Inside Known: Co-founder Celeste Amadon on fixing dating apps

Today we're sitting down with Celeste Amadon, CEO and co-founder of Known, an AI-powered dating app that just launched in San Francisco. We get into why Celeste dropped out of Stanford to pursue matchmaking, how Known's approach is unique, and some fun dating stories. Let's get into the episode. Welcome back to Get the Check. I'm Maya.

I'm Anika.

I'm Priya.

Today we have Celeste, and you're launching an AI-powered dating app. When— what is the launch date again?

It's on February 1st, so in 2 weeks.

Very exciting.

We're filming right before Valentine's Day, right before Valentine's Day.

We're doing a lot around Valentine's Day. We're doing a 1,000-person launch party at the SF Mint, and obviously since it's on Valentine's Day, it's singles only.

You all already hosted one as well, right? Which I don't think has ever been done before.

Yeah, so the first one was crazy because we did it in 2 weeks. Like, we had the idea and 2 weeks later we hosted the event. I'm really lucky that my friend Nick from Bentley helped me because I had no idea how you threw an event like this.

Yeah, they're great.

The burner community in San Francisco came through for us and gave us AV and lighting and production materials for free. That entire party, I think, cost us like $5,000, which is insane.

Wow.

I wouldn't say that it was the most high-end event of the century. It really wasn't. But it was fun. And seeing the difference— I think you were talking about it earlier, that a lot of young people are not comfortable approaching each other in public anymore. And I think it's because we have this generation of people that are really scared of rejection. So when you have a room of people where you know that everyone is single, it just drops the barriers in a way that really affects the vibe. Like, people were talking to each other in a way I've never seen in San Francisco. People were approaching each other, buying each other drinks, laughing, dancing. A lot of people came alone and were leaving, not even just like with people Like, you're like friends. Yeah, I was seeing like girls come in alone and leave with like 4 other girls even, which was really heartwarming. So for the party we're throwing now in February, it's definitely a more high-budget event. Thank you to our investors for that. It's gonna be super fun.

Yeah, but we wanted to dive into your story. Like Annika mentioned, you're obviously a young founder and would love to hear more about the company, your background, and yeah, just more about where you started.

Okay, well, I'm from Seattle originally. I grew up in a very large family. I'm the youngest of 9 children.

Oh wow.

And I think that when you have that many siblings, you end up either being ultra babied or very independent at a young age, and I think I was definitely in the latter category. Uh, I started working in politics when I was really young, and that led me to going to boarding school when I was 13 on the East Coast. And I think that that surprisingly ties into what we're doing now, because the reason I was so interested in politics was the idea of social impact at scale. And there's even some weird similarities between trying to launch a consumer app and canvassing for a campaign. Everything from like the flyering to the events you host to the way that you're careful about messaging. So yeah, we started Known last May. It's still a very early company, but we've been lucky to do extensive testing in San Francisco with great reception. So I'm hoping that, you know, we had 100 couples come out of the betas we did in the summer. And I'm hoping to 10x that now that we launch in February.

Yeah, which is like a contrarian choice, right? To launch a consumer app in SF instead of New York.

Definitely. I think founders are always convinced that they're too late. And most of the time they're too early. And for us, we're using voice-powered AI to onboard users to a dating app. And that works really well because we have much better user understanding and thus can do a better job matching them. But I think we're still really early with people being comfortable with that type of technology. And what might be weird to people today in New York might be much more comfortable in even 3 to 6 months. So our philosophy is not to rush to market and instead to launch in the most tech-forward city in the world, which also I would argue is a real dating problem.

And I would agree.

I mean, we're, we're doing this whole campaign, uh, in February, basically declaring a state of emergency in San Francisco.

San Francisco, state of emergency, seems to be called the city of love.

I don't know That's what I would call that.

I guess like in the '70s when everyone was like—

Oh, because of the hippie.

Yeah, exactly. So I think that there's a real argument to launch in San Francisco because people are tech forward here. They're comfortable with AI and they have a real problem for us to solve. And if it goes well here, then we'll go to New York or LA next.

Yeah, that makes sense. So you dropped out of Stanford to start Known. And I'm curious what made you decide to do that and why you thought this was the time that you needed to go full throttle and like launch it right now.

That's a good question. So I had been working in early stage venture and I was seeing so many founders pitching consumer AI, mostly consumer AI assistants to me. They would all pitch the same way. They would talk about basically combining, uh, emotional AI. So something like a AI life coach, an AI therapist, an AI companion with a utility function. Maybe it could read your emails, maybe it could book your dinner reservation. And their differentiation that they would sell me on was that they could do personalization by having a ton of information about who their users were. And then when I would ask them how they were getting this deep user understanding and trust, the answers came back flat. So we didn't invest in any of the companies, but it left me with this question of, where is a use case that would actually provide enough value for normal working people that you could actually create personalized AI for? And I think that dating is the only use case right now where people actually want to tell you about themselves because what you can provide them, you know, a date with someone that they really like, a life partner is so valuable. It's so intrinsically human, the desire to find that.

I was gonna ask, I've seen a lot of like founders talk about how like humans are more truthful with AI, especially in the voice. Is that something that you've noticed too in the app?

