming company, minted him hundreds of millions of dollars, but he also sold because it had grown too big for him. He didn’t enjoy the day-to-day management drudgery of running a juggernaut.

Since his exit from Grindr, Simkhai has mostly disappeared from public view. After spending more than a decade in Los Angeles, he moved back to New York a couple years ago, got married and had a son. Grindr continued to grow—and to deal with the problems Simkhai never fixed himself, including criticism that it facilitated racism and transphobia, concerns over data security, and a litany of technical glitches. Under his ownership, the app allowed users to sort others by ethnicity to better filter for their sexual interests (a policy it later changed). Grindr’s next owners sold the location data of its users. In 2020, the U.S. government forced its sale from its Chinese owners over data security concerns, putting it in the hands of a Singapore-based private equity firm. (Simkhai said he now regrets the sale, but two Chinese firms were by far the highest bidders.)

Grindr’s stock price has fallen by about half since a special-purpose acquisition company took it public last year, but is trading at more than double the price at which Simkhai sold his stake. “It’s lower than it should be,” said Simkhai, who doesn’t own any more shares. “Partially because of the sex and I think partially because of the gay.”

Despite its baggage, Grindr has remained omnipresent on millions of phone screens as the main platform that powers gay men’s search for sex, relationships and friends (but mostly sex). The firm, which generates cash, reported about $200 million in revenue last year, through ads and subscriptions.

Simkhai’s new venture seemed to me like a Dr.-Frankenstein-regrets-his-monster kind of story. He had a more nuanced take. “Motto is my attempt to finish what I started,” he allowed, but “in a way that I think could be better.”

This summer, Simkhai plans to start raising money for Motto from outside investors, something he never had to do with his first company. Grindr attracted advertising revenue from the get-go, which meant he never really needed the cash offered by venture capitalists. Besides, he didn’t want investors—especially straight ones—telling him what to do. “I didn’t want to have to answer to someone else who might have told me, ‘Yeah, don’t do this, don’t do this,’” he said. That reluctance made him somewhat of an outsider in polite tech society, and he continued to resist “vanity metrics” about fundraising numbers and hiring counts, he said.

Unlike Grindr in its early days, Motto isn’t making money yet through ads or subscriptions. The marketplace is too crowded and the value proposition too murky. But, on the plus side, Simkhai is more established now, and his wealth and fame means he can select investors he thinks share his vision. He’s friends with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, who is also gay and allowed Simkhai to invest several million dollars in OpenAI and its venture fund this year. Simkhai said he is looking for investors from the tech or Hollywood worlds—ones who will shrug off the admittedly poor climate for startup fundraising as well as any fears that Motto will be controversial.

“I can’t imagine that investors say, ‘Oh, that’s too risqué for us,’” he said. “As long as we’re in the guidelines of Apple and Google”—which prohibit nudity in public areas of apps, like profile photos—Simkhai believes that Motto won’t offend anyone too much.

Then again, he might push some limits. One tactic to fuel growth, he said, is more offline marketing, like sponsoring parties at gay bars on the Lower East Side. “And one of the things we’re going to start experimenting with is doing different things with groups,” he said. “This can be group workshops, this can be group sex—using physical spaces to get people together.”

So Motto may sponsor orgies?

“Absolutely,” he said, smiling. “You can curate an orgy. We have a good set of data.”

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For at least one night over a decade ago, Simkhai felt like he belonged in tech’s upper echelon. At TechCrunch’s annual Crunchies award show in 2012, Grindr went up against Airbnb, Uber and Foursquare for “best location application” at the dawn of the startup boom that would churn out hundreds of unicorns. And, to the shock of many people present, Grindr won. Simkhai, wearing a suit jacket over a t-shirt with Grindr’s yellow mask logo, told the audience at the San Francisco concert hall, in a slightly shaking voice, that it was a dream come true.

What sticks with him from that night, however, is that as he strode to the stage, he could hear some people laughing. “What’s that all about?” he asked me last week, rhetorically, in a quiet hotel lobby in Greenwich Village. He was hurt in the moment but also determined not to care. “To me, it’s just like, I don’t give a fuck. Our users love us. They complain about us, but they come back every day.”

