Months after sexual harassment suit, Tinder CEO Sean Rad to step down

The CEO and founder of Tinder Sean Rad is stepping down from his role, according to an exclusive report on Forbes by Steven Bertoni. Rad is stepping down nearly four months after a sexual harassment lawsuit at Tinder where a former employee Whitney Wolfe had accused then CMO and her ex-boyfriend Justin Mateen of sexual harassment. She had also named CEO Sean Rad in her complaint and accused him of ignoring her complaints and protecting Mateen. The lawsuit had led to Mateen resigning as the CMO. According to the report on Forbes, Rad will however remain with the company and serve as president of the company and join the board. Tinder’s parent company IAC has however started looking for a replacement CEO. Rad admitted that where the whole sexual harassment suit with Wolfe was concerned, “lines got blurred,” and that “the boundaries should have been stronger.”  Rad and Mateen were very good friends and once Mateen and Wolfe’s relationship broke down, Wolfe said that she was publicly abused and harassed by Mateen and that the CEO chose to overlook this. In her lawsuit, Wolfe had also said that she was discriminated against because of her gender, that it was she who came up with the name “Tinder” for the service in mid-2012, shortly after its creation. For this, she was given the co-founder title in 2012 but in 2013 Mateen told her that having a “girl founder” devalued the company, and that one year later in November 2013, Mateen and Rad removed her co-founder title. Interestingly in the Forbes piece Bertoni also says that while “Mateen had been severely out of line… numerous interviews and a long paper trail show that Wolfe carries blame, too. Texts and e-mails that Wolfe sent to Mateen show her using the same charged language she sued Mateen for.” According to the Tinder co-founder, Wolfe also got away with a lot of stuff at the company due to her relationship with Mateen. While Tinder and Wolfe settled out of court, it appears that the lawsuit has convinced IAC that it was time for Sean to leave his position as the CEO. For now it looks like Rad will still be at Tinder. Given how Tinder is exploding with growth and users, he has reasons to stick with the product.