I majored in computer science at Cornell. I tried, more than once, to get into an intro psychology course: waitlists, lottery systems, the whole bureaucratic mess that comes with a wildly popular major at a school that size. It never worked out. I graduated having taken exactly zero psychology classes.
I now write a national bestselling book about behavioral psychology for a living. The irony isn’t lost on me.
What actually built that foundation wasn’t on any syllabus. It was the campus newspaper, where I learned to find the actual story inside a pile of notes, a skill that turned out to be identical to finding the actual insight inside a pile of user data years later. It was soccer, which taught me more about managing a team under pressure than any leadership seminar I’ve sat through since. And it was just being twenty years old on a college campus, surrounded by people making decisions about who to date, who to trust, and who to avoid, and getting endlessly curious about why they made the choices they did.
I wrote about this for Cornell’s alumni magazine, Cornellians, and one line stuck with me after I wrote it:
“A key part of my education wasn’t listed on any syllabus. It was the intertwining of my formal and informal education that led me down my particularly ridiculous career path.”
That curiosity became my first dating startup. It failed, the kind of failure that teaches you more than the win would have. From the wreckage came a second attempt with a brand outrageous enough to survive a lawsuit, a temporary ban from the App Store, and two acquisitions, before becoming DOWN, a top-10 U.S. dating app with well over 100 million users across the products I’ve built.
Almost 20 years after Cornell, the common thread finally came into focus: user psychology. When my teams genuinely understood what our users were feeling in the moments that mattered, not just what they clicked, we found growth that lasted. When we skipped that step and chased tactics instead, we didn’t.
That’s the entire premise of Outrageous Startup Growth. Turns out I’d been studying it the whole time. Just not in the classroom Cornell kept locking me out of.