It's definitely something that we've noticed. We don't listen to any of the calls. We take trust and safety really seriously over at Known. But from even the AI summarizations that I see of what people talk about, it'll give us like trend reports. People go deep. I mean, we learn everything from the dynamics in people's family of origins to how their bosses just don't understand how capable they are, but they really wish they could be doing instead. To 98% of our users in our beta explicitly stating sexual preferences and kinks that they're looking for in partners. And that blows me away, but I think it also makes sense because it's markedly not human. It can't judge you and it's completely private. So unlike a different dating app where maybe you would make a profile and you'd have to put what you're looking for publicly, those answers that you tell us are used only on the back end for matching. So you can find someone that would make sense for those preferences without being vulnerable and exposed publicly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like everyone jokes about how people will say the same thing on dating app prompts.

Like, exactly.

Do you want pineapple on pizza? Or just like, like, I like The Office. Like these, like, yeah, hyper cliché things.

Yeah.

But then for you guys, you get all the answers on the back end that people wouldn't ever put on their profile.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's what gives us the edge is we understand our users really well. The name was not by accident. We make users feel known, we understand them, and we use that to find people much better dates than they could find on Hinge. And I like to joke, like, if you were going to go and try and find a partner in San Francisco, you probably need to go on 10 dates. But if you were sourcing those people from Hinge or Tinder, you can't tell who people are on those platforms. So you wouldn't choose the right people and you'd probably have to go on more like 30. And if there's one thing I know about the city, it's that nobody, not even the most adventurous man who's like playing women, is going on 30 dates. It's just not happening.

No. Yeah, I feel like dating in New York is a sport.

And not here though.

It's a game.

People drag their feet, which is so valid because like, that's me too.

I mean, everyone's so busy too.

That is part of it.

Yeah.

I feel like the demographic of people that you have here and also like what they're looking for is very different. And so being able to have that hyper-personalization just makes it also scalable to anywhere that you're going because you have like all of that information.

So yeah, I mean, I feel like it's like very similar to like just like real matchmaking.

Exactly.

Um, and I mean, growing up, or like on Netflix, there's this like Indian matchmaking show that was like really popular. And, and it was just like so interesting to see her conversations obviously with the contestants. And she wasn't successful but on the show, but I actually think she is successful because one of my friends got matched with—

wait, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah, he just got married. I didn't realize she did it.

Oh, off of the show.

Yeah, yeah, no, it's actually her real business. And then like the show decided to film her, and like unfortunately like the couples she matched on the show didn't work out. But like, better for the show, it actually works.

Um, she asked my dad if I wanted to go on it or something, and I was like, uh, no.

But that's exactly what we're trying to do with Known. It's, you know, being the friend that knows everything about you but also knows everything about everyone else that lives in your city. Because the limitations of your friends trying to matchmake for you is that they only know so many people. And even matching matchmakers. Maybe they have a database of like 1,000 people, but that runs out pretty quickly if you go on 2 dates that aren't right.

Yeah, that's fair. And I'm curious because like, um, dating apps are pitched so often to VCs, and not only they're a consumer app, but they're also like a very common consumer app. So how did you, I guess, raise your first round?

Yeah, so our vision for dating was always that we would be flipping the business model. The biggest problem with dating apps today, and when people say, you know, how known different than Hinge. Known looks nothing like Hinge. The UI/UX is completely different. There's no swiping. There's no user-to-user chatting. But that's not the fundamental difference. The difference is, is that we monetize the dates. So we really want to get users out on dates and Hinge does not. Hinge actively does not want their users going on a high volume of dates because they're trying to prolong the user lifetime on the app and keep retention and engagement high. So the pitch that we had for VCs was for the first time in history, not only can we build a company that's completely aligned with user success, but we have the technology to create a good enough result that people will meaningfully pay for it and invest in it with their time. And we saw that in the beta. You know, we would do this voice-based onboarding and the average user would talk to the AI for 25 minutes. And from that, you know, now we have LLMs and modern machine learning. And so we can understand the nuance of not just what you're looking for, but Who are you and what type of person not only would you like but would like you back? Which means our users face a lot less rejection, they're not ghosted, and it doesn't waste their time. One of the things that makes me so upset about the current dating products is just the, the data around time usage. Like, we like to talk about the loneliness epidemic in the news right now, but I think that people imagine the lonely— the loneliness epidemic as something that's impacting this group of other people that aren't yourself. Yeah, but in reality, what's really being described is the fact that our generation, all of us included, now spend 30% less time with other people across their lifetimes compared to their parents. And that has everything to do with the fact that— I mean, you're holding it in your hand right now. Everybody carries around the most addictive object ever created in their pocket. And every new convenience that we've created, whether it's online shopping, you know, same-day delivery, food delivery, streaming services have made our lives more convenient, but they've also made our lives more solitary. Americans now shop alone, eat alone, unwind alone, watch movies alone, exercise alone, worship alone. And you can't take that much time out of daily life without dating really suffering. And so when I see these stats that the average American on dating apps is using multiple and they spend 10 hours a week on them, and if you spend those 10 hours a week, you still are going on statistically less than one date, meaning you go on no date from those 10 hours. And it makes me really upset because that means that not only are you spending less time across your lifetime with other people, if you're single, you're sitting in your room scrolling on an app that was designed to have you rejected and keep you single when 10 years ago you would have been at a bar with your friends meeting other people. And I think that that's really depressing.

