Okay. Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Nathan Feather, Morgan Stanley Small and Midcap Internet Analyst, and I'm pleased to be joined by Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Match Group. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me, Nathan.
Before we begin, a few quick housekeeping items. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley research disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. Please also note Match's safe harbor during this presentation and during the question and answer session, we may discuss our outlook and future performance. These forward-looking statements may be preceded by words such as we expect, we believe, we anticipate, or similar statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties. Our actual results could differ materially from the views expressed today. Some of these have been set forth in our periodic reports filed with the SEC. Today, we may discuss certain non-GAAP financial metrics. Reconciliations of the most directly comparable GAAP financial metrics are provided in the published materials on our IR website.
These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. With that, we'll take it off.
That's the fastest I've ever heard it done. That's nice work. That's like the airplane safety talk, and you did it really fast.
Hopefully the airplane safety talk is a little slower, but All right. Spencer, now a year into your time here, tell us what are some of the major changes and accomplishments the team has had, and how those learnings have evolved your view on the business and opportunity?
We've made a lot of progress in a short period of time. I'll start with something really important to me and really important to any product-led turnaround, which is a little squishy and maybe too touchy-feely for a Wall Street audience. We have made a lot of progress on employee engagement and getting great people to be properly organized and motivated and to care deeply and feel that they can do their best work.
You know, Tinder, for example, we did an employee engagement survey about 6 months ago and then about one month ago. The answer to the battery of questions about would you recommend working here to a friend, do you feel confidence in leadership, is this a great place to work, those types of things, grew about between 10 and 20 points in just a six-month period, which is really unheard of. That's really important. It all starts with that. The other thing that we've done really well is we've made a ton of progress on the product roadmap. What we're shipping now for Tinder is innovative, it is consumer-centric, it is solving real user problems, and we're seeing that in a lot of the data. We see this with Double Date, which is a really important feature for Tinder.
We see this in our recommendation algorithm improvements. We see this in better app stability. We made a lot of progress there as well. You know, we've got a big product event next Thursday, which is the first time we've ever done a product demo event. I'm very excited about it. We'll have some news to announce there around the product as well.
Okay, great. Well, you're just starting to see green shoots on Tinder, as you mentioned. You know, with leading indicators like Sparks, now down just 5% year-on-year and Sparks coverage up 4% in December. Can you help us chart the path back to stable user growth, and what are some of the key milestones you're working towards and the timeline that comes with that?
I mean, Sparks are a metric that we care a lot about. That's a conversation that goes back and forth 6 or more times. The milestones that we have to drive in order to really improve user outcomes are making Tinder a safe place where people feel they can come meet new people in a, in a way that resonates with young users. You know, let's talk about safety for a moment. Tinder had a real spam and bot problem, and it's always going to be a challenge because as the largest dating app, we attract a lot of bad actors that come to try to take advantage of our audience. We've built a lot of important technology, including Face Check, which is a facial verification product, which significantly reduces the incidents by about 60% of people's interactions with bad actors.
We made a lot of progress on trust and safety, but still more work to do. We spend about $125 million a year every year trying to make our apps the safest way to meet new people. In terms of our branding and marketing, we've also changed a lot of our marketing tactics at Tinder. In particular, where previously a lot of our marketing spend was up funnel to drive awareness of Tinder, not so much down funnel at the user acquisition level. Tinder has no awareness problem. Everybody knows what Tinder is. The branding challenge that we have at Tinder is not around awareness, it's around reconsideration.
We've shifted a lot of the marketing mix towards down funnel, trying to make it product-focused, so telling users about this feature or that feature, about our safety initiatives or about Double Date or other product features, or just very direct response associated. A TikTok of a woman doing a get ready with me video saying, "Tinder is great. It seems like the guys there are better than ever. You should download Tinder now." That's an example of a bottom funnel UA, user acquisition media spend that's very different from a billboard or a TV ad that's top of funnel. We've changed our marketing mix and our marketing tactics as well.
