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Stanford’s Date Drop Births The Relationship Company
Courtesy of Date Drop
Date Drop, a questionnaire-based dating platform created by a grad student at Stanford, is remaking online dating at universities across the country.
Why It Hits: Dating apps are in their flop era and have resorted to rolling out AI matchmakers and premium subscriptions to boost engagement. That shift has led those looking for love to experiment with more old-school methods — dating spreadsheets, speed-dating events, or just hanging out at the local bar. Date Drop hopes to redeem technology in the pursuit of love.
Behind The Matches: Date Drop curates one person per week whom the platform deems to be a strong match.
The platform does this through a questionnaire that prompts open-ended responses, a voice conversation, and “other data that the users provide,” according to founder Henry Weng, a computer science grad student.
It then curates matches and helps plan dates using data-driven "compatibility prediction.” Weng told TechCrunch that “our matches convert to actual dates at about 10x the rate of Tinder.”
With 95% of its users saying they want to prioritize relationships over casual hookups, Date Drop is “geared toward forging long-term connections.”
Last Question: Some 5,000 students at Stanford have tried the platform, and it has already expanded to 10 additional universities, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. It plans to roll out “more broadly” in select cities, allowing non-students to join, per TechCrunch.
Weng is fueling that growth by building a startup around Date Drop called The Relationship Company, which has already raised “a few million dollars” from investors including Zynga founder Mark Pincus and former Coatue partner Andy Chen. Founded as a public benefit corporation, the company aims to “facilitate all meaningful relationships: friendships, professional connections, community, and events.”
Sounds like a return to the old social media.
Next Date: The early success of Date Drop suggests that the future of dating may hinge on intentionality — potentially bringing the era of “situationships” to an end.
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Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.