Yeah, I feel like especially in San Francisco, we talk a lot about when you do go out to bars and things like that, people also don't have the same interactions anymore. Like, I feel like people very much stay to their friend group. People aren't as social. And it all, I think, stems from the fact that we're not as used to just going out there and talking to people and having normal conversations. And so it leads to a lot of that even when you are put in that situation.

Yeah, I feel like people don't know how to do small talk anymore at all. Yeah, they like don't know what it's like to just like talk to someone new for 10 minutes and ask like normal questions that is like not about your job and maybe more about you.

I think the job thing is definitely a San Francisco phenomenon.

Yeah, it's also interesting because even when it comes to jobs, I feel like there's people where we've met and like very quickly talked about our jobs, but the conversation's like deep and interesting versus it's like, where do you work, what do you do? But it— I don't know, that's part of it too. It's like how deep you go into someone and what they do. Yeah. When you said the plan is to monetize the dates, is your plan that instead of like a subscription-based model, you do it as like per date?

Yeah. So to kind of answer more of your question about how did we pitch this to VCs, subscription businesses rely on long-tail retention, meaning if you're Grammarly and for every cohort of paying users you onboard, at some point the retention curve goes down, down, down, down, down, and bottoms out at maybe 4% of people who started paying never churn. And that's really important because all of the money is made in those businesses by adding up the 4% in every cohort that doesn't churn. So if you're a dating product and you rely on a subscription business, well, there's no long tail because either people who are paying eventually say, this doesn't work, I'm unhappy, I'm going to stop paying for this now, or they find somebody. So we have what we call both negative and positive churn in dating. And having a subscription business and having no long tail means you're always going to be flailing to try and create more revenue. And that's what we see on dating apps today. They've basically created an optionality-based product where there's a photo of somebody, you can chat with the photo, but then they gate the really good options and try and make you pay on one-offs, you know, roses, super likes to get access to the people that they deem you're going to most want.

Well, I heard that like if you have a good profile, Hinge gates your profile to people who pay.

That's true.

Oh, really? Yeah.

So if they, if they deem you to be in the most desirable camp of users, they will put you in what we call rose jail, meaning that the only people who will get to match with you are people who are willing to pay to get access to you. An analogy that I often make about this that my mom told me when I was probably 17 years old was, if you're a woman going to a fancy nightclub and you're skipping the line and getting in for free, it's not because, you know, they just want you to come in and— or it's because you're the product.

Yeah.

If you're, if you're a woman and you're going to this fancy nightclub and not paying, it's because we've been the product.

I like saw you looking at me and I was like, I can't look at you.

I'm going to laugh.

No, I mean, that's true.

And if you're not paying for something, it's because you're the product. So at a nightclub, they're not actually selling drinks. They're selling access to beautiful women. And on Hinge and Tinder, if you're not paying, it's because you are what they are monetizing. Access to you is what you're monetizing. You know, we didn't go out in a, in a Bumble type of way and say, we're gonna build a dating app for women, but it was a dating app built by women. Yeah. And so it really is in the vision of what a woman would want in a dating experience. You know, we get to know you and then we explain to you exactly who your dates are. So you have the context to feel safe making a choice to meet them. We know where you're going, if you showed up, and if few left. We know how it went, and we are, you know, vetting our user base so there's no repeat offenders that are, you know, being unkind to women and then going on more dates through the app. So I think that it really does appeal to women who are looking for a more intentional and chivalrous way to date, which is really in vogue right now. I think, like, even there was an article recently that was like, is having a boyfriend embarrassing? Basically all about how, like, men are not willing to put in enough effort to make dating them be like a valid thing to do. And I think that for Known, it's like bringing in the type of men who want to be chivalrous and intentional and respectful to our amazing female users.

I know I saw you tweeted. I don't know if it was after SantaCon or it was after— and you were like, men in SF don't want commitment and the women want effort and everyone is single. First of all, I guess, is it harder to filter men or women? Like, I assume it's harder to filter men, but maybe that's just like my internal bias. And then how do you— if like men don't want commitment, commitment, but you only want men that are okay with some level of commitment on that.

I think it's easier to filter men because they blatantly say things that would get them not let in. You know, they'll say like, I wouldn't date a woman even if she was right for me. Okay, well then you cannot be on our dating app. It's for dating. So unfortunately, sir, that's not going to work. Um, most women pass the screen because most women that I, you know, have seen in San Francisco are looking for something intentional. About like the SantaCon comments. Firstly, I don't think I should be quoted on anything I said after attending SantaCon. Um, but I think that SantaCon also kind of brings in like an interesting crowd of younger people, like people in their like early 20s.

Yeah.

