Dating Apps Are Designed to Keep You Single | Celeste Amadon, Known

Today's dating apps have been designed and tweaked and redesigned and redeployed to keep you single. They're perversely incentivized to try and keep people on the apps for longer, try and keep people hopeful enough, but also unsatisfied so that they're more likely to upgrade to being paying users. We do such in-depth onboarding that maybe there's only 10 people in the entire city that are applicable for you. If you say no, we might not find you another person for a week. It could be 2 weeks, and we can't guarantee to you when we will find you another person because and there's not an endless supply of people that are just right for you. I was walking along the Marina Green with a potential investor while I was fundraising. A woman stops me and grabs me by the wrist and goes, "You don't know me, but I know you because you set me up with my boyfriend." I had been single in San Francisco for 7 years. We have set up in our beta, I think it was around 1,500 dates, and we know of a couple hundred couples that are dating. You know, canceled our jobs that we had lined up and really burned the ships in some ways.

First believer should be you in your own idea and like your own ability to execute.

Little me would have thought that I was going and trying to start a career in politics. I often tell people that you will never catch me being a serial entrepreneur. But we were pre-product. We raised our seed round in 4 days and had more than a dozen term sheets. Hi, my name is Celeste Amadon. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Known, where we're building intelligence for human connection. And you are watching Founders in Motion.

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Okay, let's get back to the video. Celeste, thank you so much for joining us. So you're the youngest of 9 kids. You left home at 13 for boarding school on the East Coast. That's quite a lot of independence at a very early age. What did that version of you think that she was going to do with her life?

I've always been very passionate about social impact and in search of ways to create social impact at scale. So there's a reason that I started my working life working in politics. I was a Senate intern, I was a Senate page, um, and was a congressional intern as well. I would've been surprised if you told me I started a tech company, but if you told me it was one that was aiming to try and create large-scale, uh, social good, then I think it would make a lot more sense to me. So I think little me would've thought that I was going and trying to start a career in politics. I often tell people that you will never catch me being a serial entrepreneur. Uh, if Known doesn't work, I will not be standing at a whiteboard brainstorming 7 different ideas for potential companies I could start and doing market research to find out which one of them is the most likely to be a breakout company. Uh, I don't think that's a correct way of doing entrepreneurship. And more than that, I think Known is an outlier for me and things that would be interesting within tech. Um, and it's because of the mission.

Other than the social impact side, you've always been very curious about human connection, and where do you think that kind of manifests?

But I grew up in a family with 9 children. Uh, it was a blended family, so my father had been divorced before marrying my mom, and my parents were also divorced when I was quite young. So I think I've always been in the midst of complex familial dynamics and human dynamics, and it's always been something that's been very interesting to me. Even human compatibility, um, trying to understand what makes people actually be positive long-term fits for each other. I've seen, you know, my older siblings go through relationships and breakups and finding their marriage partners to getting married and having kids. Um, so I think it's always been something that's been been interesting to me. And even in working in politics, so much of what you do is trying to understand how you can convince other people to change their minds or be more open-minded. In campaigning, you do a lot of trying to understand what will resonate with people, um, and that's a huge part of what we do at Known, is trying to figure out how do we get people interested in trying this. Once they do try it, how do we convince them that the person we've found is worthy of them meeting.

Yeah. So you mentioned a lot about your background in politics, um, and campaigning and always being in that space. What do you think about your experience working in politics have really shaped the way that you're thinking about building human connections now?

Well, I think that dating is an inherently political problem.

Um, that's a hot I think it is a hot take.

I think we, we, this loneliness epidemic headline coming across every news channel, and I think it's easy to imagine that the loneliness epidemic is affecting someone else, that there's some lonelier person than you out there that needs saving. And in reality, what the loneliness epidemic is really describing is that all people, you and I included, are spending 30% less of our lifetime with other people than our parents did. And for social people, that can be as much as 10+ hours a week of your life that if you lived 20 years ago, you would be spending with friends.

Yeah.

