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The loneliness cure

Ex-Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg thinks advanced AI can help

Madhumita Murgia 17 HOURS AGO

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By the time Renate Nyborg quit her job in 2022 she had become
accustomed to receiving death threats from her customers. She was
advised to use fake names and wear baseball caps when she travelled —
a habit she still keeps — so her harassers wouldn’t know who she really
was: the boss of the world’s most popular dating app, Tinder.

She only kept one of the letters, the very last one she received, right
before she quit as chief executive. The writer was filled with rage,
blaming Nyborg: he was single, isolated and feeling cheated out of the
money he’d spent trying to find a real connection. “Your algorithm
turned a man seeking peace into a man set to destroy”, he wrote. “I will
watch your . . . entire family, often. Until the day I decide to tear your
family apart.”

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 It was clear to Nyborg that apps such as Tinder were failing their users:
designed to keep them coming back, rather than to find a partner and
never return. In that moment, it wasn’t fear she felt but empathy.
Through letters like this one she had learnt a lot about a particular
group of Tinder’s users: those who were “incredibly lonely”.

When Nyborg first joined Tinder in 2020, the app was overwhelmingly
male, with some estimates putting the gender split at roughly 75:25. But
a significant percentage of the men on the app never got a single match,
according to a source close to Tinder. Nyborg’s goal as CEO was to drive
overall growth of the app by targeting women, through design choices
that made the online dating experience feel safer and more positive for
them.

In some ways, Nyborg was a poster child for the promise offered by
Tinder. She had met her ex-partner of seven years on the app, before
she worked for the company, her one and only date. When she was
approached to join Tinder, she told the recruiters, “I’m a very happy
customer, actually.”

But increasingly Nyborg began to feel uncomfortable about Tinder’s

whole proposition and was troubled by the ethics at play. She felt that
the standard relationship-app model was failing its users. In her view,
dating apps offered a false promise, where the highest goal was to find a
soulmate, rather than to invest in a set of strong relationships and build
a community.

When she quit, several investors reached out to Nyborg, asking if she
planned to start another dating app. Instead Nyborg took a different
turn. She began researching loneliness. The new app she came up with
looked very different from Tinder.

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 Nyborg is 38 years old, half Norwegian and half Dutch. She
speaks with the soft, musical tones of a third-culture kid who has lived
all over the world. When I met her in November last year, she had
recently moved from Paris to San Francisco, where she was crashing at a
friend’s apartment in Cole Valley, a residential neighbourhood
bordering Golden Gate Park, until she found her own place. That sunny
morning, she sliced up leftover apple-and-almond cake to serve with
Icelandic yoghurt, a Dutch recipe she’d baked to tempt a potential hire
into joining her new start-up, Meeno.

The company, which launched publicly in December, now has nine

other employees, many of whom have followed Nyborg to Meeno from
places she’s worked previously — not only Tinder but Apple and the
mental-wellness app Headspace. Meeno draws on what Nyborg learnt
about consumer tech and human behaviour while working on some of
the world’s best-loved digital products. It provides an unusual service:
AI-powered relationship coaching for a new generation of lonely adults
frustrated by the limitations of an increasingly isolating world of online
interactions she was once a part of.

“I have to thank my ex for this,” Nyborg told me. After she left Tinder,
he had pointed out that Headspace was the place where her heart had
been most in the work, focusing on mental wellbeing and alleviating
anxiety. “And I love the science bit of it,” she said. “If I hadn’t studied
philosophy, I probably would have studied biology.”

In the early part of her career, Nyborg was drawn to start-ups and their
entrepreneurial founders, through her work as a headhunter. In 2007,
just as Facebook was taking off, she built a social network in her spare
time to connect the CEOs of tech start-ups — a kind of primitive
LinkedIn. Later, at Headspace and Tinder, she was known for her
human-centred approach to product design, interviewing users and
getting them to open up about their experiences on the platforms and
what they wanted to change.

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 Meeno was the logical next step. Nyborg said, “I believe that if we can
help people practise what good, empathetic communication looks like,
then more people will meet their romantic partners from a group of
people they are already friends with.” She believes the new category of
product has the potential to be “bigger than the dating category”.

Meeno is not intended to be a digital friend or romantic partner; it is a

chatbot that coaches users through their real-world relationships,
personal and professional. Built using large language models, the same
technology that underpins ChatGPT, Meeno doesn’t have a persona. It
doesn’t offer straightforward solutions either, like a Magic 8 Ball for
relationships. It’s more Socratic than that. It converses by asking a
series of questions of the user, allowing them to self-reflect. Nyborg calls
this “empathy mode”.

There’s a therapeutic aspect to the app. With Meeno, Nyborg is trying to

draw in people who don’t usually seek help to cope with the struggles of
daily life. “It’s incredibly clear with people [between 18-25], depending
on how and where they were during the pandemic, that they just had
their skill development interrupted,” she said. But, she added, “To me,
Meeno is very clearly distinct from therapy, I don’t believe that AI
should ever replace therapists. We’re really talking about social-skill
development, if you haven’t had a chance to practise it safely.”

