Hinge’s CEO accepted a job offer from McKinsey while in business school but kept delaying the start date, to work on his idea for a dating website, CNBC Make It reported. Justin McLeod attended Harvard Business School from 2009 to 2011 and received a job offer from the prestigious consulting company in his second year of business school, he told CNBC Make It in a recent interview. “It felt like the safe bet to work at a consulting firm,” McLeod told CNBC Make It. “That was kind of the standard job that you got coming out of business school.” McLeod, who wanted to be an entrepreneur, had the idea for a dating website called Hinge during this time but was in need of funds to invest into the company. McKinsey had offered a $12,000 signing bonus, which he decided to invest into Hinge. He decided to delay the start date at McKinsey so he had more time to work on Hinge. “I just said ‘Can I start a little later in the summer?’ And then ‘Can I start maybe early next year?'” he said. “I kept pushing it off and pushing it off until it had been two years of me pushing it off.” McKinsey eventually caught on to what was happening: “They finally got word that I had started Hinge and called me up and asked for their money back.” McLeod explained that his mom was pretty disappointed that she got to tell everyone he was at Harvard Business School, then McKinsey, and then “unemployed and working on a dating website.” Although the company had some success in its early years, it only brought in $1 million in revenue in 2017, McLeod told Fortune Executive Exchange. It was then acquired in 2018 by dating app conglomerate Match Group, which also owns Tinder and OkCupid. McLeod said the company expected to hit “well over $400 million” in revenue by the end of 2023, per Fortune.Now, the company is trying to combat dating app fatigue as people grow disenchanted with superficial connections online and the transactional nature of it all. McLeod recently told the Financial Times that Hinge plans to incorporate AI to play matchmaker and facilitate more suitable connections between people on the app.