And all conveniences that we've created, whether it's online shopping or food delivery or streaming services, they make our lives easier, but they also have created a more solitary society, especially in the US. So Americans are now shopping alone, eating alone, unwinding alone, watching movies alone, living alone. All of those things would be very uncommon, uh, 20 years ago. And yeah, the dating and the loneliness epidemic are very political problems, um, and it's an angle that we talk a lot about at Known is how can we create not just better dates but a more cohesive society.

Yeah, I love that. I think the loneliness epidemic is probably one of the biggest issues in the next in the next century and inherently becomes a societal issue and not just a individual type of experience. So we've spoke a little bit about politics, but now I wanna talk a bit more about your time kind of working in early stage investing. So after boarding school, you had Stanford, the JPMorgan offer, the pre-seed investing experience. You were sitting across from founders deciding whether their ideas were worth funding or the founders were worth backing. Now kind of you're the one asking for that conviction, or I've already asked for that conviction. Does having lived both sides give you an edge, or does it actually make you too aware of how you're being judged?

No, I think it definitely gives you an edge. Um, yeah, I mean, we, we raised our pre-seed, I think it was in 8 days. And we were— I mean, it's very, very grateful. We were pre-product for consumer data, um, and we raised our seed round in 4 days and had more than a dozen term sheets. And I think a lot of that comes from understanding what investors want to see, how to communicate with them effectively. Um, investors don't want to waste your time or have their time wasted either. Um, and so I think cutting through the noise and finding people that are likely to want to back your company, explaining to them why you think that that is true and figuring out if they're not interested quickly is the key to effective fundraising. Uh, and I think that seeing that from the investor side and knowing kind of what, how to decipher what, what you see as signal from the, from the founder side has been really helpful.

I think there is definitely such an art towards fundraising that people don't really talk about. Um, and a lot of it is that kind of building momentum, figuring out who's interested, who to focus your time on, um, and optimizing almost like a campaign. So you definitely have a lot of experience in the space. So since you've mentioned fundraising, I, um, on, on the business side of things, so Forerunner is kind of a leading consumer US VC, had never really invested in dating. You kind of walked in at 21 and changed their mind. What did you say and what was the hardest thing that they pushed back on?

Well, I'm really grateful for my partners at Forerunner. They've been incredibly helpful to us and, uh, strong early believers in what we're doing. I think that they were interested in our results-driven approach. You know, I think usually when people are pitching dating apps to VCs, they're pitching niche dating apps. It's like dating apps for Mormons, dating apps for cat lovers, dating apps for every kink imaginable, um, and Known is not a niche product, it's a completely different business model. And so I think they buy the fact that with new technology, it's finally possible to create real outcomes for users and that people want those outcomes and they're willing to pay for them. And in consumer at large, you know, people will pay for things that either create meaningfully enjoyable real life experiences. So like for example, someone will pay $30 to get into a bar they want to go to, or they'll pay for things that make their lives more convenient.

Yeah.

They'll pay an extra $10 to have their DoorDash arrive faster, or they'll pay for things that make them feel good about themselves. And unfortunately, today's dating apps don't do any of those things. They don't create real outcomes and enjoyable real-life experiences. They definitely don't make people feel good about themselves, and they don't make your life more convenient because they're designed to take 10 hours a week and still provide you zero result. And so I think that being able to flip the business model and use cutting-edge technology to create those results was exciting. Not just to Forerunner, but to investors at large.

Yeah, super exciting. So I've never really been on dating apps for maybe like the last 6 years, and then suddenly in the last few months I've like found myself on them. I have to say it, it is like a pilgrimage of like people to go through and like that fatigue of just even being on the platform is super real. So what are really love about the Known story, your story, is that there were no kind of like dramatic moment, no like big decisions. Like you and your co-founder Asher just got really obsessed, started missing classes, and realized you'd missed the Stanford enrollment deadline by weeks. Where did the obsession initially come from?

