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Welcome to the Ar On Labs podcast. Our special guest today is the one, yes, the only Colin Hodge.

Colin, man, thank you for showing up today.

Happy to be here. Thanks so much, Bill.

Hey, man. Give everybody the two-minute, the two-minute

spiel. I don't know what a good word is other than spiel. I feel like that's an old-school,

New York word spiel. When was the last time you heard that word, Colin? Give me the spiel. Give me the

spiel. But I need the two-minute spiel. I can give you my two-minute spiel. Don't worry.

I have an engineering background.

I studied computer science.

I went to Cornell and then spent some time at Amazon, Microsoft, and all the big tech guys back in the day.

But I pretty quickly realized that I wanted to strike out on my own.

And so after a few years of toiling, I launched the viral hit Bang with Friends. It was a dating app slash hookup app back in 2013. And so we just had our 10-year anniversary. It blew up out of the gate. We had millions of users. I rebranded it,

went through all sorts of lawsuits and stuff, all the while doing most of the coding myself.

And then at some point, we were able to raise some money, able to sell the company five years in.

And thankfully, about five years ago, I was able to buy it

back after a short stint where another company owned it. So now we are running down, as it's

called, Down app. And we are a top 20 dating app in the U.S., maybe top 15 depending on the day.

And we're very happy to hopefully be

positively changing the culture and helping people find the relationships that they want.

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