Name: How Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg Found the Right Chemistry With Online Dating
Uploaded: 2018-06-27
Duration: 4 min 58 s
Description: Mandy Ginsberg sits down with Fortune to talk about online dating, her personal dating experiences, and shattering the glass ceiling.

Match Group. We're in the business of finding love for people across the globe. And we have brands like Tinder, OkCupid, Meetic, which is primarily in Europe. Match, Plenty of fish that operates in Vancouver but has broad reach. We've got businesses in Brazil and Japan. Japan, really in every country across the globe, someone is using one of our apps. 12 years ago, I got a call, I was in Dallas, Texas, and I got a call from a recruiter and she said Match. com was looking for the CEO to start a startup. So, it was the second brand that they were gonna launch, which was. Really to compete against eHarmony. And so I took on that role, and I was responsible for launching one of the newest of challenger brands at the time, called Chemistry. com. We found, based on our research, that eHarmony eHarmony was very discriminatory at the time, they didn't allow same sex relationships. And also one out of five people who went on their website were rejected. And so we created this campaign which was called, Rejected By eHarmony. Nope, still gay. We were really open to bringing anyone to our website. Really took off at, I mean, one point we were shooting that campaign, I thought, I am either get fired for this? Or is it gonna really work? And it resonated. And the rest is history. We are able to really create by a distraction the time for that competitor and it really was the beginning of mass launching, incubating, buying so many new brands. [ MUSIC ] I got married really young. In fact, I got married pretty much in the year or two out of college. And I actually was divorced when I was in my late 20s. And so I was back into the dating game as a single mom with a one year old daughter. It's a lot of Experience going back. The reality is, dating's hard. I always say that dating someone you're really into is very exciting. But just dating in general can be hard. There's ups, there's downs, people ghost you. You have great dates, you have bad dates. And so me as a single mom who is dating I'm going to have the same experiences. And I think just understanding what it's like to be really excited about someone and they don't come back or they say they're not interested. When I took on that job early on at Match when i was running that chemistry brand I never sort of lost sight of that notion of what it's like to be a dater and to have those highs and lows in dating I'm a mom. I've got a 10 year old and a 20 year old in college. I talk to her a lot about dating and what it's like to date as a woman in this country and around the world. And so for me, as a female CEO running this organization, coming out with a female perspective, I think we have a responsibility to protect the women on our apps globally. And so, what are we doing to make sure that they have a great experience and a safe experience? We have a one strike you're out policy and you're banned for life. They're not just banned on the app where they actually had bad behavior, but they're banned across all of our apps. When it comes to dating apps or online dating, really, so much of Getting it right and making sure you have a great experience people come back to, it's just making sure that the female experience is great. There's so much thought that goes into the female experience. Some of it is not as overt and marketing related, so it might be a change in the algorithm. And some of them are more overt, so for example, at Meetic, which is very similar to Match in Europe, we launched a gentleman's badge. And it basically signals great behavior by men, and we've seen that Of the men that've got that badge on their profile, they get over 30 % more attention. And then on Tinder we are also introducing the ability for women to have a choice. They don't have to go first, but if they want to they can. [ MUSIC ] If you live across CEO's, fortune 500 companies or intech companies, there's not enough women. You know, we look at our organization and we have. 35 % VPs and above are women, which is far greater than most technology companies, but it needs to be at 50 %. And I think the one thing I would say is that, when you have women leadership and you have women in VP positions, etc, it is so much easier to recruit and attract other women. Because they sort of see their career progression and they feel like they They have a shot at running a division, running a company, running marketing. We've got a journey ahead of us, but there's so much opportunity for girls and women, and this is just the beginning. [ MUSIC ] I think I have the best job in the world. We have the ability to change people's lives in a really profound way. I mean we have people that are Constantly sending in wedding invitations, baby namings, like all these incredible letters that we get because people will write to us and say, my life is meaningfully different and there's now way that I would have meet this guy or this gal if it weren't for your apps. There's no other CEO job in the world where you sit down in an airplane and someone, you tell them what you do and then they start asking you about their love life so. Which is always fun. But I do think that ability to connect people and these meaningful connections on love, it's a pretty powerful mission. [ MUSIC ]

Mandy Ginsberg sits down with Fortune to talk about online dating, her personal dating experiences, and shattering the glass ceiling.