Hmm. I'm thinking back on it right now. So Asher and I started working on the idea of Known almost a year ago now, so probably March of 2025. Um, and we were curious, could you basically make an AI version of eHarmony? Could you onboard users with this very in-depth onboarding process where you would understand enough about them to really service them? Um, could you, if you had that information, what could you do with it? And how could you get rid of the parts of dating apps that people dislike the most? Which turned out to be exactly what you would think they are. It's swiping, it's chatting, it's being ghosted, it's having too many options or too few. So it's market dynamics. Um, and when we realized that if you had the type of data that we now have at Known, you could solve many of those problems in a secure and user-aligned way. I think that was really enthralling because we understood from doing so much research on the current market that today's dating apps have been designed and tweaked and redesigned and redeployed to keep you single. And it's quite, it, it's, it's surprising, but it also is when you, when you really start to think about it, it makes a lot of sense because they're perversely incentivized to try and keep people on the apps for longer to lengthen their retention curve. Uh, and to try and keep people hopeful enough, but also unsatisfied so that they're more likely to upgrade to being paying users because only 5% of people on dating apps pay. They can't make enough money.

Yeah, for sure. So, so yeah, I think this is a great segue for me to ask you, if someone is moving over from a Hinge and a Tinder to Known, what should they expect?

They should expect a lot less volume, uh, but more precision. So on Known, we'll find you one person. Uh, hopefully you like them, but if you don't, we can't just replace them right away because we do such in-depth onboarding that maybe there's only 10 people in the entire city that are applicable for you, uh, and compatible with you. And so once you say no to the first option, we have to go out and find another one. One of the things I hear about some of our competitors is that you can essentially swipe via chat. Like, you can say no, no, I don't want to meet him, no, I don't want to meet him, and it'll continue to feed you new people. That still creates the same market dynamics that create, um, choice paradox on dating apps. And so on Known, if you, if you say no, we might not find you another person for a week, it could be 2 weeks, and we can't guarantee to you when we will find you another person because there's not an endless supply of people that are just right for you.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that kind of discretion is really important because choice is such a big thing. If you always know that there's going to be choice on the horizon, you will always keep swiping or moving to the next person. So you mentioned that the onboarding is so in-depth that you understand a person fully. So could you give me a glimpse in terms of like the questions you ask someone on this onboarding flow?

Yeah, I think it starts, the first question that we ask is, it's usually something along the lines of, hi Celeste, you joined Known because swiping just isn't cutting it anymore, so we're gonna do this differently. Um, I'd love to hear where you grew up and how you ended up living in San Francisco. So it's essentially asking you to tell it about the first chapter of your life, and from there we ask a follow-up question. Um, about your childhood and maybe where you went to college if you did go. Um, and then we, we ask about your career. We ask about how your friends would describe you. We ask about what you do in your spare time. You know, we try to understand whether you're an introvert or an extrovert. Um, whether you work to live or live to work. So there's a variety of questions. I'd implore anyone watching this who's curious to try it and tell me what they think. I don't think that the questions are fully the secret sauce. Like, I think we do a great job of understanding users at onboarding, but it's also what we learn about you over time from continuous conversation.

Yeah, and something you said that I thought was super interesting is, I think you mentioned at one point that doing it through voice, you can learn a lot about who they are as a person, what they value using their voice and tone. Could you talk to me a bit more about that?

Yeah, so we are completely compliant with all biometric data laws, but we are able to try and use some imprints into people's speech patterns to understand not just what they're saying, but how they're saying it. Because when you meet someone for the first time, you're not just assessing the transcript of what they're saying to you, you're listening to how they speak judging, ¿humble or boastful? Are they sincere or insincere? Are they kind or are they kind of conniving? And so with known, part of what we can do is also understand personality from the way that people talk in a similar way that people assess other people in real life.

Yeah, I think that's super exciting and definitely a part that A lot of the current products in the market don't really get a reading that, and I do think like you can tell a lot by a person by the way that they deliver a story, not just by the actual content of the story. Um, so I wanna go back to like, so you had this whole like dropping out of Stanford moment. Talk to me about that. How did that feel? Um, was it out of left field? Any initial regrets?

