Tinder CEO Sean Rad was ousted by his company's majority stakeholder in the wake of a sexual harassment lawsuit filed by a former executive, and will soon be replaced by "an Eric Schmidt-like person," he's announced.
"I went through every stage of mourning at once — fear, a bruised ego,"
he told Forbes, which reported the news Tuesday. "I started thinking about the company and my whole future."
Rad, 28, has a 10-percent stake in the dating app company as its founder, and will remain there as president and as a member of the board.
Tinder has become the go-to dating app for young adults, and has experienced explosive 600-percent growth over the past 12 months, and gotten 40 million downloads since its launch in 2012.
Rad and former Tinder CMO Justin Mateen are both named in a July lawsuit filed by Mateen's ex-girlfriend, Whitney Wolfe. Wolfe accused Mateen of sexual harassment, and claimed Rad stripped her cofounder title away because she was a female, and later fired her once she brought up Mateen's alleged sexual harassment.
Mateen was forced out of his position by the lawsuit, which itself was settled out of court. It appears the lawsuit has also given the company's majority stakeholder, IAC, an opportunity to install a new CEO.
In the end, "The board thought the best path was to bring in a CEO, thinking if we opened up the role it would attract better talent. I strongly disagreed," said Rad.
"Things were going so well. The company was growing faster than ever, we were about to launch revenue, my relationship with Sam [Yagan, of IAC] could not have been better, and we had got through the whole sexual harassment suit."
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