As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be preparing to go on first dates — not with people they matched on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop matches students with potential dates once a week based on their questionnaire responses.
A kid from Stanford trying to disrupt an established industry from his dorm in Palo Alto? Stop me if you’ve heard it before! But young adults are deeply disillusioned with the frustrating and demoralizing state of online dating. Why not try something different?
Since the Date Drop program launched in the fall, more than 5,000 students have tried out at Stanford. It’s also 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 dates about 10x faster than Tinder,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Instead of swiping, we get to know each person deeply and send them a compatible match each week.”
At first, Weng had no intention of turning Date Drop into the foundation of a startup. Then his close friend met his partner through Date Drop. “That’s when I got the feeling it was a smaller project,” he said.
Weng now thinks that Date Drop is just the first service from his startup, Relationship Company, which is a public benefit company — the kind of company that is required by law to consider social impact alongside profits.
“It started as something I wanted to exist on campus and it became a company because people kept asking for it in their schools and I needed the resources to do it,” he said.
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Weng has already raised “several million” from some angel investors, including Zyngo 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 of The Relationship Company is to facilitate all meaningful relationships: friendship, professional connections, community, events,” he said.
Of course, using algorithms to predict whether users of a dating service might be compatible with each other is how dating apps work. However, Weng says his model is more focused on creating long-term connections, with 95% of Date Drop users saying they are interested in relationships.
Weng explains that there are two basic elements at play. First, the questionnaire must be thorough enough to capture a true picture of who they are. “We do this through questions, open-ended responses, voice conversation and other data that users provide,” he said.
Another challenge is compatibility prediction. “Because we help people plan data, we have data about which matches actually work. So we have a model trained on real results,” he said. “Once you have these two components, true agreement is standard stuff from the comparative theory literature.”
Weng is currently pursuing a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford and has focused his education on the economic and mathematical concepts of matching. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he created his own field in the study of people, mating, and incentives.
“I started to understand how shapes coincided with 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 the same issues.”
In addition to his technical education, Weng found an unexpected class useful for learning how to run a startup: “Introduction to Clowning.”
“The basic tenet of clowning is that clowns are failures, and instead of being afraid of failure, they reveal it,” he said. “As a product creator, your whole journey is just repeatedly failing and coming back up. The clown class was a wonderful microcosm.”
So far, The Relationship Company has two employees and 12 students serving as campus ambassadors in addition to Weng. Because their work revolves around forging matches, Weng extended this thinking to how he runs the company. It offers employees a $100 monthly “relationship stipend” to spend on meetings, gifts, experiences, or anything that helps 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 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 routine,” he said. “It made me more open to people I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.”