Okay. As you're going through this process, you know, one of the hallmarks has been Project Aurora. help us break down what that program is for people that aren't familiar, the goals of the program and early learning so far.
Sure. We decided to throw everything at Australia. Make Australia be the best Tinder that it could be, and we call that Project Aurora. I'm not sure who named it or why it's called Aurora. But it's, you know, that's what the Australia initiative is. It's product and marketing related. Starting with product, there are features in Australia and that are not available in other countries, features like Chemistry, which is an AI-driven single drop where it connects to the consumer's Camera Roll.
It goes through my 110,000 photos that I have on my phone, and it pulls out insights like I like dogs and Chinese food and the beach and hikes, things that are buried in my Camera Roll. It's almost like, you know, what a palm reader would do, but now we're reading the camera, and this window to my soul is telling me everything about me. It's driving compatible matches based on the photos that are on her Camera Roll. That's how Chemistry works. That's only available in Australia right now. We'll be expanding that elsewhere shortly. That's an example of something in Aurora. Aurora also has differentiated marketing where that was the first market where we shifted from this top-of-funnel brand advertising to bottom-of-funnel user acquisition. We've also done different recommendation algorithms in Australia.
We've built out a number of other features that are only been available in Australia. I think investors have been keying on it, and we've been trying to give as much transparency as possible about the green shoots that we're seeing in Australia. On the last earnings call, I gave a couple good examples. The gender balance has improved. The Sparks Coverage, Sparks and MAU have improved quite a bit in Australia and so that's that's very encouraging.
Yeah, that's great. Coming out of that 4Q call, a lot of investors were surprised that the 4Q global trends looked relatively similar to those in Australia. Is that what you expected so far? Can you help us understand the puts and takes of why Australia wouldn't be tracking Australia substantially ahead?
The reason is that we, like, keyed up, we teed up Australia and Aurora as a separate, kind of a separate, you know, whatever, playpen.
Mm-hmm.
We've been impatient. I've been impatient, Australia doesn't actually have as many differences as the rest of the world as I think maybe investors think. I think investors think that Aurora is, like, really this walled garden.
Mm-hmm
T hat's totally separate. You know, a lot of the features, we've been launching in other countries too.
Yeah.
I think that's maybe why the Australia differences aren't that radically different than the rest of the world.
Yeah. Okay. Makes sense. Now thinking of that product event you mentioned next week in Los Angeles, I'm sure we'll learn a lot more, but from a high level, as we think about the Tinder roadmap, what are your main priorities from a user perspective in 2026, and what are the one or two features that you think could be the most material?
One of the main priorities is helping people showcase themselves better. A Tinder profile of somebody and a Hinge profile of that same person, and y-you wouldn't know that they're the same person sometimes. On Hinge, they look interesting and charismatic and amazing, and on Tinder, they look mediocre. It's the same person. The reason for that is 15 years ago, when Tinder started, its ease of use, its quick profile creation was a feature, not a bug. You know, you could, within minutes, create your profile on Tinder, and it was a response to eHarmony and Match, which had this really long onboarding. Now the result 15 years later is a lot of kind of, you know, incomplete or unimpressive or uninteresting profiles of people that look mediocre.
Hinge, on the other hand, has always had a really complex onboarding. It ends up feeling like a better place with better dating outcomes. We've been raising the bar on Tinder profiles. We are doing products like Camera Roll. I already described how Camera Roll in Australia with Chemistry is impacting your matches through the Chemistry product. Camera Roll is also going to be impacting your profile creation and pulling those insights from your Camera Roll into your profile. We're testing other ways to bring information from your profile, qualitative information, so your answers to prompts up into the photo carousel to give them more prominence and a number of other features, including helping users indicate what about the person they're interested in.
Hmm
Rather than just I'm interested in the person.
Mm-hmm.