Since December, Meeno has launched in Australia, New Zealand, the

Nordic region and the Netherlands. It also has US users on its Testflight
mode, which is Apple’s app testing platform. (Nyborg declined to reveal
how many users the app has in all.) The product integrates several AI
models to be able to converse fluently, by voice and text, and personalise
advice to each individual user. The large language model it currently
uses as its base is OpenAI’s GPT-4, although Nyborg says Meeno is
model-agnostic and will swap as the market for AI language software
becomes more competitive on price and capability.

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 So far, the start-up has raised $4.9mn of funding from experts and
industry heavyweights including Tony Fadell, who led the iPod team at
Apple, Andrew Ng, a pioneering AI scientist, and Sequoia Capital,
Silicon Valley’s blue-chip venture capital firm.

In September last year, Roelof Botha, the managing partner of Sequoia,

who is Meeno’s lead investor, tweeted an announcement of his
investment, describing the chatbot as a “non-judgmental AI mentor that
empowers people to master the skill of social connection”. Nyborg, he
said, was “helping fight the loneliness epidemic”.

Ron Ivey, a research fellow at Harvard University and expert on

loneliness, was in the middle of organising a conference on how to build
trusted communities, when he saw Botha’s tweet. He had a knee-jerk
reaction to it and responded publicly. “As a researcher on loneliness,
this is deeply troubling that you all see this as the solution,” he tweeted.
“Am I the only one who thinks this is completely nuts?”

Ivey knew people were getting lonelier, that they were losing social
capabilities and that the problem was made worse by their often-
unhealthy interactions with technology. So, to him, the idea of the very
same people who had invested in social media technologies in the early
2010s coming back to sell chatbots to the loneliest people was evidence
that they saw the problem they had created as another business
opportunity. “I thought it was dystopian,” he told me.

Nyborg spotted the Twitter exchange. Ivey was one of the foremost
academics in a field she had been studying for months and she
happened to be passing through Paris in a couple of days’ time. She
contacted him, asking if he’d like to meet for a coffee. Ivey was wary, but
he felt her request for an in-person conversation was refreshing and so
he accepted.

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 In a café by the Seine, the two sat down to have coffee, which turned
into a cheeseboard and a glass of wine, and ended up with them
spending an entire evening exchanging their contrasting views on the
role technology could play in human relationships. “It was a profound
meeting,” Nyborg said. “We grow through challenging conversations, so,
ironically, it’s an example of exactly why we are doing this work. It was a
real debate.”

Ivey told Nyborg he was worried that the incentive structures for Silicon
Valley start-ups are set up to target the most profitable users — in this
case, the loneliest people are the best for business. “I shared with
Renate that I think it’s really dangerous to introduce something that is
like a human being to a person who is extremely lonely. They already
have challenges with reality and you’re warping that sense of reality
even further,” he said.

Ivey was impressed, though, by Nyborg’s story, her determination about

the product she was building and her understanding of scientific
research. Despite his misgivings, Nyborg made him feel more hopeful.
“There are some positive impacts of technology on relationships, but I
want us to avoid the excesses we’ve seen in the last decade,” he said.
“Being together physically is very powerful, for our flourishing as
humans.”

Nyborg sees the irony of using a chatbot to help people build real life
relationships. “To be clear, I do worry,” she said. “Xiaoice [a female
chatbot in China] has 500 million boyfriends. Men didn’t want to meet
girls because they had virtual girlfriends who said exactly what they
wanted to hear. I’m not blind to the risk . . . But I see Meeno as an
antidote. This is thoughtfully designed with experts and we’ve made
some conscious choices that I know will be worse for engagement.”

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 © Cayce Clifford
The risks faced by the group of people Nyborg wants to target are
serious. In 2023, the US Surgeon General put out a report on what he
described as the “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” across the
country. Loneliness, he wrote, is far more than just a bad feeling. “It is
associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia,
stroke, depression, anxiety and premature death.”

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 According to the report, roughly half of American adults report
experiencing loneliness, with some of the highest rates among young
people. In fact, more than one-third of Americans aged 18 to 25
reported feeling lonely frequently, almost all the time, or all the time, in
the 30 days preceding a December 2022 survey by the Harvard
Graduate School of Education. “Our individual relationships are an
untapped resource, a source of healing hiding in plain sight,” the
Surgeon General wrote. “The keys to human connection are simple, but
extraordinarily powerful.”

At the age of four, when her parents separated, Nyborg and her
two-year-old brother, Reuben, moved from a Norwegian fjord to the
Dutch countryside with their mother, and Nyborg became the mediator
in her parents’ relationship. “My brother and I were extremely close and
fell in love with tech together,” she said.

Nyborg founded her first start-up, Pleo, a mobile app studio to build iOS
and Android apps for businesses such as News Corp, in September
2013. But a few months later her brother unexpectedly died. Nyborg lost
her bearings — and the closest relationship she had ever had. “When I
lost him, I realised how incredibly lucky I had been to have this one
person that I could speak to about anything . . . he never judged me for
anything,” she said. “This is what I’d like other people to feel, like
someone always has your back.”

