After more than a decade shaping modern romance, Justin McLeod is leaving Hinge behind to launch his next venture: another dating app, with an AI twist, called Overtone.
Today, Hinge has more than 30 million users, with a date being set up every two seconds. But in 2011, when it launched, McLeod was just a young Harvard Business School student when he came up with the idea for an app “designed to be deleted.” And the fresh-faced twentysomething entrepreneur was so desperate for people to sign up for his app that he even bribed them with chocolate.
At the time, online dating largely took place on desktops and required real effort. The idea of swiping to find the love of your life (or a one-night stand) on your mobile phone seemed alien.
So persuading fellow students (who had no shortage of opportunities to meet people in class and dorms and at parties) to sign up for Hinge was challenging, McLeod tells Fortune.
“I remember the days of running around the college library in Washington, D.C., at this college, Georgetown, and bribing kids with Kit Kats to come try my app,” he says laughing. “We would get dozens of users a day—maybe, if that.”
Financing Hinge also required a lot of scrappiness, with McLeod recalling he had to “beg and borrow a lot” to get the app off the ground.
“I was out there networking and talking to as many people as I could and taking money from anyone who would give it to me. That’s just what it takes sometimes,” he says. “I was collecting—me—literally like, $5,000 checks and $10,000 checks to come and start Hinge.”
Hinge CEO’s big break came from a McKinsey job offer
These days, it’s hard enough landing an internship while studying—let alone walking straight into a full-time job right after graduation. But for McLeod, that wasn’t the case: He hadn’t even finished his second year of business school when McKinsey offered him a spot in its coveted grad program.
A career in consulting would have set McLeod on a path to a six-figure salary, with Glassdoor estimating that the average consultant earns between $173,000 to $233,000 a year. McLeod’s sign-up bonus alone was $12,000.
It turned out to be the big break he needed—to finally get Hinge off the ground.
“I was able to keep putting off my offer for, like, a couple of years,” he recalls, while adding that he “borrowed” the money to build his app.
“Once Hinge started to become successful, and they saw I was the founder of it, they were like, ‘You’re probably not coming to be an analyst here, are you?’ And, of course, by that time I had to pay it back.”
Why did McLeod choose the highly risky path of entrepreneurship when he could have had a comfortable career at McKinsey?
“I turned down my offer and started to work on Hinge, really because I was just so passionate about the idea. Once I started thinking about it, it was hard for me to stop. I really knew this was what I was meant to work on,” McLeod says.
Of course, it paid off: By 2015, Hinge had raised $26.35 million and had an estimated valuation of $75.5 million, before Match Group bought the company from McLeod for an undisclosed amount.
The founder treated himself and his family to a nearly $13 million apartment in New York soon after. Meanwhile, Hinge brought in $396 million in 2023, and an estimated $550 million last year.
Advice for entrepreneurial Gen Z grads
Like McLeod, young people today aren’t dreaming of holding down a nine-to-five gig after college or climbing the corporate ladder. Research consistently shows they want to be their own boss.
And they’re already making those dreams a reality: In fact, the second fastest-growing job title among Gen Z grads right now is “founder,” according to LinkedIn.
His advice for young entrepreneurs? “You have to be hopelessly idealistic and ruthlessly practical at the same time—that’s how you create something big and successful.
“Some people who are, like, too in the hopelessly idealistic camp, dream but never make something a reality, and people who are too in the ruthlessly practical camp do things but nothing that big or game-changing,” McLeod explains.
Instead, he says, successful founders like himself constantly balance the two: Essentially dream big, but “pay attention to the very practical day-to-day realities in order to make that come to life.”
Meanwhile, for Gen Zers who don’t know what they want to do career-wise after school, his advice is to stop overthinking it—just give work a go, whether that’s starting your own business or dipping your toes in the rat race.
“I think people who get too self-involved in, like, ‘What’s my career going to be? What am I going to do?’ They miss the opportunity to cultivate that passion, that interest for something out there in the world,” he says.
“I would never have figured out what I wanted if I just sat around, like, meditating about it. I had to work a summer in health care and realize, ‘That’s not it.’ I worked on a few other startup ideas before Hinge came to me, and it was a lot of figuring out what I didn’t like or what didn’t resonate with me. But each time, I got a little bit smarter and a little bit closer.”
A version of this story originally published at Fortune.com on Sept. 22, 2024.
