Grindr CEO’s Daily Routine, From Skipping Breakfast to ‘Founder Mode’

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with George Arison, the 47-year-old CEO of Grindr. It’s been edited for length and clarity.

If you had told me as a teenager in Soviet Georgia that one day I’d be running an American public tech company — let alone something like Grindr — I couldn’t have grasped it.

The moment I stepped out of JFK airport, I felt something different — later I realized it was freedom. America gave me not just liberty, but the chance to unleash my potential, pursue my dreams, and come to terms with being gay.

Taxis were a mess, so I co-founded Taxi Magic. Buying a used car was miserable, so I built Shift. And when Grindr called in 2021, I saw the ultimate refounding challenge. I wasn’t there on day one, but I had the chance to reimagine the world’s most important platform for gay men.

Every impossible moment in my life taught me the same lesson: dissatisfaction isn’t a burden, it’s fuel. At Grindr, and with my family, that energy is what drives me.

Here’s what a typical day in my life looks like.

BI’s Power Hours series gives readers an inside look at how powerful leaders in business structure their workday. See more stories from the series here, or reach out to the editor Lauryn Haas to share your daily routine.

I’ve tried different pills and beds to hit seven hours of sleep

My wakeup time varies based on when I go to bed. If I go to bed before 12 a.m., I try to wake up at 7 a.m., because I get to see my kids before they go to school.

If I go to bed closer to 1 a.m., I probably sleep till 8 a.m., because I need to sleep seven-ish hours a day to function at the level I like to function at. If I sleep six and a half, it’s okay. If I sleep six or less, I suffer. I’m not as fast.

Through the last decade, I’ve tried a bunch of stuff to get to seven hours of sleep. Different bed, pills, etc. I really do notice a change in my demeanor and how happy I am around people, but also how quickly my mind works.

I’ve tried all those sleep trackers. I can’t sleep with stuff on my hands.

I start every day with stretching and emails

If my kids are around, I’ll see them first.

Related stories

Well, no. First I’ll check my email, because I’m ridiculously addicted to my job. I’ll look at email, look at Slack, look at my text messages.

I’ll try to see my kids for 15-20 minutes, but they’re most likely eating breakfast during that period, so level of engagement is minimal. But it’s still good to spend a little bit of time with them, maybe read them a book, and then they leave for school at 7:45 a.m.

Then I get into the mode of getting ready for the day: brush my teeth, stretch. I have a bunch of back problems, mainly because my left foot is half an inch shorter than my right foot. Even though it’s corrected with an orthotic, from 35 years of being like that, my back is still often very tight. I try to stretch that so it doesn’t get in the way during the day.

That’s all intertwined with work. I’m working the whole time while I’m getting ready. My meetings usually start by 9:30 or 10 a.m.

I have oatmeal every day, but skip breakfast thanks to Mounjaro

I have a little bit of coffee most days, but not always. You end up drinking a lot of coffee because you didn’t get enough sleep. I don’t need to do that, fortunately. If I have coffee past 12 p.m., it’s really bad for me the next night.

I don’t eat very much. I’ve lost a ton of weight on Mounjaro, and the result is you don’t have a lot of appetite. I don’t need to eat in the morning, unless I didn’t eat anything the night before.

For lunch, when I’m at home, I eat oatmeal and fruit. It’s something I eat every day, at least once a day. It’s really important to me, to my heart health, to my gut health. If I’m in the office, I usually have some form of a Sweetgreen. Lots of avocado and salmon.

One of my biggest to-dos in life is to add daily working out to my schedule. That is something that went away with children and has been very hard to maintain in the last couple of years.

In the winter, I’m a big skier. My kids are totally amazing skiers. I’m not saying that because they’re my children; they really are some of the best five-year-olds on the mountain.

My days are stacked with meetings, though I prefer time to think

I go into the office two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have a lot of meetings. Today is a bad example: I have 30 minutes open between 11:30 a.m. and 12 p.m., but every other time till 5:30 p.m. is full with a meeting.

This whole week is like that. I try not to do that most weeks, but some weeks it’s just unavoidable. The problem with it is, it doesn’t leave you much time to actually think.

The idea that you don’t have one-on-ones — I don’t understand how you function that way. My whole job is to ensure that the team is working at the fastest possible capacity. Concurrent with it is to ensure that they have clarity of what’s on my mind. I don’t know how you do that without meetings.

I have two meetings a week with our chief product officer. Two-thirds of the company reports up to him, because he also manages our engineering team. I think it’s a totally reasonable thing for me to spend an hour and a half with him a week. I wish I had more.

I use Grindr myself, even though I’m married

I’m married, so I don’t actively use the app in that sense, but I think it’s very hard to be building a product that you’re working on all the time without being an actual user.

Most of what I’m spending time on Grindr on is understanding what users think and how they use the product. I don’t actually tell anybody who I am on the app.

I’m very in the weeds with stuff like that. The whole “founder mode” popularity — when I first saw it I thought, “I don’t know how else to function.” It’s great that someone gave it a title, but that has been my management style forever.

I try to be home almost every day by 5:30 or 5:45 p.m. On the days when I’m at home, I try to actually stop everything at 5:00 p.m. and be with my kids until they go to bed. I’ll still be on email, obviously.

When my kids go to bed, my husband and I will have dinner, and then from 9:00 p.m. until like 12:00 or 1:00 a.m., I work a lot more. Anything lengthy that needs to be read or commented on, I do all that at night.

I watch ‘The Gilded Age’ and write my children’s book

I’m extremely passionately pro-America. I think America is the best thing in human history, and it is vital to protect and defend it and promote it. That might not be a very popular thing to say to some people, but I very passionately believe that.

I buy a lot of books for my kids. We own probably 10,000 children’s books here. It’s been really hard to find books that are really good at telling the American story. I engaged a couple of children’s book authors, and together we’re working on a story where my children are going to be the main actors.

I have ghostwriters who are doing most of the work, but we are coming up with the ideas. It’s a call every two weeks.

I watch a lot of shows on my iPad at random times during the day when I have time, or weekends in particular. It’s my good relaxation to do a couple of hours of just totally removing yourself from reality.

I’m watching “Foundation” right now. I watched “The Gilded Age” when it was coming out. I’ll watch “Invasion” as well. A lot of what I’m interested in is either very old times, pre-modernity, or futuristic fantasy times. I think the shows about today are not done as well. They try to be too many things to too many people.