Um, but I think that there is a phenomenon going on where men are feeling really rejected by the dating experiences they're having on dating apps, and I think it makes them less willing to put a lot of effort into anything. So I kind of hope that by creating intentional experiences where it feels like you're intentionally paired with somebody and everyone knows what the expectation is— like, you, man, are taking this woman to dinner at this restaurant that you chose— that it will help create better expectations that lead to a result where both people feel happy with, like, the interaction. The problem with the subscription business model and then having to rely on one-off payments is that they're constantly trying to convert people from free users into paying users. And how do do that, you have people have just enough hope, they match with people but they don't go on the dates, you know, they get ghosted, but the hope of having matched with somebody desirable to them keeps them on the platform but still feeling unsatisfied, so they'll want to upgrade to be a paying user. The incentives of those businesses are just critically misaligned. And so what really excites me about Known is that we have the user understanding that we would need to provide a really good user experience, one where you're not rejected, one where the people we're pitching to you to meet actually make sense for you, one one that doesn't require 10 hours of your time each week. But because we can create a really good result, people are willing to pay for it. And that means that we don't have to build a business model where we're misaligned with our users. We actually want our users to succeed, and we're okay to see them leave happily having found somebody.

What is the metric that you guys align on, at least in terms of— for your business model? I'm guessing you don't track ARR. So then at that point, what do you track? And like, how do you format your financials?

I'm curious.

For right now, what we're really focusing on is the conversion rate of introductions to dates. So on Hinge, if you match with 30 people, the odds are that you would go on a date with one of them. We focus a lot on trying to have our conversion rate from introduction to date above 60%. So if we say, hey Maya, you should meet Adam, we want there to be a more likely than not chance that you guys will go on a date, so that when users see their introductions, they believe that they're going to meet these people. I think one of the big problems with dating maps now is we've trained ourselves by our past behavior to see the people we meet and match with as hypothetical. They're real people.

Yeah, that's true. I'm curious, when you were in the early days, let's say you started back in May, so it's been like 8 months. 8 months.

Okay, that's exciting.

Um, how did you go about like originally matching people?

Yeah, so when we were just starting the business, we wanted to prove a couple of different things. We wanted to prove that we could get to understand users and win their trust well enough to have the information we need to match them. And when we started seeing these long onboarding calls come in, we knew that that was pretty much covered. And the next thing was, can we actually create good enough matches to set up meaningfully better dates? And how we did that was running both kind of classic machine learning, doing embeddings and finding similarities between people's answers. Filtering using LLMs. So you can explain to us, you know, I only want to date a man who has two sisters, or I only want to date a woman who's also vegan like me. And we can ensure that those nuances are found within your matches. And then we were basically working with human psychologists, especially a woman named Pepper Schwartz, who made some of the original algorithms back in the day for products like Perfect Match to put social science into the way we were matching people. Now, I really, really care about our original users' user experience. So even for our upcoming San Francisco launch, we're running evals and making sure that each match that goes out is high quality. When we were just starting the company, I was a perfectionist. I wanted to see every single person who was going to be pitched to each other. I wanted to understand why. I mean, we were training our model to be better at it and to be able to do it in our vision of what couples make sense.

I was gonna say, like, sometimes people say opposites attract. Like, how does that factor in? Is that true?

I don't know. This is a sore subject. So you know how they say if you don't like your friend's boyfriend and they break up, you shouldn't necessarily say, oh my God, I always hated him, because maybe they're gonna end up getting married? Like, they could just get back together.

Yeah.

Well, I had a similar situation happen recently where The research shows that opposites don't attract. In fact, one, one way of testing whether your relationship is likely to be long and healthy is to even just take the 16 Personalities test, the Myers-Briggs test, and if you are the same personality code or one letter off from your partner, you are much more likely to have a long and healthy relationship with them.

Wow, I didn't know that.

I told everyone I knew this. I told all my girlfriends, I told my sisters, I told, you know, my, my older mentors who have fiancés. And of course they all went home and made their boyfriends and husbands.

I would do that too.

I'm like, no, I'm literally thinking about like, what is this?

And I feel like men get so upset about that. Like, anytime I've asked a man to take a personality test, they're like, why am I doing this?

And of course some of them came back and were so happy, and they're like, we have the same personality, I knew it! And those ones tended to be the people that I think are in great relationships.

Oh my God.

And then other people came back and I had caused a real problem. They were like, you know, we're completely opposite personalities. And like, we led to this whole conversation of whether we actually make sense for each other. I wish we had never done this. So it's the last time I'm offering compatibility tests to people in my life.

Oh, okay. So then do you like— is some of the science behind what you guys are looking for, um, are you categorizing personalities?

That's one of the things that really excites me about voice. People have always said that you can't you know, reverse engineer chemistry because it's— yeah, but I really believe that a lot of chemistry has to do with the combination of personalities and the way that people talk.

Yeah.

So something that we look deeply at right now is what can we learn from not just the transcripts of what people say, but how they say it, how they answer questions. When you meet someone for the first time, you're meeting me, you're assessing, is this person humble or boastful? Are they genuine or ingenuine? Are they kind or are, you know, conniving. And that's something that we can really start to understand from these voice conversations is how does this person interact and what does that say about who they are. So when we look at matching people, the interests that you have don't have to be aligned. It doesn't matter if your boyfriend likes playing golf and being in a fantasy football league and you like getting drinks with your girlfriends and going to yoga. Those interests don't have to be aligned, but fundamental personality traits, you know, are you extroverted or introverted? Are you a judgmental person or not? Those things really matter because otherwise you're going to be constantly trying to meet in the middle with somebody who isn't really like you.

