Why I Started Kin

For a long time, I thought dating was supposed to feel like this.

I’d open Grindr, find someone I was interested in, and start talking. Sometimes we’d talk for hours. Sometimes for days.

You’d exchange photos, ask the usual questions, slowly figure out what he was looking for, where he worked, what kind of person he was, whether he was actually single, whether he wanted a relationship, whether we were even remotely compatible.

And then, sometimes,
he would just disappear.

No explanation. No goodbye.

Just silence.

So you’d start again.

Another profile. Another conversation. Another person to figure out from scratch.

Other times, I actually met the person.

But sitting across from someone I’d only known through a dating profile could feel strangely difficult.

He was still a stranger. Maybe we’d meet once. Maybe twice. Then we’d stop talking.

And again, I’d start over.

I realized I wasn’t tired of dating. I was tired of searching.

I wasn’t trying to meet hundreds of men.

I just wanted to meet one person I was genuinely excited about, date him, and maybe build a life together.

But the tools I was using weren’t really designed for that.

They gave me more people to look through.

And that meant more decisions. More conversations. More uncertainty. More time spent trying to understand people who, most of the time, were never going to be right for me anyway.

It started to feel like a second job.

And I kept thinking:

Why am I doing all of this myself?

So I started looking into matchmaking.

The idea made sense to me.

Someone gets to know you. They understand what you’re looking for. They search on your behalf. And when they find someone they genuinely think you should meet, they make the introduction.

That was much closer to what I wanted.

But traditional matchmaking came with a different set of limitations.

The services could cost thousands of dollars. The quality of the experience depended heavily on the individual matchmaker. And each matchmaker could only work with the network of people they had access to.

It felt like the right idea, built for a much smaller world.

And that made me wonder:

What if matchmaking could work at the scale of a dating app — without turning dating into browsing?

What if I could just tell someone who I’m looking for?

This is the kind of man I’m attracted to.

This is the kind of relationship I want.

These are the things that really matter to me.

These are the things I’m flexible about.

And then let someone else do the searching.

Not give me hundreds of profiles.

Not make me swipe.

Not make me start from zero with another stranger every night.

Just understand me well enough to know who might actually be worth meeting.

That idea became Kin.

Kin is matchmaking, rebuilt.

You tell Kin who you’re looking for.

Kin gets to know you — not just the boxes you check, but what actually matters to you in a relationship.

Then we search.

When we find someone we genuinely think you should meet, we introduce you.

You see the person. He sees you.

If you’re both interested, we connect you.

And what happens next is still human.

A conversation. A date. Chemistry. Maybe something more.

Because I don’t think technology should make dating more complicated.

It should do more of the work before the date, so you can spend more of your time actually dating.

You don’t search.
We do.

Why now?

For most of the history of matchmaking, good matchmaking has been difficult to scale.

A great matchmaker has to remember hundreds of details about people.

Who they’re attracted to. What they care about. What they say they want. What they actually respond to. What they won’t compromise on. What they might be more flexible about than they think.

And then they have to hold all of that in their head while searching for someone else who might fit.

That kind of work is deeply personal.

But it is also incredibly time-consuming.

AI changes that.

Not because AI can predict who you’ll fall in love with.

I don’t think it can.

But for the first time, we can build something that can listen to thousands of people, understand what each of them is looking for, remember those details, and continuously search across a much larger network.

In other words:

We can start scaling the work of a matchmaker without turning matchmaking into another dating app.

I don’t think love should be an algorithm.

Kin isn’t trying to calculate your soulmate.

There are things no profile, interview, or AI can know.

Whether you like the way someone smiles.

Whether conversation feels effortless.

Whether you want to see him again when the date is over.

That part should stay human.

What Kin can do is everything that comes before it.

Understand what you’re looking for.

Find people who make sense.

Filter out the people who clearly don’t.

Notice someone you might have overlooked.

And tell you:

“I think you should meet this person.”

Then we get out of the way.

And Kin should get better as it knows you.

Maybe you tell us you want someone tall.

Then you meet someone shorter and realize you don’t actually care that much.

Maybe you say career matters.

But after a few introductions, you realize what you really care about is whether someone has direction in his life.

Maybe you’ve always thought you had a “type.”

Then someone completely different surprises you.

A good human matchmaker learns these things over time.

Kin should too.

Every conversation, introduction, decision and date should help Kin understand you a little better.

Not so it can decide who you should love.

So it can become better at deciding who might be worth meeting.

I’m building the service I wanted for myself.

I didn’t want another dating app.

I didn’t want more profiles.

I didn’t want a better swipe.

And I didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars just to have someone search a small network for me.

I wanted something in between.

The attention of a matchmaker.

The reach of a network.

And technology doing the work I was tired of doing myself.

That’s what I’m trying to build with Kin.

Maybe it introduces you to the person you spend the rest of your life with.

Maybe it doesn’t.

But I think dating can start from a better place than endless searching.