Most young people are told the path to prosperity is to study hard, maybe go to college, and get a good job. Not Grindr CEO George Arison. Born in the 1980s Soviet Union, his father told him he had only two shots at success—one of which was learning to be proficient with a firearm.
“My dad would come to say good night and spend 30 minutes talking to me about the fact that, in his view, the Soviet Union would collapse by the time I was 15, and the only people who would succeed if the Soviet Union collapsed were people who either spoke English or knew how to shoot guns,” Arison exclusively tells Fortune.
“And seeing that he did not expect me to know how to shoot guns or be good at it, my only alternative was to be really, really good at speaking English.”
While other kids his age were raised on tightly controlled messaging, he says he was fortunate to have access to global news channels—and that’s how he perfected his English, opening him up to a world of possibilities when he eventually moved to the U.S. as a teen.
“I had a great grandfather who lived in the same apartment building that we lived in, across the hall, and he had been a very senior officer in the Soviet military during World War II, so as a result, he had special privileges,” he explains, while adding that one of those privileges was access to a radio that would sometimes catch non-Soviet radio frequencies.
“So oftentimes, when something was happening, he would be able to listen to Voice of America…and so I could actually absorb some of this stuff in ways that most other kids could not.”
Later, Arison’s grandad similarly had access to cable before others. “The two cable channels you got were CNN and C-SPAN, which I think is really ironic with government sanctioning…My parents would never let me watch TV, but they would let me watch this because it was great to practice English.”
By the age of 12, Arison had memorized the full names of every member of Congress—and two years later, in 1992, the Soviet Union dissolved. But just before, he had successfully applied to a boarding school in Maine, thanks to an American exchange family. He used the only public fax machine in Tbilisi to smuggle his application across the border, setting him on a path few could imagine from a city still behind the Iron Curtain.
Grindr CEO says Gen Z’s career expectations are ‘out of whack’ with reality
Like many immigrant U.S. students, Arison’s free time was spent working multiple jobs. It’s the one thing that separated him from the majority of his classmates, he recalls. One of the jobs he held was working at the college campus’s café until the early hours of the morning. Often, he’d return to the dorm after finishing his shift at around 4 a.m. and still be up for class later, like everyone else.
He also navigated the challenges of being a gay man in a new country, finding guidance from older gay men—mentors who helped him navigate both personal and professional growth.
Arison made his first entrepreneurial mark by founding Taxi Magic, now called Curb. He sold it for an undisclosed amount before taking the reins at Grindr—the LGBTQ+ dating app with 14 million monthly users, in October 2022—landing a $1-million-a-year salary, plus bonus and stock options.
And he says his success, in part, is thanks to those early hardships he experienced. Now, as a CEO, it’s something he looks out for in talent.
“I think that life being difficult teaches you a lot of challenging things, and showing that you overcame those challenges is oftentimes very appealing to people like me,” Arison says. But in reality, he’s taken stock of the fact that many Gen Zers lack that grit.
In his eyes, having access to the world’s information at their fingertips has created a generation of young people who think they’re experts, without having put the work in. And seeing twentysomething influencers with millions in the bank only adds to that delusion.
“The expectations around ‘Hey, I read this in Wikipedia, so I’m an expert in sales,’ is very different from anything I ever experienced,” he explains, while adding that their expectations for promotions and progression are “out of whack with reality.”
“And then the second thing is, I think people want to get credit for how difficult their life might have been…But if you view it as, because my life was difficult, I deserve XYZ, you really hurt yourself.”
Grindr CEO’s advice for Gen Z: Be patient and willing to put the work in
Like the CEOs of Pret and Cisco, Arison stresses the importance of learning the ropes first, and mastering the unglamorous early roles before worrying about a promotion.
And for those racing toward the corner office far too early, he offers a reality check: Most companies have a single CEO and a long queue of people with decades of experience competing for that spot. The average age of a Fortune 500 CEO is around 57, not the early twenties.
“Everything I really know is either because I learned it myself or I learned it from my mentors,” the CEO stresses. “I did not learn how to raise capital because I read about raising capital. I learned how to raise capital because I watched my mentor, and then I learned how to do that from him. It was a learning process.
“And I had no expectations that I would have my boss’s job at 27 years old,” Arison adds. “Only the truly exceptional ones will break out and become amazing—that’s an exception to the rule.
“So my advice would be: Be a lot more cognizant that learning a professional skill set is almost all about apprenticeship. You need to be very willing to put in the work that it takes. Find really good mentors—seek them out—and learn from them.”