I'm on a leave of absence from Stanford, uh, and it was something that I, I did because I really wanted to build the product and I knew that the time to build it was now, not in 3 months or 6 months. Asher and I are both pretty risk-positive people, so we took time off or dropped out, they call it, before we raised a dime or had even really a single user. Um, because we knew that there was a meaningful product to be built. Um, and we, you know, canceled our jobs that we had lined up, uh, and really burned the ships in some ways. But it was never that traumatic. Uh, I think in some ways actually building a company when you still have the option to go back to school if it doesn't work is probably less risky.

Yeah, and I love that. Um, I, and I, I love that framing. You're a very risk-positive person. And that's true. I think taking risks is actually a very positive thing. And one of the notions I really hate is people thinking that they have to raise a certain amount of money in order to do something. But no, like your first believer should be you in your own idea and like your own ability to execute. If you don't believe, it's like hard to get someone else to believe in you. And okay, so Um, you mentioned Asher, so I think you guys have such a, a beautiful dynamic. So tell me about your co-founder Asher.

He's an amazing product person. Him and I have been friends since we were 18. Um, so almost like 5 years now. Um, I met him right before we both went into Stanford together. We worked together, um, on a variety of kind of side projects, but also taking classes together and traveled you know, for spring breaks, but also, you know, I traveled with his family. So very tight-knit. Um, I think we have a one-of-one founder co-founder dynamic because we're such close friends at this point. We have a friend group together, we live together, we have a dog together, we have company together. So in a lot of ways he is my life partner and I'm lucky that we are very in sync with think about the world, and usually probably 99.9% of the time think the same thing, which means I can trust him to act on my behalf and he can trust me to act on his because we see things very, uh, similarly.

Yeah. And that trust is so important because sometimes the co-founder dynamic lasts honestly longer than most marriages these days. So I would, so one point that you mentioned that I thought was pretty interesting is you saying that like you're very similar and you agree on kind of 99%. Of most things. So do, do you ever find that like maybe that's not a super positive signal or do you really enjoy that?

Hmm. I can see where you're going with that. I think like it's always valuable to have people have other opinions and have healthy debate. Asher and I have different opinions about the design of, you know, this modal versus that one, or, you know, should we order like this food for lunch versus that? I'm not saying that we agree on everything, and I think that we are able to use the fact that if we have differences, it usually means that we'll end up meeting somewhere in the middle. I more mean that generally speaking, him and I agree on the type of company we want to run and the type of team we want to have and the type of product we want to build and what is the end goal and what is the end mission. That is all completely aligned. So the small stuff, that's beneficial to have multiple ideas, but different ideas doesn't mean disagreement.

I, I think that's very true, right? Like, I think the overall alignment needs to be very clear, but like the small nitty-gritty things, like it's great to have like a, a healthy debate and to test things out. And you never know what you don't know, right? So like, who knows? Like maybe you both could be wrong or both can be super right.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so you guys are very close. So here's what I keep thinking about. You're building a product about what it means to be truly known by another person and your co-founder is someone that you've known for years and trust completely and aren't dating, like, does that bond like shape how you build?

I think what it does do is it shapes the way that Asher and I think about teams. So because Asher and I have such a compatible relationship and we are so in sync with each other. Like, there is no tension or disrespect between him and I ever. And I think that that modeling of behavior stemming from the founders on our team goes pretty broadly about the way that we want to interact with each other, the team, what it means to have disagreement, how you handle that. And it's created kind of a haven of positivity and amicable, like, co-working that I think really benefits the company. Yeah.

Yeah. I, I find that some of the best teams I know, their co-founders are absolutely best friends and also like first few employees, they're all like one big cult. So you've had a very iconic kind of morning walk on the marina with your investor. Can you tell me, you bring me back to this SF Bay Marina moment and what happened.

