When Spencer Rascoff became CEO of Match Group in February 2025, and CEO of Tinder in July of that year, he inherited a dating empire whose flagship app had spent more than a decade relying on the same formula that made it famous. Tinder’s swipe-left, swipe-right experience had revolutionized online dating, but the company had struggled to keep pace with changing consumer expectations. In 2024, Tinder’s paying user base declined 7% while revenue grew just 1%.
“In a lot of ways Tinder had lost product market fit with its users because it hadn’t innovated,” Rascoff told me recently. The company, he acknowledged, had “rested on its laurels for a long time.”
