Rodeo

Sam's entire career has been a single sustained bet on the idea that technology should pull people toward each other, not away. He started at LivingSocial, the deals platform that pioneered group activity discovery, where he worked on email yield optimisation and business intelligence, unglamorous work, but it gave him a data-first lens on consumer behaviour that most product people lack. He joined Hinge in 2013 as one of its first six employees, when the app was a LinkedIn-for-dating curiosity with negligible traction. Over nine years, he rose to COO, led a full product rebuild from scratch, and oversaw the transformation that produced a 9x lift in user conversations. That rebuild is a case study in product courage: Hinge deliberately destroyed what wasn't working, launched what felt like a new company, and grew into one of the most defensible consumer social businesses in the world. Sam's particular insight from that experience is about friction - not reducing friction entirely, but reducing the right friction while keeping the friction that creates meaning. That thinking maps directly onto Rodeo: the problem isn't discovering things to do with friends, it's the coordination friction that makes plans collapse between idea and execution. He's vocal about this on LinkedIn and has spoken publicly about consumer social as the next frontier after a decade of dating app dominance. He's based in New York, a parent, and someone who thinks about the friendship recession not as an abstract cultural phenomenon but as a lived problem he's solving for himself and people like him.

Tim was CPO at Hinge through the same rebuild that Sam led as COO, which means the two have nine years of war stories building the same product together, and a fluency that most co-founding partnerships spend years trying to manufacture. Where Sam brings operational depth and data instincts, Tim is the design and product mind. He was responsible for the visual and interaction language of Hinge through its transformation from a forgettable early-stage app into the culturally distinct product it became. His public presence is minimal, he doesn't write long LinkedIn posts or do podcast circuits, but that tells you something about how he operates: his thinking shows up in the product, not in the discourse around it. At Rodeo, Tim is building the experience layer: what does it feel like when a plan actually comes together? How does the app make coordinating with friends feel lighter than it does today? He's based in New York, also a parent, and according to their shared interviews, the one who polices the product from getting feature-heavy when simplicity is what the user actually needs.