This is something that women in particular really want. They don't want to just know that a guy says they are interested in you. They want to know, what was it about me? That is the beginning of a conversation because you then know that that's the commonality of where the conversation begins. We'll be showing off a lot of these things next Thursday, but there's a whole set of work around improving profile creation and in order to generate more Sparks. I mean, there's so much to answer your question. I'm trying to figure out how to focus on it. You know, the other big one I'll quickly hit is the recommendation algorithm.
Mm-hmm
.W hich is the beating heart of any dating app, right? We've seen how important the recs algo has been to TikTok or to Snap or to Instagram or to YouTube. I mean, in those cases, their business goal is to drive engagement and time spent because they're ad-supported, right? You know, in the case of Zillow, its recs algo is really important. Figuring out which houses to show is very important because they're trying to do it in service of generating leads to real estate agents. That's how they monetize. In the case of Spotify, its recs algo is really important, and what they're optimizing for is user satisfaction because they're trying to drive retention of a subscription product. Our recommendation algorithm was historically quite focused on monetization-
Mm-hmm
because that was the priority that was set from the board and from the leadership team that we should prioritize short-term business results. With my joining, we've been much more focused on driving user outcomes, and we've been able to point the recommendation algorithm team more towards user outcomes and improve match quality, improve Sparks Coverage, improve number of Sparks by changing whom we show to whom. We see that, you know, we see that impact on retention very significantly. That's another big area of focus that we've made a lot of progress in.
With that comes your focus on user givebacks. Within the 2026 guidance, you budget about $60 million of user givebacks, largely back-half weighted. What's leading to that cadence kind of back half versus first half? Are there any specific updates that you think could cause some more material ahead, whether it's the recommendation engine or something else?
Yeah. I mean, I'll give you an example from. I was in New York yesterday for our board meeting. I got in late last night. On the plane, I was reading an example of a test that we're doing right now with what we call unblurring see who Likes You.
Hmm.
For those that don't use the product, what does that mean? On Tinder, there's a page that shows these people that like you, but they're blurred out unless you pay. If you pay, they become unblurred. We're testing giving more free value to the user, unblurring one or two or, you know, N of those to the user. This was an email about an experiment that we were running in a couple of countries.
Mm-hmm.
A very small % of users. If we unblurred one or two of them, it drove better user outcomes. It improved retention, it improved sparks, it improved user satisfaction, et cetera, for obvious reasons, because now you're, like, you're seeing what's, you know, you're getting a little taste of what's behind the paywall if, you know, a taste of potentially meeting the right person without having to pay. It improved user results quite a bit, but it also hurt revenue quite a bit. What the team does very, very well now is now they grind.
Mm-hmm.
They're like, "Okay, well, how can we change the how can we change the test, the experiment in order to retain as much of the retention improvement and Sparks improvement as possible while mitigating and ameliorating the revenue impact?" Maybe it shouldn't be showing two see who Likes You, it should be showing one. Maybe it doesn't have to be every time the user opens the app. Maybe it's every other time, and just that is enough to drive retention, but still, you know, not impact revenue as much. Maybe we should only do this for women, not for men. Maybe, you know, which countries are we allowed to do that just for women, not men? There are some countries where you're not allowed to have differentiated products or differentiated pricing by country, but there are many countries you are.
Maybe it should just be certain age groups, et cetera. They'll kind of grind, and two to six weeks from now, we'll end up having a winning experiment that improves user results but only hurts revenue a little bit, and that's where the revenue budget comes from. You know, we've communicated to investors that we're willing to give up $60 million of revenue annualized intentionally for things like this. I have no idea how much that particular experiment will end up eating up of that budget. What happened in Q4 was that we had, I think, a $15 million budget. I think we spent about $9 million of it.
What keeps happening over and over again is our team is so darn good at that grind stage of being able to retain most of the user benefit while mitigating the revenue loss that we've underspent that budget. I don't know what will happen with the $60 this year, but that's how the sausage gets made. That's probably more information than you wanted, but that's like, that's how the company actually operates.
Yeah. It's very helpful. Let's zoom a big way back here.
Okay.
