in November, employees at Grindr’s in-house digital magazine, Into, were on edge. They’d just left an emergency staff meeting at the company’s West Hollywood headquarters where they had been told the LGBTQ news outlet was about to publish one of the most explosive stories in its 15-month history. The topic: a Facebook post in which Scott Chen, the president of the gay dating and hookup app, wrote that marriage should be “between a man and a woman.
Grindr declined to answer the majority of questions from a list sent by BuzzFeed News about the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States investigation, employee complaints, and internal problems, but in a statement it said that its “significant growth” from 3.3 million to more than 4.5 million daily active users was a sign of its “hard work and cooperative efforts of the entire team.”
Just two years earlier, Grindr had been a very different place — a steady and profitable 8-year-old company hoping to shed its image as a cisgender gay men’s hookup app to become an all-encompassing LGBTQ-focused media destination. Into had been a key piece of that vision, a digital magazine executives pitched as a “queer Atlantic.” There was also Grindr for Equality, an advocacy arm intended to “help LGBTQ people around the globe” with sexual health and safety campaigns.
Little changed at first. Employees still enjoyed their perks, including catered lunches, company-funded parties, and in-office activities like cupcake socials and puppy playdates. At Into, which had launched in August 2017, reporters — most of whom were contractors or freelancers — chased ambitious stories that required travel and video. Meanwhile, the Grindr app was humming, clocking 3.3 million users a day.
While the CFIUS investigation played out in private, the company faced a public reckoning that spring. In April, BuzzFeed News reported that Grindr, which had 3.6 million daily active users at the time, wasand other personally identifiable information, including location, phone ID, and email, in nonsecure file formats with third-party companies.
Multiple former Grindr employees described Chen and his lieutenants, two former Facebook engineers named Alex Lin and Po-chun “Birdy” Chang, as poor cultural fits. While they operated the preeminent app for cis gay males, the three men — all straight — seemed to have little grasp of gay culture. It also didn’t help that they lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, flying to Los Angeles every week for work on the company’s dime.
Former Grindr employees told BuzzFeed News that Chen spent a lot of his time working with the company’s Beijing engineers developing small features and changes to the app that he hoped would drive more engagement, and that he often failed to communicate them to the LA team. Two former employees said Chen also seemed to have little desire to fix theproblems that plagued the app; he didn’t want to touch things that seemed to be working.
“Scott openly mocked Kindr,” a former employee recalled. “He didn’t understand why we wanted to celebrate what he saw as ‘fat people.’” Three former employees said that Chen didn’t take the threat of the CFIUS inquiry seriously. Having eliminated most of the engineering team in the US while simultaneously looking to diversify from Beijing, Chen started making trips to Taipei, where he eventually opened a 20-person engineering office.
“For us we are interested in Chinese government relationship and of course, promote sexual health ,” he added in the note. BuzzFeed News also obtained emails showing that Chen, by September, aimed to build a separate app for users in China, South Korea, and Japan. Pitched as a way to break into the Chinese market and keep China and other Asian customer data in the country, the separate app was immediately flagged by executives because it hadn’t been approved by CFIUS. Many also shared ethical concerns.
If you really had that dream than why sell out? 😂
It's not like they were forced to sell it 🤣🤣 they would have had to agree to the acquisition
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