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Gay bubble5/27/2023 “His ability to focus on the smallest details forces you to look at things in a different way,” said Steve Levin, who leads the company’s sales team. Running the day-to-day operations keeps him busy, and employees describe an extreme attention to detail that likely keeps him even busier. Of course there’s a suggestion that a lot of useful feedback can be gleaned from an impromptu chat with a regular user over a drink, but, given that his app’s demographic overlaps so totally with his prospective dating pool, is that work or pleasure? “Depends on what you consider work,” he said.īut whereas sliding up to users is a good business-and perhaps a good dating-strategy, Simkhai isn’t much of a joiner overall. He goes out a lot, too, and can rattle off a list of regular haunts that seems as exhausting as it is exhaustive: Here, Rasputin, Revolver, Saint Felix, the Abbey, Eleven. When he’s not working (and even when he is) he’s frequently plugged into Grindr, sporting a profile anchored by a beefy shirtless shot, muscles glinting in the sun. If that’s the case, Simkhai may very well be the poster child for his own app. “It doesn’t mean that it has impacted the number of people that go to the bars,” he said, “but I think this is a way that complements the way in which gay men in West Hollywood and the surrounding areas meet one another.” “I know how difficult it was for him to take the technology that he knew existed and turn it into Grindr.”Īpps like Grindr, said Duran, are an asset to a community like WeHo, in that they let a younger generation of gay men discover the Boystown scene, and each other, in a digital space, where they spend a lot of their time anyway. That level of success “is really a tribute to Joel and his team,” said John Duran, a West Hollywood city councilman who’s known Simkhai for a few years. If you’re discreet enough, you might even score a date in North Korea or Iran. To the Israeli-born Simkhai, 37, who’s served as CEO from the start, it’s a point of pride that he has users in nearly all 192 countries around the world, from Africa to Argentina and China to Chile. Self-financed from the beginning, today the app boasts six million users and counting. Buoyed by early praise in gay media and word-of-mouth, Grindr rose fast to become a household name among gay men, first at home, then abroad. Although light on technical chops-in New York he worked in finance and marketing-shortly after arriving, he teamed up with co-founder, and former senior vice president of product and design, Scott Lewallen, and Grindr was born, quietly at first, in March 2009 (Lewallen left this past April). is no original idea, but in Simkhai’s case at least it may have led to one. It’s all about circles.” For gay men, WeHo’s a little different, he acknowledged, but still “the effort level to meet someone is a little bit higher than for someone in New York.” It’s very much so a circle-your personal circle, your professional circle. “It makes it a little harder to meet and interact. “Los Angeles is a city where you can pretty much be in your own world,” he told WEHOVille recently from Grindr’s glass-and-cement-heavy office on Sunset and Highland, a stone’s throw from WeHo. They let you get close to other people, but, maddeningly, not close enough to interact with. The bubbles were one of the first things Simkhai noticed shortly after decamping to Los Angeles five years ago from Manhattan. (Read WEHOville’s review of Grindr and other gay mobile phone apps here). More likely you’ve heard of his app, Grindr, the location-based gay dating service that’s taken all the fun out of gaydar, and which has become a sort of shorthand for the anonymous hookups and speed dating that have come to define online dating in the age of the iPhone. You may have heard of Simkhai, who is become something of a fixture on the Boystown scene. Or, at least that’s how Joel Simkhai sees it. But here in WeHo we move in bubbles-mainly the glass and metal chassis of our cars. People in New York are constantly brushing into strangers on a daily basis-jostling on the subway, huddled together at crosswalks.
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