We talked a lot about the near term. I want to talk a little more long term. If we look out over the next five years, I think certainly one of the big tech changes we've seen, talked a lot about this conference, is Gen AI. How do you think generative AI, machine learning, how do you think that can revolutionize the online dating industry?
Well, I mean, it already is. It's not really a long-term thing. It's more of a short-term thing, I guess. to answer your question, I think there are a couple ways. The simple one is internal employee productivity, which I think every company is experiencing, and the Block news, I think, has kind of brought it back into focus, and I've been getting questions from investors of, you know, is that the new normal? You know, you guys have 2,200 employees. Should you have 1,100 or, you know, et cetera. you know, what we're doing is we're obviously adopting all internal AI tools you can imagine. People are finding superpowers they didn't know they had. no, I don't expect any massive step down in headcount at Match Group.
We're already a very tightly run company after the layoffs that we did last year, where we did do a 13% reduction. Internal productivity, yes, of course, and there are lots of examples that I could give. I'll give just one quick example ’cause I'm excited about it. Hinge last week, I dialed into the Hinge huddle, the Hinge Wrapped meeting, which is every two weeks they do an all hands.
At their Hinge all hands, a content manager on the social team, so like a relatively junior employee who is not technical at all, showed something that he built with Claude Code, which when one of their influencers wants to create a social asset saying, "Here's a, you know, here's a TikTok of me using Hinge," and they wanted to show a screenshot of people texting, messaging back and forth in Hinge, like flirting in Hinge designers used to actually create that. It would take about a week turnaround.
Hmm.
Instead, this non-technical junior employee created a password-protected website where any creator can now go and create a social asset. He just types in like, you know, "Hey, how are you? What's going on? Do you want to go on a date?" "Yes. Where should we go?" Blah, blah. You type that, now it creates a video asset real-time in the Hinge branding of showing them typing back and forth. You can change the typing speed. You know, do you want clicks or no clicks? Do you want emojis? Whatever. Now it's a social asset. Like, oh my God, this is the productivity improvement for Hinge internally just from having that is massive. Anyway, there are hundreds of examples like that throughout the company. It doesn't mean we're gonna lay people off. It doesn't mean everyone's going to get superpowers.
That's that. On the on the product, I think is the bigger impact. You know, where to begin? We are, you know, we're using AI for profile creation is a big surface area of this. Hinge has been a leader in this, where when you're creating your profile, it'll say, you know, "What do you like to do on Sundays?" If you type brunch, the AI will automatically say like, you know, "Come on, Spencer, you can do better than that.
Tell me where you like to have brunch." I'll say, "I like to have it at this restaurant." It's like, you know, "Come on, like, tell me about a funny story that you had." "Well, the waiter spilled the food on me." "Well, you know, how did you react to that?" I'm kind of chatting back and forth with the AI and improving my profile on the way. If you go look at Hinge. Everyone looks very funny and clever and interesting, and it's because it's all been teased out from them during the profile creation with AI.
Tinder uses AI in photo selection right now to scan my Camera Roll to select which photos would be good, which, you know, photos just of me or it'll say, you know, on my profile, it just told me that it noticed that I'm wearing the same jacket in three of the photos. It's like the AI is telling me that it's giving me AI coaching saying that I would probably do better if I had different outfits in each of my, you know, each of my photos. Those are the ways in which it's improving profile selection on Tinder. The recs algo is, you know, massive. The whole thing is AI, ML. What else?
Mark and Hillary and Claire, who run product based here in our San Francisco office. They're in the front. Feel free to shout out other AI-
Are You Sure?
Yeah. Okay, that's good. Are You Sure? And Does This Bother You? Thank you. In chat, a huge problem that we have is men are terrible, and the things that they say can be extremely offensive and we call it too much too soon, where they're, you know, they have no game. We've built an LLM-based kind of barrier there that reads what I write, you know, interprets it with as an LLM and puts up a little speed bump and says, "Hey, Are You Sure? You want to say that? That might be viewed offensively or, you know, maybe you want to change it in this way," et cetera.