So yeah, I was walking along the Marina Green with a potential investor while I was fundraising, and I had someone stop me first and go, oh my God, I see you all over TikTok. Um, and we keep walking, and like 10 minutes later, a woman stops me, grabs me by the wrist, and goes, you don't know me, but I know you because you set up with my boyfriend, and I had been single in San Francisco for 7 years. Uh, I was bewildered but obviously very excited. Anytime I find out that people are dating from known, it makes my day. Um, but the investor, we— as we walked off from, from this woman, uh, he went, you paying them? And I said, no, but that's a great idea and I should really start doing that.

When you're creating a positive impact on people's life, like they want to say thank you. And that's so beautiful. So how, when you got, got, start to get started on building Known and like building this database of like people to match with each other, like how did you get things started? Like was it AI at the beginning or was it just kind of like you hammering the phone, playing like real life matchmaker?

The matching early on, we would have AI do it, but it didn't do a good enough job. So we would go in and we would look at, we would try and rearrange the matches to make them better or veto matches that we didn't think were good enough. We don't have to do that anymore, thank God. Um, but yeah, we got our original users mostly from like TikTok. Like I would make silly TikToks that wouldn't even do that well. It would get like 3,000 views in SF, but then we would get 800 people signed up, which was the first signal to me that what we're building, people really want. You know, it's not rocket science in hindsight. Like the idea of being able to serve someone a date with someone they would want to go on a date with on a platter does have PMF, like it's a PMF result, right? But where can you actually do the engineering work that gets you to being able to provide that to people?

This is super funny that you mentioned, 'cause I was trying to like matchmake founders together a while back. Um, and I also tossed it over to AI and it does a horrible job at it. So it's really interesting that you mentioned that like the kind of intake part you were able to do very early on, but the matching part had a little bit of human in the requirements at the beginning.

Yeah.

And so, so you've seen so many people go through the platform at this point, like how many people are on Known and like how many matches have you set up?

So we don't share those numbers publicly, but we, I can say that We have set up in our beta, I think it was like around 1,500 dates, uh, and we know of a couple hundred couples that are dating currently from those dates, which is really exciting. Um, that was back in the late summer and early fall, um, of 2025. And then we just launched in San Francisco. As I said, we're not sharing numbers from that yet, but it's going better than our beta did when it comes to user acquisition. So I'm really excited about it, uh, and we're gonna hopefully be launching dates next week. So once that starts happening, I'm considering doing like a build in public, publish the number of dates that happen every week on actual One Thing. But I also, I don't wanna have people feel like we're being invasive at all. So we'll see. Mm-hmm.

To make some decision on that.

Yeah.

So you talk about loneliness, the loneliness epidemic, like super fluently, like the stats, the structural argument, everyone eating alone, scrolling alone. But do you ever feel it yourself?

I am very rarely alone right now, um, given that I work 7 days a week in office with my team and we work a lot. So I won't think that I feel the type, the, the type of loneliness that I think most people are facing in the US. But I can say that being a founder and having a lot of stress, um, and working a ton can feel lonely even if you are not alone. I'm really grateful that Asher and I started this company together because I think without him I would feel lonely. Um, but I have an amazing team and we get along really well and everyone's in, in some ways friends and family. So I, I think that's made it a lot easier.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think something you mentioned, like, like being a founder, you could feel lonely even though you're in a room full of people. I think that sentiment resonates a lot across the board. Um, and it, it's something kind of like a founder's curse almost. When you think about Known in the next year, what are you really excited about?

I hope that we have a million users and we set up, you know, a million couples. That's, that's what I hope to have happen. Um, maybe even more than that. One of the interesting things about consumers that you can grow really, really quickly if you build your technology in a way that it can sustain high concurrency and usage. And we're investing in that heavily at Known. And I'm excited to see people outside of San Francisco using it because it's already working in SF, and I can imagine the amount of good that we can bring to other cities. It's just, it's a very meaningful, product to be working on.

Yeah, I love that. Well, thank you so much for coming on. Like, I really appreciate your time, and I love learning more about love and human connections and human intelligence.

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