Before Buyout Offer, a Boardroom Feud Festered at Grindr

The week before Halloween, Grindr, the gay dating-and-hookup app, threw a big party near New York’s Chelsea neighborhood—its second annual Pleasure Ball. The theme: sexy garden, essentially. (“Nature’s gay and it’s hungry,” read the invitation.) Attendees showed up as scantily clad gnomes and fawns, and the crowd included influencers, New York advertising executives and Grindr CEO George Arison, who went attired in a velvet blazer affixed with bug-shaped brooches.

Entirely absent from the evening’s fun were the two straight men trying to take control of Grindr’s future: James Lu, then Grindr’s boardchair, and Raymond Zage, a longtime Singapore-based financier, who had both received invites.

If they had shown up, it would’ve made for an awkward time. Lu and Zage have long owned more than 60% of publicly traded Grindr, but a week before the party, news of their plan to purchase the rest of Grindr and take it private had leaked, sowing distrust within the company and its board. Soon after, Arison pushed back against their proposal, and he said at the company’s all-hands meeting that he didn’t think Lu and Zage’s plan was best for the company, according to two people who attended. One concern on Arison’s mind was whether the company would lose employees and executives lured by the prospect of public company stock, three employees said.