Tinder parent company Match Group “clarifies” Sean Rad’s statements as company prices IPO at lower end of range
Tinder's parent company Match Group has filed a last-minute submission to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) after the app's chief executive Sean Rad went rogue in an interview during the company's "quiet period" in the run-up to its IPO.
Rad's interview with the Evening Standard ran yesterday, the same day that Match Group priced its IPO at the lower end of expectations. The company will raise $400m, valuing the parent of Tinder, OkCupid and other online dating services at around $4.2bn, including debt.
Shares of the Texas-based Match Group will start trading on Nasdaq today, priced at $12, under the ticker "MTCH."
Readers' attention was probably drawn to the more lurid details within the interview – 27-year-old Rad revealed he lost his virginity at 17, the number of women he has slept with, that he's "addicted" to Tinder and that "every other week I fall in love with a new girl".
He also confused sapiosexuals – people who are turned on by intellect – with sodomy.
But none of this appeared to concern Match Group, whose SEC filing was more concerned with some erroneous figures that were published within the interview. Specifically, estimates that Tinder has around 80m users worldwide and 1.8bn swipes a day.
"While these statements were not made by Mr. Rad, the company notes that they are inaccurate and directs readers to the Preliminary Prospectus, which states that for the month of September 2015, Tinder had approximately 9.6m daily active users, with Tinder users “swiping” through an average of more than 1.4bn user profiles each day," the filing stated.
"The article was not approved or condoned by, and the content of the article was not reviewed by, the company or any of its affiliates," it continued.
"Mr. Rad is not a director or executive officer of the company and was not authorised to make statements on behalf of the company for purposes of the article."