As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be preparing for their first dates — not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, created by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop matches students with potential dates once a week based on their answers to a survey.
A Stanford kid trying to disrupt an established industry from his Palo Alto dorm? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before! But young adults are deeply disappointed by the frustrating and demoralizing state of online dating. Why not try something different?
More than 5,000 Stanford students have tried Date Drop since its launch in the fall. It has also been rolled out at 10 other schools, including MIT, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, and Weng says he wants to roll out Date Drop more broadly in some cities this summer.
“Our matches convert to real data at about 10 times the rate of Tinder,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Instead of swiping, we get to know each person in depth and send them one compatible match per week.”
At first, Weng didn’t intend to turn Data Drop into a startup foundation. Then a close friend of his met his partner through Date Drop. “That’s when I felt like this was less of a project,” he said.
Now, Weng thinks of Date Drop as just the first service from his startup, Relationship Company, which is a public benefit corporation — — a type of company legally required to consider social impact alongside profits.
“This started as something I just wanted to have on campus and became a company because people kept asking for it in their schools and we needed the resources to do it,” he said.
Already, Weng has raised “a few million” from some angel investors, including Zynga founder and early Facebook backer Mark Pincus, who taught business classes at Stanford (including Weng). Andy Chen, a former partner at Coatue, and Elad Gil, an early backer of Airbnb, Stripe and Pinterest, also invested in Relationship Company.
“The long-term vision at The Relationship Company is to facilitate all meaningful relationships: friendships, professional connections, community, events,” he said.
It’s normal for the course to use algorithms to predict whether users of a dating service may be compatible with each other – that’s how dating apps work. But Weng says his model is more geared toward creating long-term connections, with 95 percent of Date Drop users saying they’re interested in relationships.
Image credits:Date Drop
Weng explains that there are two basic elements at play. First, the questionnaire must be comprehensive enough to capture a true picture of who someone is. “We do this through questions, open-ended responses, a voice conversation and other data that users provide,” he said.
The next challenge is compatibility prediction. “Because we help people plan data, we have data that matches actually work. So we have a model trained on real-world results,” he said. “Once you have those two components, the actual matching is standard stuff in the matching theory literature.”
Currently pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford, Weng has focused his education around the economic and mathematical concepts of matching. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he created his own major to study people, matching, and incentives.
“I started to see how fit shapes so much of our lives,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Who your life partner is, who your friends are, what college you go to, what company you work for are all compatibility issues.”
Beyond his technical education, Weng found an unexpectedly useful class for learning to manage a startup: “Intro to Clown.”
“A basic tenet of clowning is that clowns are failures, and instead of fearing failure, they revel in it,” he said. “As a product builder, your whole journey is repeatedly failing and coming back. The clown class was a wonderful microcosm of that.”
So far, The Relationship Company has two employees besides Weng, along with 12 students who serve as campus ambassadors. Because their work revolves around the power of matches, Weng has extended this mindset to how he runs the company. He offers employees a $100 monthly “relationship stipend” that they can spend on dates, gifts, experiences, or anything that helps them deepen an important relationship of any kind.
“Relationships are the most important factor in a person’s life,” Weng said. “There’s also great research that shows that money spent on other people makes you happier than money spent on yourself.”
Weng’s fascination with how people form relationships has also influenced how they go about their daily lives.
“Date Drop showed me how many interesting people are out there that you would never meet through your normal routines,” he said. “It made me more open to people I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.”