Hmm. Wow. I feel like that is true. Like, if I were to, like, for example, like you and your boyfriend, like, I feel like you're for sure more similar than different.

Yeah, I guess like I I will say they're like—

they're—

we have different reactions to like how people treat us or like situations. So I think like the judgmental part is different, but like everything else, when I'm thinking about the Myers-Briggs, is probably the same. It's also—

I think you're in a bubble of people like you, and then like you probably think about like Audie, her boyfriend, and it's like, oh, we're— we're— how different are we in comparison to like how different are you from like me or Priya? But it's like, that's not the comparison. It's like in the world, like it's exactly—

it's like the mindset difference.

Yeah, yeah. It's like if this is the scale of like people often are like, well, I'm so clean and my boyfriend's so messy, we're nothing alike. And you're like, no, this is the not clean side of the spectrum, this is the clean. You guys are both right here, you're just slightly different than him. And so you're in your bubble and you think that it's so different, but it's not.

I guess that's fair.

Wow, wow, I never really thought about it that way.

There's also like something to be said for someone that deals with whatever like your unique personality quirks are well. Yes, you know what I mean? Yeah, like I feel like you and Audi both have— like everyone has like some quirkiness, and like you you guys like handle each other's really well.

Hmm.

I'm also curious, like, why, why voice and why not video?

Would you want to do a video?

I feel like that's a lot.

I don't know, I guess like no.

Okay, what about you?

It's definitely more low stakes to just sit in on a call.

Yeah, it's also like, then are you gonna be like, what do I look like? Because I think, yeah, I look like in video because now we do like TikTok and podcasts and stuff. And it's actually really mentally taxing to have to think about what you look like.

Yeah, you really do a lot of— the reason that we avoid video is if you're, if you're trying to get someone to really open up about themselves, voice is great because they're not writing what they're saying and then reading it and editing it. They're just free-flowing. It's a conversation. That's why podcasts are so great. Um, but video, you're looking at yourself and you're like, that opens up the self-consciousness to try and analyze how you're being perceived. The entire point is that it's not a human, it can't judge you, and We don't want people to be feeling this sense of friction with the onboarding. We want them to feel really comfortable.

Yeah, no, I 100% would be the type of person to write out my entire script.

That's exactly what I would do in that situation. So that's so true. Mine, I would be like, hello, but like some bedhead on.

You have to see the real me.

I wanted to ask you, when we got coffee, you were like, people have stopped you in the marina before. And I wanted to ask you the craziest story of like who you've put together because you probably hear crazy dating stories.

Yeah, we do hear— I mean, I hear a lot of really crazy stories about people's exes too.

I was going to say that too.

I don't speak on that.

I'm a vault.

But what I can tell you is we've set up a lot of couples and during our beta we didn't have a great way to track couples that we set up that ended up dating. So most of them we found by having them find us in the streets. So for example, when I was fundraising, I was walking on the Marina Green at— along the Marina Mile. Yeah, at like 7 AM with an investor. We're talking about Know, and I'm trying to convince him that this is the future of dating. The first woman stops me and she goes, you're the girl that dropped out of Stanford that's building a dating app, right? Like, yeah. He looks at me, he's shocked. Keep walking. 5 minutes later, a woman grabs me by the arm, goes, you don't know me. You don't know me, but I know you. You set me up with my boyfriend and I was single for 7 years in San Francisco. You've changed my life.

Wow.

Now we keep walking and this investor looks at me and goes, you paying them? I go, no, I'm not, but I should really start.

That's a good idea.

But that's not the craziest thing that's happened. So the other day I was out, it was late at night. I was at one of the bars in the marina on a Friday night and a girl came up to me and she said, You reunited me with my boyfriend.

Oh my God.

What do you mean? And she said, so I was dating this guy in college and it didn't work out because we both moved to different cities. I think she had moved to LA and he moved to New York. And like 7 years later, like 5 years later, they both moved back to San Francisco. They both joined Known at different times. Wow. The app matched them.

Wow.

And we sent them, we didn't know, we sent them on a date, but they went on a blind date back when we were testing whether that would be a good feature set. We ended up deciding no to the blind date. So they show up at this matchmaking event and they're placed together with a description of why they're such a perfect match for each other. Oh, let's just say they're now very seriously dating. If there's one couple I'm banking on getting married and, you know, cross my fingers because we're going to sponsor that wedding and I hope to get to speak, I think it's going to be them.

Wow.

Girls are going to start slipping you hundreds to match them.

Alternate business model.

On this— on the side.

So we're actually running a campaign right now in San Francisco. One of the things about Known is that we let most people in, but we screen out people that we don't think are fits for the platform, especially if you say that you're not trying to date intentionally. Yeah, we're not going to send you on a date with someone who isn't interested in going on dates. Um, so we're running a campaign in SF right now called Ban Your Ex. You might see the flyers around.

Oh wow.

Uh, you can scan submit and give us the first name, last name. There's a lot of people who have the same names in San Francisco, so you need to give us where they work and at least one identifier. Yeah, you can give us a photo if you want.

Okay.

Um, and then you can tell us what they're guilty of. The options to select are like lying, cheating, gaslighting, love bombing, manipulating, and being an overall bum.

No.

