As Valentine’s Day approaches at Stanford, some students may be gearing up for first dates — not with people they met on Tinder or Hinge, but with matches from a service called Date Drop, designed by Stanford graduate student Henry Weng. Date Drop pairs students with potential dates once per week based on their responses to a questionnaire.
A Stanford whiz kid is trying to disrupt an established industry from his Palo Alto dorm? Stop me if you’ve heard this one before! But young adults are deeply disillusioned with the frustrating, demoralizing state of online dating. Why not try something different?
Over 5,000 students at Stanford have given Date Drop a try since its launch in the fall. It has also rolled out at 10 more schools, including MIT, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania, and Weng says he wants to roll out Date Drop more broadly in some cities this summer.
“Our matches convert to actual dates at about 10x the rate of Tinder,” Weng told TechCrunch. “Instead of swiping, we get to know each person deeply and send them one compatible match per week.”
At first, Weng didn’t intend to turn Date Drop into the foundation of a startup. Then, a close friend of his met their partner via Date Drop. “That was when I got the sense that this was less of a project,” he said.
Now, Weng thinks of Date Drop as just the first service from his startup, The Relationship Company, which is a public benefit corporation — a type of company legally required to consider social impact alongside profits.
“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 said.
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Already, Weng has raised “a few million” from some angel investors, including Zynga founder and early Facebook backer Mark Pincus, who has taught business courses at Stanford (including t …