Henry Weng, a graduate student at Stanford University and founder of new education startup The Relationship Company. He is on a mission to make the world a friendlier place. In the aftermath of that experience, he launched Date Drop, an innovative approach to matching people on dates. Since her service launched last fall, it’s already become quite popular among students. He’s attracted the support of top angel investors, including Mark Pincus, founder of Zynga and early backer of Facebook. With their support, he is poised to take his project from campus life to developing new horizons.
Date Drop has already gained more than 5,000 users at Stanford. Now, though, it has broadened its reach to ten new institutions, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. This personalized, hands-on service is what distinguishes it from other dating apps. As a result, it reaches a match-to-date conversion rate that’s almost ten times Tinder’s. Even more impressively, 95% of Date Drop users say they want to build relationships.
The concept for Date Drop arose from Weng’s observations about how matching affects various aspects of people’s lives. He believes that “Relationships are the single most important factor in a person’s life.” This conviction drives his passion to develop an equity-centered platform. It’s more than connecting people to date, it creates friendships that improve quality of life.
Weng has raised “a few million” for The Relationship Company’s various projects to keep innovators like her working. But perhaps most important has been his collaboration with Mark Pincus, CEO of Zygna. Pincus has taught many of the business school courses at Stanford that Weng took. That bond, in turn, has deeply influenced Weng and Date Drop’s entrepreneurial path.
This allow Weng to make it easier on end-users as well, and to do this, she’s implemented a $100 monthly “relationship stipend” for employees. This stipend can be used for outings, presents, events, or any other thing that serves to foster a critical relationship. Weng emphasizes the psychological benefits of spending money on others, stating, “There’s also great research showing that money spent on other people makes you happier than money spent on yourself.”
Date Drop employs a robust, smart matching algorithm. It does this by bringing in a rich set of data points from its users, like open-ended responses and voice-based conversations. Weng explains, “We do that through the questions, open-ended responses, a voice conversation, and other data that the users provide.” This real-world, carefully curated data is what provides the platform the opportunity to train a model based on real-world outcomes.
The startup’s long-term vision extends well beyond dating. Beyond creating romances, Weng imagines The Relationship Company as a place to cultivate all important relationships—from friendships to work connections to community engagement. “The long-term vision at The Relationship Company is about facilitating all meaningful relationships,” he states.
Weng’s dedication to inclusivity goes beyond his approach to pair-matching. He notes that Date Drop has helped him connect with individuals he may not have otherwise encountered: “Date Drop has shown me how many interesting people are out there that you’d never encounter through your normal routines. It’s made me more open to people I wouldn’t have crossed paths with otherwise.”
Our journey to build The Relationship Company has not been a straight line. Weng originally planned for Date Drop to be a service limited to his own campus. Other students from other schools have indicated a huge interest. This drove him to kickstart the project as a company so that they could get the resources that they needed. “This started as something I just wanted to exist on campus, and it became a company because people kept on asking for it in their schools and I needed resources to do that,” he explains.
Now that summer is just around the corner, Weng has an exciting plan up her sleeve. She plans to grow Date Drop into more cities, helping even more people discover deeper connections. His innovative approach to dating and relationships could potentially reshape how people engage with one another in both personal and professional contexts.