ADVOCATE - June 15 - Grindr officially has new owners. The popular LGBTQ+ dating app has announced Jeff Bonforte, Rick Marini, and Gary Hsueh as its new CEO, COO, and CFO, respectively. The trio is part of a group of investors that purchased a 98.59% stake in Grindr through San Vicente Acquisition Partners for $608.5M from Beijing Kunlun Tech, a Chinese company that acquired it in 2016. As background, both Bonforte and Marini identify as straight and boast robust résumés in Silicon Valley. A former member of the executive team at Yahoo!, Bonforte helmed Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, and Flickr, among other key areas of the company. He also founded and ran five startups. Marini is the former head of Digital Innovation at Hearst Corporation and was the founder & CEO of BranchOut, the Facebook professional networking app. He was also named one of 2018's Top 50 Angel Investors by Forbes; as an angel investor, he has helped grow Snapchat, Reddit, Opendoor, Poshmark, PAX, and OutReach. "I don't think you have to be gay to want to have a strong, healthy, safe LGBTQ community," Bonforte said. "And so I think we see Grindr's role in that, and we hope we can further it." "It won't be a perfectly smooth road, there will be challenges in the future," Bonforte predicted. Priority on "day one," they said, is user safety and security. In this area, the company has already conducted a partial audit, and a full audit of these features is now under way. However, don't expect any sweeping redesign. "You have to be careful not to dabble with the core product," Bonforte said, adding, "We don't want to hurt Grindr. It's so good."
by Daniel Reynolds
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