And then you can tell us, you know, should we ban them? Absolutely. Maybe. Or no, because you're still in love with them. Oh, that would be so funny. That is so funny.

Wait, literally, speaking of crazy, yesterday a girl came up to me and she was like, you don't know me, but we dated the same guy. But we both, but we both had like good relationships with them. But like, the city is actually like so small.

Yeah.

When did you decide that you wanted to go all in on building Known and drop out of Stanford?

So I didn't ever make the conscious decision that that's what we would do. We started designing the platform, and we got really obsessed with it. At Stanford, there's what we call huddles in every dorm, which is essentially a conference table and a wall of whiteboards. And it got to the point where my co-founder and I were staying up until 4 AM every night whiteboarding out what we thought was the dream dating app, especially for young people. And we would bring our friends in and have them be a committee and tell us what's wrong with it and what they would use or what they wouldn't use. And this went on for maybe 5 weeks. And at Stanford, we have the quarter system, so that's like half of a quarter. Yeah, we were essentially failing our classes. We became practically nocturnal. And then we realized that we had missed enrolling in our spring quarter classes, and not just missed it by a couple of days, we had missed it by weeks. And it wasn't, you know, irrevocable. We could have gone and, and negotiated with professors and gotten into the classes. But I think it was a tell for Asher and I that we really wanted to do this and that something was there. And so we sat down and we had just a very frank conversation. We're like, what are the pros and cons? Like, the pros, you're going to learn a lot. The worst case is that it doesn't work and people don't want it. And then we go back to school.

Yeah.

Like, we already are almost done with our majors. We can still graduate on time if we just take this one quarter off. So we weren't thinking, you know, burn the ships, we're dropping out of Stanford, it's all done.

Yeah.

But 2 weeks later, we ran our first beta. And people loved it. And I think that was when it was really all over for us.

Did you start on Stanford's campus?

We didn't. I don't think that college students are the right audience for an intentional dating product. Yeah, like, not only do they not have the money to take people out on nice dates, they also don't have the money to pay you in exchange for it.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

And they're not the right audience for wanting like that level of seriousness. I think we really excel at matching people that are in their like mid-20s to late 20s because you have actual things that you're looking for. You know who you are and you know what type of people you like and don't like. And college students are in college to figure that out.

Yeah, that makes sense. How did you and Asher, your co-founder, meet?

We actually met at Stanford's Admit Weekend. Okay, so before we even went into college. And then he ended up living across the hall from me our freshman year, and he had a roommate who was really COVID conscious Um, I don't want to— don't want to expose him on this, but his roommate would like sleep in a mask, and I think it made Asher feel like he shouldn't be in the room all the time. So we ended up spending a lot of time in my, my dorm freshman year, and we became very good friends from there on out.

That's so cute.

What do you—

what would you like describe your co-founder dynamic as?

I think we have a lavender marriage of sorts. Like, Asher comes in in the morning, it's like, good morning, my beautiful angel. Here is our child, AKA our office puppy, and I've made you coffee, and the children, AKA our team, is upstairs. And today is going to be a beautiful day. So we have a really good relationship. We do LED face masks at night together and debrief the day. I'm really lucky. He's a trooper through and through.

Wow, that's nice to have, because yeah, I heard someone said to me once, like, picking your co-founder is like literally picking your partner in life, or it's even harder. Exactly, because you spend more time with them. Like, your partner, you just like see for dinner, and you know, but this, this person, you have to like make decisions with on a daily basis.

It's just a lot. I think it's also important that you just think that your co-founder is usually right. I think this is important in hiring of all sorts, but I think that you should only hire or work with people that you believe, you know, most of the time are right about whatever they're doing. And so for Asher, I think that he is usually right about design. I think he's usually right about product. I think he's usually right about marketing, which means I'm not constantly following him around trying to figure out if he's doing a good job or how to fix what he's doing.

Yeah.

And that just creates a lot less conflict long term.

Yeah, there's a lot of trust involved. Like, I feel like the three of us have also, from building the podcast, realized that no one person can do everything. You have to, like, delegate things to people and trust that everyone's going to be making, like, the best decisions in that situation.

A lot of it's also respect. Like, I feel like the three of us— I've, like, known Priya for so long that it's, like, very rare we'll come to a different conclusion because it's been so many years. But, like, sometimes Maya will, and, like, at the time I feel like it'll just be a disagreement and we'll go one way or another. And then like down the road I'm like, oh, Maya was like so right, like I was wrong. And I think like someone where you think you're wrong is really valuable because if there's someone where like you always think you're right, even long term, you don't have respect.

Yeah, yeah.

Because you're like, oh, I'm just like compromising for the smoothness of the process, not because I actually think there's value in compromising.

I was thinking that has to do with being low ego and being willing to actually to change your mind, right?

Yeah.

You don't always want to be compromising. You want to be letting your team tell you that you're wrong and changing your belief system to believe that they're right.

So how big is the team that's working on Known now?

It's anywhere between like 9 and 15 people depending how you cut it, because we have some people working part-time on it.

Okay.

We have an office down in the marina and we're actually just about to get a much larger office because we're trying to hire like 10 people in the next month and a Um, but I love my team. It's a nice mix. I think a lot of young founders go out and they only hire like 18, 19, 20-year-old people that will drop out of college. And I understand why, because hiring real adults that have real responsibilities is a hard thing to do as a young person because you have to convince that person that their fate is safe in your hands, which has a lot to do with just communicating that you are a high-integrity serious person, which typically comes with age.