On the receiving side, we have a Does This Bother You?, which as it comes through, it reads it, and if we think it's gonna be a problem, we give the recipient the opportunity to say, "Hey, you know, I don't wanna see this." It kind of blurs it and it lets them unblur it if they want. It's a really important safety feature. It's a really important vibe feature, which changes people's, you know, people's experience on the app because we can build an amazing app with beautiful design and market it really well, but at the end of the day, this is a two-sided marketplace, and the product is only as good as the people that are in it and the way those people behave.
Mm-hmm.
We can use AI to improve the way they present and the way they behave.
Super interesting. Talked a lot about Tinder so far. A little bit of Hinge. I really want to dig in on Hinge here. Continues to be a bright spot in the portfolio.
I'm wearing my Hinge sneakers today, Nathan.
Nice. I love it.
Super disgusting.
What do you need outside of sneakers to hit the $1 billion revenue target?
Yeah.
you outlined in the Analyst Day here? What are you most excited about for Hinge as we kind of progress over the next 24 months towards that?
We need Hinge to continue doing what it's doing, I guess is the, is the simple version. I was in the New York office yesterday, went through the latest product roadmap with them. They're building a lot of innovation in that focused, intentional dating space and continuing to just own that space. I mean, they have run the table. They are the clear category leader in that intentional dating space, they need to just keep doing what they're doing and continue to grow in new countries. They launched Mexico and Brazil last year. They're launching three more Latin American countries and potentially an Asian country this year. Keep doing what they're doing. They're doing it really well.
I didn't have many edits when I, you know, when I sit down with them.
Okay, great. Easy enough.
I mean, I'll say one other thing actually.
Yeah.
I think investors have already, like, accepted that there's this path to billion, like check, no problem. I think the interesting next phase of the conversation is trying to figure out how big Hinge can really be.
Yeah.
You know, I believe that that intentional-focused dating segment is bigger than the fun dating segment that Tinder plays in. I think that for two reasons. Number one, it's a much wider age demographic. It's from, you know, who wants to use an app that's designed to be deleted? Someone from 25 to 65. You know, I mean, a college friend of mine is 50 and just got divorced, and he's on Hinge. You know, friends of mine that are in their 20s are on it. It's a much wider age group that's interested in that type of a product, and it monetizes really well because my 50-year-old friend is willing to pay a lot. By the way, he's an MD at Morgan Stanley. Not here.
He's willing to pay a lot to, you know, to use an app that's designed to be deleted. The Tinder users generally are less well off. They tend to skew younger. It should be a bigger audience size and more highly monetizable. I have very big dreams for Hinge and how big it can really be globally and, you know, there's just a lot of running room ahead for it.
Yeah. Certainly. Now, talked also a lot about a lot of the investments you're making. As you're going through this Tinder turnaround, continuing to build out Hinge, help us understand how you're thinking about balancing profitability with investing in the user?
Well, what we decided to do this year was to run the business at flat. You know, we run it flat revenue, flat EBITDA. We maybe could have accelerated the rate of Hinge revenue growth or accelerated the speed with which we can turn around Tinder if we had decided to take a big step down in margin, but I decided not to do that. So that was the limiter that I gave as kind of, you know, ballpark flat on margin and revenue. You know, we are taking some margin degradation at Tinder in order to, you know, in order to give Tinder more budget. I think, you know, I think I like that discipline. I don't I get asked sometimes if there's a whole, like, margin step-down reset required.
I do not think there is. That's not in the works. I have no plans for that. I think with enough focus on the right user segments and enough innovation and effort, I think we'll be able to accomplish what we need without a reset in how the business is monetized.
Looking forward, are there any factors you're monitoring that could cause upside or downside to the 39% margin target you outlined for 2027 or kind of beyond?
