As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be preparing for first dates — not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Drop Datedesigned by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop matches students with potential dates once a week based on their answers to a questionnaire.
A Stanford kid trying to disrupt an established industry from his dorm room in Palo Alto? Stop with if you’ve heard that one before! But young adults are deep disappointed with the frustrating, frustrating state of online dating. Why not try something different?
Over 5,000 students at Stanford have tried Date Drop since it launched in the fall. It’s also rolled out to 10 more schools, including MIT, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania, and Weng says he wants to open Date Drop more widely in some cities this summer.
“Our matches are turning into real dates at about 10 times the rate of Tinder,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Instead of scanning, we get to know each person deeply and send them a compatible match a week.”
At first, Weng didn’t intend to turn Date Drop into a foundation of a startup. Then a close friend of his met their partner through Date Drop. “That’s when I felt like this was less of a project,” he said.
Now, Weng is thinking of Date Drop as the first service from his startup, The Company Relationswhich is a public benefit corporation — a type of corporation 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 I needed resources to do that,” he said.
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Already, Weng has raised “a few million” from some angel investors, including Zynga founder and early Facebook backer Mark Pincus, who has 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 The Relationship Company.
“The long-term vision of The Relationship Company is to facilitate all meaningful relationships: friendships, business connections, community, events,” Weng said.
It’s par for the course to use algorithms to predict whether users on a dating service might be compatible with each other — that’s how dating apps work. But Weng says his model is more geared towards creating long-term connections, with 95% of Date Drop users saying they’re interested in relationships.
Weng explains that two key elements are at play. First, the questionnaire must be thorough enough to capture a true picture of who someone is. “We do this through questions, open-ended responses, a voice chat and other user-provided data,” he said.
The next challenge is compatibility prediction. “Because we’re helping people plan dates, we have data on what matches actually work. So we have a model trained on real results,” he said. “Once you have those two ingredients, actual matching is standard material from the matching theory literature.”
Currently pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford, Weng has geared his education around his financial and mathematical concepts. matching. As a Stanford undergraduate, he created his own specialty to study people, matching, and motivation.
“I started to see how matchmaking shapes so much of our lives,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Who is your life partner, who are your friends, what college do you go to, what company do you work for are all the same problems.”
Beyond his technical training, Weng found an unexpected lesson useful in learning how to run a startup: “Intro to Clown.”
“A basic principle of clowning is that clowns are failures, and instead of fearing failure, they enjoy it,” he said. “As a product developer, your whole journey is just repeatedly failing and getting back up. The clown class was a great microcosm of that.”
So far, The Relationship Company has two employees besides Weng, along with 12 students serving as campus ambassadors. Because their work revolves around forging matches, Weng has extended that mentality to how he runs the company. It offers employees a $100 monthly “relationship fee” that they can spend on dates, gifts, experiences, or anything that helps them deepen a meaningful relationship of any kind.
“Relationships are the most important factor in a person’s life,” Weng said. “There’s also great research showing that money spent on other people makes you happier than money spent on yourself.”
Weng’s fascination with how people form relationships also informed how he goes about his daily life.
“Date Drop showed me how many interesting people there are out there that you would never meet in your normal routines,” she said. “It made me more open to people I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.”