Yeah.

And experience.

Yeah, exactly. But we have a lot of people who have, you know, a decade of experience on our team. We have engineers who are like the 12th engineer at Uber. We have a guy who's helping us with machine learning who was the head of AI/ML at Uber Eats and then the head of AI/ML at FAIR. And we also have a lot of young people on the team, people who are working on go-to-market and operations. Who really understand young people. And what I look for there is, can you really empathize with the user? Can you explain to me how someone would feel when they see this ad?

Yeah, yeah, I was going to ask you about that actually, because you are a younger founder, but you've hired like top ML engineers and you've raised $10 million from Forerunner and NFX. And I'm curious if you have any tips or hacks for people that are also in their early 20s thinking about starting something on on how to be taken seriously. I'm sure that's something you thought about, maybe like less so now, but in the beginning it's something I think about all the time.

And I wish that I could say that the key is just to be yourself, um, but I spend a ton of time and energy thinking about how to portray myself in an older and more mature way than, you know, the 22-year-old version of me that was in— or the 21-year-old version of me that was in college only 8 months ago. And it's exactly for the reason we were just talking about, that you're asking you know, people to join your team and put their fate in your responsibility. And you have to explain to them why they should trust you to bear part of, you know, the result of their career, especially people who are either starting families or thinking about starting families. And then for investors, like, that's their reputation that they're putting on the line to back you. And early on, I think that investors are mostly just seeing, is your idea idea backable, and are you as a person backable? And sometimes if, you know, maybe your idea is super backable but you're not this charismatic leader, but if you're super technical, that can make up for it. And really early on, maybe you're super charismatic and likable and backable, but your idea isn't quite there, and they'll make a conviction bet on you as a founder. But you have to be projecting to the world that you are a serious person. And I think we saw a fad of young founders, like, in the last 8 months try to go the opposite way and build companies that were around, you know, hype and shitposting, and that didn't go well. Yeah, right. Because at the end of the day, you have to be someone that people want to either buy from, work for, invest in. And that means you have to be a, you know, a pillar of belief. Like, people need to want to put their hope and belief in you.

Okay, we have a fun speed round that we're calling Kiss, Marry, Kill. Okay, we're starting off easy. So, no, no, no, it'll be great. Kiss, Marry, Kill: SF, New York, LA.

Okay, kiss New York. New York is a lot of fun.

So much fun.

I don't know if it's for me forever, but I'm excited to try it. Um, SF, marry. I love this city and it's part of the reason we're launching here. I lived in LA for a summer. I want to love LA, but I would kill LA.

Okay, I have the same answer, I think. Our next one is kiss, marry, kill: finance bro, tech bro, performative male.

I think kiss the performative male. It's like a one-time thing. Yeah, marry the tech bro and kill the finance dude.

Yeah, that's super valid. Last one, you said how sexy a place is matters more than the two people. When deciding where are you pulling I had to look at your tweet. These are public, Celeste. No. When deciding—

I get a non-account, guys.

I know these are all jokes. This is all in good fun. But you said how sexy places matters more than the two people when deciding a second date. So kiss, marry, kill: dinner, drinks, and coffee.

Okay.

Kiss, dinner. Dinner's fine. Dinner's just not for me. Marry drinks. I think drinks are perfect because you can have one drink and leave if it's not right. And if it's going really well, then you can stay.

Yeah, and it's more fun and flirty.

I would kill coffee. I, I respect the fact— I think it's like half of our users prefer coffee dates, so I respect you guys. I will send you on your coffee dates. I have gone to so many cafes in the past 2 weeks to vet the best coffee shops to go on coffee dates at. We're looking for the criteria of: is the coffee good? Is it quiet enough to talk? Is it busy at the hours you guys want to go? I'm doing the work for you all, but I just don't get it. I I think it's maybe because I go to so many coffee chats to either try and hire people or to network. So for me, if I'm at a coffee chat during the day, it feels really corporate.

It does, it does.

Yeah. But honestly, I get why some people like it. It's like casual, it's fast. If it doesn't work, you can leave. A lot of people are less into drinking now too, so I think that that's an aspect of it.

Yeah, I feel like a coffee date only works works when it's not off a dating app and you're not sure if it's a date or not. Yeah, because then there's enough mystery and it's like low stakes. Like, I feel like I've had a fun date before where it was like, oh, do you want to get coffee? And I'm like, sure. And then it's like, yeah, it's like a pre-date. And they're like judging your vibe, and it's like a respectful man that's like, I don't want to— or, you know what I mean? Yeah.

But what did I tell me recently? That in San Francisco, if you're going to go on a date with a woman you know, you have to do a pre-date first. So it's like you take them for like something during the day. Yeah, it's like guess whether you could ask them on a date or if that's inappropriate. Yeah, exactly. So the coffee can be the pre-date, but like off of a dating app, I just think that it's better to have something a little bit sexier.

Yeah, which drinks is perfect.

Yeah, drinks is perfect because it's like, it's dark out. Yeah, like candlelit bar. I don't know, maybe I'm just a romantic.

