As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students are preparing for first dates. These dates are not with people they met on mainstream apps like Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop. Date Drop was designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. It pairs students with one potential date per week based on their responses to a detailed questionnaire.
A Stanford student trying to disrupt an established industry from his dorm is a familiar story. But young adults are deeply disillusioned with the frustrating and demoralizing state of online dating. This has created an opening to try something different.
Over 5,000 students at Stanford have tried Date Drop since its launch in the fall. The service has also rolled out at ten more schools, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Weng says he wants to expand Date Drop more broadly into some cities this summer.
Weng claims their matches convert to actual dates at about ten times the rate of Tinder. Instead of endless swiping, the service gets to know each person deeply and sends them one compatible match per week.
Initially, Weng did not intend to turn Date Drop into a startup. That changed when a close friend met their partner through the service. He realized it was more than just a project. Now, Weng thinks of Date Drop as the first service from his startup, The Relationship Company, which is structured as a public benefit corporation. This type of company is legally required to consider social impact alongside profits.
Weng explains that the project started as something he simply wanted to exist on campus. It became a company because people kept asking for it at their schools, and he needed resources to make that happen.
Weng has already raised a few million dollars from angel investors. These include Zynga founder and early Facebook backer Mark Pincus, who has taught business courses at Stanford. Other investors are Andy Chen, a former partner at Coatue, and Elad Gil, an early backer of companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and Pinterest.
The long-term vision for The Relationship Company is about facilitating all meaningful relationships, including friendships, professional connections, and community events.
While using algorithms to predict compatibility is standard for dating apps, Weng says his model is more geared toward forging long-term connections. He notes that 95% of Date Drop users say they are interested in relationships.
Weng explains there are two core elements to the service. First, the questionnaire must be thorough enough to capture a real picture of who someone is. This is achieved through questions, open-ended responses, voice conversations, and other user-provided data. The next challenge is compatibility prediction. Because Date Drop helps people plan dates, they have data on which matches actually work out. This allows them to train a model on real-world outcomes.
Weng is currently pursuing a computer science master’s degree at Stanford. He has oriented his education around the economic and mathematical concepts of matching theory. As an undergraduate, he even created his own major to study humans, matching, and incentives. He started to see how matching shapes so much of our lives, from life partners and friends to colleges and careers.
Beyond his technical education, Weng found an unexpected class useful for learning to manage a startup: Intro to Clown. A core principle of clowning is that clowns are failures, and instead of fearing failure, they revel in it. He sees product building as a journey of repeatedly failing and getting back up, and the class was a wonderful microcosm of that.
So far, The Relationship Company has two employees besides Weng, along with twelve students who serve as campus ambassadors. Because their work revolves around forging matches, Weng extends that mindset to company management. He offers employees a $100 monthly “relationship stipend” to spend on dates, gifts, experiences, or anything that helps them deepen an important relationship of any sort.
Weng believes relationships are the single most important factor in a person’s life. He cites research showing that money spent on other people creates more happiness than money spent on oneself.
His fascination with how people form relationships has also influenced his daily life. Date Drop has shown him how many interesting people are out there that you would never encounter through normal routines, making him more open to people he wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.