I mean, there are a lot of little things, right? One is that Tinder, if, you know, if Tinder MAL improves, more revenue comes. If we don't have to spend all the user giveback budget, or if the marketing efficacy is better than we expect, we don't have to spend as much of the marketing budget. Those are all, you know, any of those things could happen. We got a little gift last night from Google with the Android decision. We are still assessing is that a small gift or a medium gift, but, you know, there's something, there's some benefit there. I mean, there are, like, a dozen small puts and takes.
Mm-hmm.
Nothing jumps out at me big in that regard.
Okay. You mentioned direct payments there. Obviously, the Google change last night had a lot of changes on iOS in the U.S. It's set to get roughly $110 million or so of savings from direct payments this year. How are you thinking about reinvesting versus passing through those incremental savings? What's the plan to navigate a scenario where maybe the courts will back some of that?
We got this gift from the courts for Apple, $100-ish million, and then we created our own gift with our staff reductions last year, which was around $100 million. We have this $200-ish million benefit. As I said, we're running basically a flat margin this year. Where did all that money go? You know, we're buying back a lot of stock, and we're also paying a lot of dividend. We get about $1 billion a year of free cash flow, and that all goes back to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. We're basically taking those $200 million savings and giving it back to the user through increased marketing expense.
Tinder's going from $180-$230 and of marketing expense, and through the user giveback budgets. That's, yeah, that's where we're spending the Apple gift. What might happen if the rules change, if the, if the courts change? I think it's really hard to speculate because it depends. It depends how they might change. Like, for example, the higher court, they said Apple actually is entitled to something when you link out. Well, we have to figure out what something is, and then we have to figure out, for example, is it gonna be a different amount for subscriptions versus single purchases, for example?
If it's higher or lower for one or the other, then we can change what we prioritize and how we incentivize the user, just like one versus the other. It's just there are too many unknowns to speculate how any of this might impact us. What I can tell you is we did a great job of cranking last year to adapt and testing, and it really showed the benefits of Match Group's scale and the multiple brands. The emerging and evergreen brands, especially the evergreen brands like Match and OkCupid, which had websites with decent, a decent percentage of their business still on the, on the web, they had web payments already, and they had 20 years of optimizing the checkout flow on a mobile website and a desktop website.
They took the lead, and the other brands learned a lot from how they iterated on this alternative payments. Tinder benefited from that, and then Hinge, which had no web presence, so they were really at a disadvantage when this starting gun was fired, they created their own implementation, which also was, you know, terrific and actually in some ways even better than the others because they were starting from scratch. Took them longer, but they ended up in a great place. Whatever happens with the Apple ruling, however the Google decision shakes out, I'm pretty confident that we'll adapt very well to it and recognize the benefits of scale and of different, having these different platforms that learn from each other.
Now, switching gears, you announced in the 10-K that Azar had been removed from the App Store. Talk us through what happened there and how that could impact the financials in 2026 guidance?
About a month ago, Apple decided that random video chat apps don't abide by their rules. They took out, I don't know what the total number was, but I think it was 100 or more video chat apps. We're still in active negotiations or conversations with Apple, making changes to the app so that it is not random, so that the user has preferences, has profiles, selects specific people. to feel less like you're being paired with a, you know, a random person and much more like you're actually selecting the person that you're paired with. We're still talking with Apple. We're still resubmitting. I don't know what the ultimate outcome will be. It's a small impact.
I think, you know, I think you put out a note or a, you know, a couple of sell-side analysts have put out notes estimating, and we put in the 10-K, what the number was, and it's small, especially after expenses and stock comp. Azar basically breaks even.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we're fighting for it, so we'll see where it all nets out.
Now, thinking about the broader portfolio, on the fourth Q call, you unveiled the GEM, which is your portfolio strategy framework. Through this initiative, have you identified any clear gaps or areas of opportunity within the portfolio, and how does it shape your view on potential acquisitions and launches from here?
