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Meet Sharmistha Dubey, a Jamshedpur engineer who changed the online dating game

Sharmistha Dubey served as the CEO of Match Group, a conglomerate that owns several global dating apps including Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge.

Meet Sharmistha Dubey, a Jamshedpur engineer who changed the online dating game

Sharmistha Dubey (photo:Vogue)

Sharmistha Dubey, also known as Shar Dubey, is a well-known Indian business administrator who has built a name for herself in the United States. The 52-year-old previously served as the CEO of Match Group, a conglomerate that owns several global dating apps including Match.com, Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge.

Here’s everything you need to know about Sharmistha Dubey – 

Born in Jamshedpur in 1970, Dubey studied at Loyola School. She then graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in 1993. She was a classmate of Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the only woman in their class.

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After completing her graduation, Dubey worked for a steel company in her hometown. She worked there for close to a year and saved up enough money to attend Ohio State University where she earned an MS.

She then started her career as an engineer in 1998 with Texas Instruments. Eight years later, she joined Match Group. She reinvented the online dating game and also came up with the ‘Likes You’ feature for Tinder in 2017.

Dubey went on to add paid membership feature which made Tinder a billion-dollar corporation and the most promising app in the industry. This decision made Tinder the world’s top-earning non-gaming mobile app and transformed the online dating business forever.

“The parts of the job that attracted me were the sociological and anthropological elements of this very complicated human problem of who we love, who we are attracted to, and how love lasts. To be able to solve it through technology is really unique,” she said in an interview with Vogue.

In 2017, she was named COO of Tinder. She was appointed CEO in March 2020 and helmed the $40 billion (over Rs 3 lakh crore) group during the pandemic era before stepping down in May 2022.

Speaking about the problems the business faced during the pandemic, she told Vogue, “We saw a pretty sharp decline in almost every metric across all our platforms. It became clear that people couldn’t go out and meet, and that this was going to have to dramatically change.”

Dubey remains on the board of directors of the group.

Meanwhile, she won Tech Leader of the Year at Vogue Women of The Year 2021.

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