Renate Nyborg, the new CEO of Tinder met her husband on the app. She is now trying to fix the issues that keep women off the platform.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Tinder hasn’t been able to focus on solving some of the problems that have damaged its reputation and allowed competitors to gobble up its customer base. Its parade of controversial male CEOs spent little time understanding the experiences, from receiving unsolicited graphic images to simply not feeling welcome, that turned women and LGBTQ people away from the app.
These persistent problems have allowed competitors like Bumble to define themselves in opposition to Tinder, diverting users the company would like to have from swiping into its own app.
But Tinder’s new CEO, Renate Nyborg, is working to improve the product for those who felt left out in the past and is leveraging her global experience to help the brand expand internationally.
In a recent interview with Fortune , Nyborg recounted part of her personal experience as a user of Tinder, which was precisely on the popular dating app that she found the man who would become her husband some time later in just one day. And, while her time on the platform was brief, her life experience outside of it prepared her for her recent professional challenge as Tinder’s new CEO.
Renate Nyborg, shared her experience as a user of Tinder, a dating app where she found the love of her life
For Nyborg, the future of Tinder goes beyond dating. She envisions the app’s next decade as a “place to foster meaningful human connections” with a global mindset, be it short-term or long-term, romantic or platonic, digital or offline.
Tinder basically invented the modern internet dating landscape and, a decade after its launch, it still dominates the market as the number one dating app in the world. But with that success has come a number of challenges, including some, like Tinder’s portrayal as a “hookup app” that can be a hostile and even scary place if you’re not a straight man, that still haunt the company.
That’s where Renate Nyborg comes in. Appointed CEO of the app in 2021, Nyborg appears to have sprung entirely from the brains of the company’s brand marketing team. The 36-year-old is the latest testament to Tinder’s ability to create healthy, long-term relationships: She met her husband on the app six years ago and still describes herself as a “happy customer.”
She is also a CEO, the first in Tinder’s history, who made it her first order of business to delve into the experiences women and LGBTQ people were having on the app. And, in what may seem like a low bar to some, she is known as a stable, drama-free leader. “I’m just here to build,” is the closest Nyborg will ever come to acknowledging the contrast between her leadership and what she came before.