Tinder’s Sean Rad Demoted from CEO, Will Serve as President of Board | Hacker News Reader

Tinder’s Sean Rad Demoted from CEO, Will Serve as President of Board

techcrunch.com

70 pointsfunkyy10 comments

> Ultimately, it’s a giant “he said, she said” that will likely forever remain cloudy—in September Wolfe and Tinder settled out of court, with neither Mateen nor anyone at Tinder or IAC admitting any guilt

This is unbelievably sloppy journalism.

It's not 'forever cloudy'. We have the actual text messages in question. Unless one wants to accuse Wolfe and her legal team of fabricating evidence (which is quite the accusation), those SMS logs are more incriminating than a smoking gun.

Also, while they did settle, Tinder (IAC) did admit wrongdoing, pretty much immediately after the story broke[0][1].

If both Wolfe and IAC are admitting that Mateen harassed Wolfe, and we have the evidence to go along with that, that's about as conclusive as one could reasonably expect.

EDIT: For clarity, this quotation was pulled from the Forbes article[2] now linked in the comments. Not sure if this was the original submission and the post was merged or if I just confused the two links. Either way, though, my comment still stands, as the Techcrunch piece says 'In the end, no party admitted guilt and the case was settled out of court.'

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971289

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7971983

[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/11/04/exclusi...

Yeah my read from this article was a lot different. Seemed to imply that there was a nasty break up and they both sent nasty messages to each other afterwards. Also implied that she was only given the cofounder role because they were together in the first place.

Edit: Was referencing this article from the comments - http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/11/04/exclusi...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2014/11/04/exclusi...

Great article about how this was done. Sounds really scary.

>In July a former Tinder executive—and former Mateen girlfriend—named Whitney Wolfe went public with a salacious sexual harassment lawsuit that generated awful press and the CMO’s quick suspension.

it is simple - don't mix relationships and work. Reminds about that GitHub story too. And about a high-power couple and several low-power couples/relatives we have here across our organization too.

Sounds simple until you realise that boyfriend/girlfriend, husband/wife teams have also done very well. Bezos started amazon with his wife, and of course we're having this conversation on the news aggregator of an accellerator that started after a conversation between PG and Jessica Livingston, who then extended their personal relationship into co-founding YC.

Maybe works better when they're the boss.

Starting a company with your wife is utterly different from starting a relationship with your not-yet-co-founder. If your relationship with your spouse goes to shit, everyone knows what the deal is - division of assets, etc. Spouses are incentivised not to 'harass' because they're afraid of what it will do to the settlement. This Tinder shit is so unclear it's actually devaluing the stock price!

From the sound of it, the scandal merely provided an opportunity for the parent company to take back power of a hugely valuable property. The scandal itself, while obviously unpleasant for all involved, didn't affect Tinder's performance as a fast growing app. At all as far as I can tell.

As far as relationships at work go, it's really hard to say that it's always a bad idea. Bill and Melinda Gates met at Microsoft and ... well it worked quite well. http://www.biography.com/people/melinda-gates-507408#persona...

Best part of the whole article, this line:

“I learned if we could penetrate social influencers first, it would trickle down to everyone else.”

Oh how spot on that choice of words is :)

> Tinder’s parent company just swiped left on Sean Rad, ...

https://i.imgur.com/Sg8vJkv.gif

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