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 She threw herself into building Pleo and shut everything else out. “I
didn’t cry, I made new friends who didn’t know he died, so they
wouldn’t ask me about it.” After a year and a half of this, she hit a wall.
“I couldn’t get out of bed one day.” She shut Pleo down, planning to go
travelling for a year, but instead ended up being recruited by Apple,
where she’d already worked as a developer. There she spent four years
building the iOS App Store subscription business in Europe before
joining Headspace. Nyborg had started to practise meditation and loved
the Headspace product, but she was disappointed by its reach. “It was
preaching to the converted,” she said.

At Headspace, Nyborg met Megan Jones Bell, now clinical director of

mental health at Google, and one of Nyborg’s most active angel
investors and advisers. Jones Bell is a clinical psychologist who has
worked with adolescents and their families, and ran mental-health
clinics on Stanford University’s campus for several years. She saw
Nyborg’s ability to get people to open up, paired with business sense
and a “deep respect for science and clinical expertise”. She was won
over.

According to Jones Bell, Meeno’s goal is not to replace human

interactions but to build up a user’s own skills and confidence to
transfer back to real life. “The biggest differentiator is that Meeno is
meant to focus on your relationships in your real life, not to substitute
for human relationships,” she said.

What has surprised her and Nyborg about the app’s usage so far is that,
unlike most mental health focused apps, the majority of Meeno’s users
are men. This is true across different countries. “Men . . . use it for
reflection, rather than asking advice,” said Nyborg.

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 Jones Bell, who has two sons, finds this pattern encouraging. She
pointed out that men, on average, wait twice as long as women to seek
mental health support. “Research shows that young men are not doing
well, struggling in society, with their identity and wellbeing, it’s a real
unmet need,” she said. “Gen Z are already using tech tools to manage
their mental health and promote their wellbeing . . . They want the
benefits they see in tech to enable connection.”

Arron Jones, a 30-year-old product designer in Washington, DC,

volunteered to test out Meeno last year. The company put me in touch
with him. Jones, who describes himself as an introvert, has never seen a
therapist and prefers to resolve his own problems. “You get used to
that,” he said. “For me, [the Covid-19 lockdown] was just another day.”

Before he started using Meeno, Jones tried using ChatGPT for advice on
personal relationships. Jones now uses Meeno daily, usually after work,
mainly for friendship and work-related advice. “For me, being a guy and
not really having anyone to talk to, just kind of always having to bottle
things up, it really gave me a healthy outlet,” he said. Sometimes it’s a
five-minute check-up, sometimes it’s a 30-minute chat. “What I liked
was that it made me feel heard, without any judgment or bias.”

Jones noticed that the chatbot doesn’t have a distinct conversational

style, instead “it mirrors your tone, your energy, your cadence”. He
prefers the on-demand nature of AI coaching compared with its human
equivalent. “You can speak to [AI] any time, any place, where humans,
they have their own issues, they have their own life, so they’re not
readily available to cater to your needs, so to speak,” he told me. He
never really thought to use it for romantic relationships, but said it’s
been useful in helping resolve arguments with friends, by showing him
their perspective and tricky situations at work.

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 This has been a common pattern among Meeno users, Nyborg said.
People are not just using it for break-ups or dating advice, but a much
larger range of relationship topics than anticipated, with advice on
friendship the number one thing sought by 18-34-year-olds. “When
humans gather, we talk about our relationships — your professor, your
boss, your roommate. It’s such a salient part of being human and how
we relate to each other,” Jones Bell said. “It shows there is a much wider
market.”

As Nyborg prepares to launch Meeno more widely, she told me she is

doubling down on design choices that might cost her commercially, but
will protect her users’ mental health. There won’t be any advertising in
the app, as privacy and trust are key to drawing in this new audience.
Instead, Meeno will eventually have a subscription business model. “We
don’t want to drive this to be a daily usage app. It’s about impact. You
come to it for emotional insight, and make a commitment to do so, so it
doesn’t make sense to be super regular.”

Nyborg said she is deliberately building Meeno to disincentivise

addictive use, encouraging short bursts, ideally less than 20 minutes at
a time, before turning back to the real world. Meeno is deliberately an
“it”, despite experts in the chat space telling her to use a female avatar,
because it would “make engagement massively grow”. “It’s not a person
or a friend,” she said, “the entire focus is on you.” One unexpected
finding, she said, was that a third of sessions were people going back to
read their own reflections.

Over time, Nyborg’s goal is for Meeno to discover new tips and
behavioural patterns from its user data that will help to forge closer
relationships. “We know human connection is a wonder drug. It’s the
most consistent predictor of avoiding cardiac arrest, dementia, obesity
and more,” she said.

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 For Arron Jones, Meeno has helped to offset the “incredible amount of
judgment” in social circles today — both online and in real life. “No one
wants to be 100 per cent authentic with themselves,” he says. He, too,
had that fear over the years, but “now I feel like I’m more honest,
because of Meeno,” he says. “And that’s translated into other areas of
my life where I could be more honest and authentic with myself.”

Madhumita Murgia is the FT’s artificial intelligence editor. Her book

“Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI” (Picador) is out now

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