Do you have any top spots in the city yet, or are you still deciding?

I do. So we're partnering with Alma for some influencer dinners. I think that the rooms there are so beautiful. They're amazing.

I was there on Wednesday, literally this week, and we were in the social club area, and it's just like such a vibe.

It's such a vibe.

Yeah.

I also really love Left Door. I'm a Left Door fan through and through. I think their bites are great.

Yeah.

And then honestly, I think my favorite first date spot, if you were going to be north in the city, is probably Roaming Goat. Like, they have really good bites. Everything on the menu is good. They have a sommelier who will come and help you pick out a bottle of wine. I think it's the best way for having a good date date, like order a bottle of wine, you don't have to finish it, but it like gives you an excuse to stay and ruminate in the conversation. Yeah, and it's so— the lighting in there is so cute. So yeah, I plugged Romingo and I love it there.

Oh my God, yeah, we were actually literally just talking about best first date spots yesterday in the city because Annika and I used to live near Nob Hill area and our go-to date spot was Omelie on Polk.

I love Omelie, I should have mentioned that.

But it was like sorella So Pri and I were joking because like we'd go on a date with a guy. This is like years ago, but like it would be like, you know, when it's like the third or fourth date and as a girl you're like, okay, I guess I'll suggest a spot and like do a tiny bit of work in this situation. And so we'd always be like, omelie, because we'd be like, oh, it was actually one block away. Like, we'll just go home, we'll be in with the girls. Like, it's like a 7 PM Friday situation. You're at the pregame by 10. And then Pri and I both would like two guys we were on a date with different days. Ran into the same situation where they're like, oh, it's dark out, like, we'll walk you home, like, being a gentleman. And we were like, oh, it's okay, like, we're right here, we're right here. And they were like, oh no, no, like, like, actually being nice, not like trying to invite themselves. And then they walked us home, and it's like, you literally walk out of the wine bar, around the corner, and I'm like, okay, well, I'm home. You're like, oh, you picked this off of convenience.

Okay, okay. It was so funny.

It was so funny.

That's so funny.

Yeah, and then they'd always make a comment about it too.

They'd be like, oh, like, you were right here.

Yeah, awkwardly stand at the stoop. Like, our stoop was like the perfect like first kiss spot because it was just like, it was like a kind of like private stoop. But then me and Priya were like, we'd always be like, yeah, gotta go.

It's like, I'm not fumbling with my keys, directly into the door. Good night, sir.

One time she made up an excuse excuse. And what did you say? It was like, we had— we live with 4 girls, and I was like, oh, one of my roommates is having like a big party right now, sorry, otherwise I'd invite you in. Because I think he, he said something very casual like, oh, I'd be down to like get another glass or something, like if you have wine or something. And I was like, oh my God, yeah, I was like, my roommate's having a big party right now, like sorry, can't. And then he was like, oh, this is the quietest rager of all time, because there was no party. Oh my God, bye. But he ended up being my boyfriend, so in the end— well, not now, but yeah.

Yeah, yeah, no, but we really do want to know like who should not be on Known, guys.

And then what roles are you guys hiring for right now?

Everything. So we're hiring for product engineers. So people who want to work on the mobile app. I mean, it's already built, but we're going to continue to build new features and polish it even more. We're hiring for full-stack engineers, especially people who have experience with applied AI. We're hiring for a design engineer who wants to work on haptics and making the phone buzz in the perfect way when you do the onboarding and all of the small tweaks on the front end. We're hiring for machine learning engineers and there's so much different— there's so many different things we're doing for MLEs. You know, it's everything from continuing to fine-tune the core recommendation engine that helps pick matches to working on the suite of AI agents that we have that power everything from the reservation booking to scrubbing user data to make sure that none of your really private data is exposed to other users. To working on personalization and memory for the AI conversational chat experience that people have within the app. And then we're also hiring for non-technical roles. I'm going to hire a chief of staff. We're hiring for operations, go-to-market, social media. Basically, if you want to be involved in Known, there's a spot for any type of person. And what's the best way for people to apply, just on the website, or you can apply on the website if you're really enthusiastic, feel free to like DM me on LinkedIn.

I actually really did.

Yes, I do. Yeah, I've actually hired a couple of people out of my—

really? Yeah. Well, I feel like it's a sign someone cares.

Yeah, just don't ChatGPT your message because I can tell. Yeah, the other day someone sent me a LinkedIn DM that was like, hi Celeste, I'm so excited to work at insert company. It's like, come on, you're really—

even try.

You're a really good engineer too. I was Can I look past this? Maybe.

I feel like if it's an engineer, yes. If it's operations or non-technical, no. Because like me and Mai talk about this all the time because Mai's an engineer and like she does things and I'm like, yeah, you can just get away with whatever you want because at the end of the day you're a cracked engineer. But like if I did this, like in her—

yeah, no, I, I send you guys like messages or emails to proofread.

Yeah, yeah.

And they usually need it.

Yeah, they always need it.

I'm like, thanks guys. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We're very excited for the app to launch. Priya and I will download it and we'll come to the party. We're super excited.

Come to the party. You have to use it. We're going to find you. I'll put you on the VIP list.

Cool.

Thank you.

Thank you.