Simkhai tuned out his critics when he ran Grindr, which had virtually no barriers for users to sign up. (It reported about 3.3 million daily active users by 2018, when Simkhai sold it.) But that openness had a dark side, leading to scores of blank profiles, catfishing, unsolicited dick pics, racism and transphobia. Vanity Fair called Grindr the “world’s biggest, scariest gay bar.” Simkhai remembers that the criticism took him by surprise. “It was so not my reality,” he said. He avoided making significant changes to the app, and people kept using it. Simkhai reveled in the positive stories he heard from users—funny hookups, new relationships and friendships, even plenty of marriages.

Only now does he realize the full consequences of his hands off approach, especially with users so glued to the app. Astoundingly, Grindr users spend more than an hour a day on the app every day, on average. “It’s not good for your mental health,” he said. “And it’s not good for your time. But from a business perspective, it’s good.”

Simkhai designed Motto to be less addictive and time-consuming. Users get new batches of men to scroll through only once a day. They get notified only when someone likes their profile, and then they can proceed to chat with or ignore that person. And they can trust that the photos they see are real and current, affixed with a time stamp from when they were taken. The matching, in theory, will lead to less bad behavior and more healthy, consensual sex with people looking for the same.

Only available currently in New York and Miami, the app is also using profile batches as a way to counteract the obvious problem that it has far fewer users compared to other hookup apps like Grindr or Scruff, which show users a grid of hundreds of guys (often just their torsos) to scroll through. (Grindr “is one of the most amazing products ever built. So we are keeping it as it is,” its new CEO, George Arison, told me last year.) Motto just introduced a “map view” for people to view the location of other users, but only those with whom they’ve already matched. If you’re kind of picky, that can be a sparse map.

Motto’s lack of scale is presenting other growing pains. Men who really want a quick fix right now have an increasingly popular option in the cruising app Sniffies, which the app stores ban. (People access Sniffies as a web-based app that they can install on their phones’ home screens.) Simkhai acknowledges that Motto hasn’t fulfilled its vision yet. “A lot of people are looking to hook up right now,” he said. “We just got more work to do.”

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At 5 p.m. at the Lower East Side bar, my phone buzzed with a prod from Motto notifying me a new batch of profiles was available for me to browse. There was a 6-foot “vers” top in Long Island City, Queens, who wanted casual hookups, and a 5-foot, 5-inch bottom in Bushwick, Brooklyn, interested in friends with benefits.

Simkhai said he is taking a more heavy-handed approach in building Motto than he did with Grindr. “The ground rules are you have to be respectful,” he said. Users also have to upload current pictures. “You don’t know how many times we reject photos that are 5 years old, 7 years old, 8 years old,” he said. He sometimes even approves users’ photos himself, although the company also says it uses AI tools for image detection. (Much bigger companies have introduced similar features; Match Group, which owns Hinge and Tinder, this month launched Archer, a gay hookup app that also authenticates photos.)

Simkhai and his co-founder, former Uber product manager Alex Hostetler, started Motto with just Simkhai’s money, a few employees, a software development team in Argentina and off-the-shelf tools that make it much easier to build an app today than it was in 2008. Back then, Simkhai started Grindr with $1,000 and a hobbyist developer. Its code base was archaic. “Some guy in Poland was one of the few people who knew the language,” he said. The bugginess didn’t really matter. Grindr was the first mover in the gay hookup space—it amassed scale almost without trying.

Motto will be a much tougher follow-up act. Simkhai told me he regularly talks to his “future self”—in this case, “70-year-old Joel”—and asks what he wishes he had done differently, and how he ultimately wants to cement his legacy. His success with Grindr, he said, was largely an accident: “I wanted to solve a personal problem. I built it on a shoestring budget, and it turned into this huge thing,” he said.

Now that he’s older and wiser, he has learned new management tactics, like “managing towards objectives” and “firing fast”—things he plans to implement at Motto. He’s trying to be more intentional about what he’s building this time. “I don’t think I’ve ever quite grasped what my life has been—what Grindr is,” he said. “Maybe you call it unfinished business.”