Grindr CEO George Arison knows what it means to start from scratch. Born in the Soviet Union, he immigrated to the U.S. as a teen, hustled through odd jobs while studying, and graduated college with just $500 in his pocket. Far from seeing hardship as a setback, he credits it with giving him the grit to build himself into a self-made millionaire.
Now, his biggest concern is whether his two children will have the same fire in their belly. So much so that he’s planning to bring them into the office from around the age of 10.
“When I was their age, my dad would come to say good night and spend 30 minutes talking to me about the fact that, in his view, Soviet Union would collapse by the time I was 15, and the only people who would succeed if the Soviet Union collapsed were people who either spoke English or knew how to shoot guns,” Arison exclusively tells Fortune. “There’s a very sharp contrast there between what I was getting as a six-year-old and what my kids are getting as six-year-olds.”
Arison made his mark founding Taxi Magic (sold for an undisclosed sum and now called Curb). He took the reins at Grindr, the LGBTQ+ dating app with 14 million monthly users, in October 2022—landing a $1 million-a-year salary, plus bonus and stock options.
