Tinder swipes left on CEO Chris Payne, co-founder returns to position

Tinder co-founder Sean Rad has returned to the dating apps hot seat just five months after making way for outgoing chief executive Chris Payne.

Rad’s return was surprising, given that, when he stepped down in March, it was widely seen as a move by IAC to bring in someone the company had more faith in to navigate Tinder.

Tinder’s founder, Sean Rad, will replace him as CEO effective immediately, the company announced Wednesday.

Greg Blatt from the media group IAC has also been named to a new position as executive chairman of Tinder.

Though Payne’s resume was sparking – he was a veteran of eBay and Microsoft – Tinder was looking for something different.

“It became clear after a few months that it wasn’t going to become a long-term fit”. He further said they thought they might take action on the issue sooner than later.

Payne said, “I enjoyed my time at Tinder but we mutually determined that this wasn’t going to be optimal and thought that a quick transition served everybody best”.

Sources told Forbes that Rad’s removal from the CEO role boiled down to the sexual harassment lawsuit, which was later settled out of court. Whether or not all this relationship drama is at all related to this week’s Twitter drama over that Vanity Fair “Dating Apocalypse” article remains entirely unclear.

“Our intention was to highlight the many statistics and incredible stories that are sometimes left unpublished, and, in doing so, we overreacted”, Tinder said in a statement following the stream of Tweets.

Tinder, created in 2012, uses geolocation to propose romantic matches for users to quickly scroll through.