Yeah. What you're referring to is we have this kind of three-sided triangle now where we've got fun brands like Tinder, we've got focus brands like Hinge, and we've got familiar, familiarity brands like BLK for Black daters or Salams for Muslim daters. A number of our other apps, like The League, sit at the intersection of familiar and focus. All of our 20-odd brands are mapped to those different user needs. In terms of white space, I do think we have some white space in some of the user segments. Question is, like for example, we don't have a Jewish app, just as an example. Hinge is the largest Jewish dating app by a mile for the focus space and for the fun space, Tinder is the largest Jewish dating app.
Do we need a Jewish dating app? Yeah, I don't know. It's debatable. We're assessing that now that we have this framework. What I will say is that we're very attentive to the startup landscape. This company, better than any company I've ever worked at before, has our ear to the ground and has an incredibly robust competitive intelligence function. There are three areas of innovation that we see that are interesting to us. One is the in real life space, where increasingly Gen Z says they wanna meet in person, not on the apps. There are a number of startups that are in that space. Another area of innovation is around the social graph, where increasingly Gen Z says, "I don't wanna just be shown strangers.
I wanna see mutuals, friends, and friends of friends." Of course, Tinder is a leader in that space with Double Date, where we really have a social graph, and that's where Tinder and Hinge both started, right? They both started with Facebook Connect. You would see, oh, these are my friends or my friends of friends or two degrees of separation. When Facebook deprecated Facebook Connect, they lost the social graph, and by then, Tinder and Hinge were very big. There are a number of startups in that space. The last space is in the AI matchmaking space, where people are saying, "Well, hold on. Why do I have to look through hundreds of profiles to get to a date?
Why can't the AI just do that for me and just figure this out for me like it's you know, it's going out there into the world and doing other things for me? There are a lot of startups in that space, including Overtone, which of course we incubated, and Justin, the founder of Hinge, and I decided for it to spin out, and now we're a large shareholder of that, and then there are a number of other startups in that space. Those are the three general areas of innovation that we track most closely, as well as more affinity apps like, you know, like other demographic or ethnic groups that we don't have discrete apps for.
Okay. Great. Well, we've covered a lot of ground here. You've been in a lot of investor conversations, you know, since you joined The Seed. Can you leave us with maybe the one or two aspects of the business you think are most misunderstood or underappreciated by the market?
I think we get, I mean, I had a call last week with one of, one of the largest shareholders of Zillow that I've been courting to try to get to, you know, get to become constructive on Match Group. The way that person described it, he's like, "Look, I will stipulate and underwrite to your Tinder turnaround because you're saying all the right things, and you seem to have the right people in place, and you're, you know, you're showing green shoots." Like, good. Okay. I will stipulate that Hinge is gonna conquer the focus space, et cetera. I will stipulate that E&E has headwinds, but it's not gonna really move the needle all that much, and that Azar is kind of irrelevant. Let's just take all that on its face.
Convince me that this category overall isn't left for dead, that Gen Z hasn't just moved on and said, like, you know, 'Not interested in dating, not interested in using dating apps,' because that's what the headlines keep telling me, and that's what my 23-year-old in my office tells me," and so on and so forth. I think that's the stink in the room. You know, that's like what hangs over the stock and the company and the category. My retort to that is a couple things. First of all, the research says that they still wanna meet, they still wanna date. That's just true. It's just that they didn't want to be using the old Tinder, which was a Hot or Not product. You look at Hinge, and Hinge has crushed it, even with Gen Z users.
It's just that the world changed, and Tinder didn't change with it. The second thing I'd say is that help is on the way demographically because all the research that we do about Gen Alpha shows that they are a more normal generation than Gen Z, that they are willing to put themselves out there to date. They have girlfriends and boyfriends in high school. They enter college having kissed a couple people. You know, they didn't miss several years, formative years of high school and of making mistakes in early college because of COVID and the pandemic and remote school. You know, they're not so nervous about how AI is going to take their jobs and ruin their lives, et cetera, the way Gen Z is. They're a much more adapted generation, and that bodes well for us as well.
We're not sitting here waiting for that. We're adapting the product to suit the needs of where the daters are today, but also the weather's gonna change pretty soon.
Okay. Great conversation, Spencer. Really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.