Social Impact Tech: Andrew Hendel of Marshmallo On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
Make sure you are addressing a real problem. I’ve seen some people who were enamored with the idea of being their own boss that they create something that does not address a real need.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Andrew Hendel.
Andrew Hendel is the CEO and Founder of Marshmallo. Before founding Marshmallo, Andrew was a Managing Director at Beach Point Capital, a highly reputable hedge fund managing $14 billion in assets. With an in-depth understanding of financial services, his knowledge extends to the crucial role of compliance with anti-money laundering regulations, where banks and financial institutions are required to understand their customers to ensure legal and ethical practices thoroughly. This involves comprehensive verification of customer details, including name, date of birth, address, and social security number. Andrew recognizes the significance of leveraging technology to streamline and automate this process, making it more reliable and cost-effective. Motivated by his expertise and passion for innovation, Andrew founded Marshmallo, a cutting-edge company that combines bank-grade financial technology with the world of online dating. Rather than solely focusing on fraud prevention and regulatory compliance, Marshmallo applies financial technology to enhance safety and security for online daters. As the visionary behind Marshmallo, Andrew is dedicated to revolutionizing the online dating landscape. By utilizing his comprehensive knowledge of financial services and advanced technological solutions, he aims to create a secure and trustworthy environment for individuals seeking connections in the digital age. Andrew holds a B.S. and M.S. in Management Science & Engineering from Stanford University’s School of Engineering and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi for academic excellence.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I was born in Boston and moved to LA at three years old. I grew up with two younger siblings, and I was quite the protective older brother when I wasn’t chasing them and their friends out of my room. Both my parents are physicians, and although I spent a lot of time listening to a medical talk at the dinner table, I had no desire to follow them into a medical career. However, they instilled in me a desire to look out for and help others.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
My financial career was pretty buttoned down, as you can imagine. But since I started Marshmallo, I have heard about many terrible dating experiences. I recently met a woman who only dates someone she meets through friends. She is terrified of online dating because years earlier, two of her friends were murdered by a stranger they met at a bar. She is an attractive, kind, and funny woman who struggles to meet a wide range of people because meeting unvetted strangers online is understandably too stressful for her. Hearing her story crystallized the real-life need for a dating app that prioritizes safety, like Marshmallo.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
My little brother has a friend whose father is a successful financial manager. Our families celebrated holidays together and took vacations together when I was younger. He always took an interest in my personal and professional life, and I always turned to him when I needed guidance about my career in finance. He helped get me an internship in investment banking when I started and continued to offer me advice about career choices throughout the years. He was the one who suggested that I get involved in a start-up, although he may have meant working for one rather than starting one up! He has remained a great cheerleader, reassuring me when I have doubts.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” ~ Albert Einstein
I created Marshmallo to provide a valuable service to help people meet real people and make real connections online. Hopefully, it will be a success as well. I don’t believe the choice between value and success is binary. I think that being of value initially will lead to success later.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
All the traits and actions that I think are instrumental to success are evident in the formation and realization of Marshmallo.
Dream big: There are thousands of dating apps out there, why bother creating a new one? Because I believe that a dating app that focuses on safety and privacy will make it more comfortable and fun to meet people online. You can stop worrying about getting burned and concentrate on finding compatible matches and friends online. Innovation evolves from big dreams.
Take risks: I left a secure career that I knew well and was comfortable with to create a company that could be positive and impactful. Entrepreneurship is exceptionally stressful and risky, but finding success in something that you create is super satisfying.
Work hard: Don’t kid yourself; success comes with hard work. You need to analyze and investigate thoroughly all aspects of the project you are taking on. I can tell you the statistics concerning the many risks of online dating. I know the demographics of the target users, and I have thoroughly analyzed other dating apps. Coding the program is a tedious and lengthy process that must be well supervised and repeatedly tested. And if you want to employ the best AI and identity verification technology available, you must know about all the options.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the central part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our health. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
Millions of people around the world use dating apps to meet people online. However, not enough is being done to keep users safe. Anyone can join an app with a fake name, age, and picture and harm people in many ways, some with tragic and deadly consequences. Stories about kidnappers, murderers, and scammers who meet their victims on dating apps make the headlines, but plenty of everyday disappointments cause emotional and psychological damage. It can be painful to discover the person you thought you had a genuine connection with isn’t who they say they are. Trusting any dating app can be hard when there are so many ways to abuse the technology.
The problem is not just the number of predators, scammers, or catfishers online, but the fear of meeting one in person. Stranger danger is ingrained in you in kindergarten. I want to alleviate that fear with Marshmallo. We want to help our users feel more comfortable meeting new people.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Artificial intelligence makes it possible to match government-issued photo IDs with users’ selfies and profile pictures. Not only does this prevent people from misrepresenting their age or appearance, but it ensures that people actually are who they say they are! Marshmallo uses photos, selfies, and ID verification in concert with one another to deter dangerous catfishing.
And if there is in-person harm, Marshmallo knows users’ actual identities; we’re optimistic that this will deter wrongdoing from the outset and keep everyone safe. Further, we check over 300 databases with over 700,000 registered sex offenders on them to specifically exclude those people from Marshmallo.
Our priority is keeping our users safe so they can feel more comfortable meeting their matches and making genuine connections offline. To further that goal, we have employed other safety features. We prevent people from messaging new people more than once without receiving a reply in order to deter some unwanted messaging and harassment. We also limit the visibility of self-reported data like your religion or political preferences to people with the same answer if the user chooses. This protects people’s privacy while still enabling us to match people well.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
I’ve worked in financial services all of my career. Through that experience, I’ve learned a lot about the tough regulatory environment and the emerging technologies to comply with all of the government’s requirements. Right now, there is an identity verification boom that is going on. I thought there was an opportunity to apply ID verification technology to the online dating world. I have a younger sister, and I’ve always been protective of her, babysitting her when she was young and helping her to move into college. Now that we are both working adults, we are good friends who share our experiences. She jokes about not wanting to get murdered by some online predator, but the jokes belie an underlying genuine fear. She and her friends have invented elaborate failsafe when meeting online matches, sharing their locations, and scheduling check-in times to stay safe..
She is not alone in expressing her fears of meeting online strangers. A friend who has been in a relationship for ten years is getting divorced and is petrified to get back into the dating scene, especially online dating. Dipping her toe back into the dating pool is hard enough without the added safety concern! My cousin, who just graduated college, is moving to a new city and is also worried about meeting people and apprehensive about relying on online dating apps. In college, she met people at parties or through friends. It is much scarier to meet people you have yet to check out beforehand.
Marshmallo is a technologically advanced way of checking people out and giving you peace of mind.
How might this change the world?
Netflix shows like You, Clickbait and Tinder Swindler have exposed the dark underbelly of online dating. Marshmallo was built to enable people to make new relationships online safely. Hopefully, Marshmallo will keep women and men using online dating apps safer from catfishing, fraud, and in-person harm. Online dating apps are magnets for criminality. In the few months since we launched, I’ve seen tons of fraudulent people try to join Marshmallo with a photocopy of somebody else’s ID or with “selfie” photos of somebody else. One person submitted the ID of a man who looked 20 years older than his selfies, lived over 3,000 miles away, and looked nothing like him! We rejected all of those users.
According to the FBI, online dating romance scams cost people over $1 billion in the U.S. last year. That number is rapidly increasing and is significantly understated because many people are embarrassed and don’t report being scammed. I’d like to make that number go down. Also, there are still a large number of people who are averse to using online dating apps because of the risks involved. By some accounts, a third of single people haven’t used dating apps because they fear being scammed or harmed. By making online dating safer, I hope to expand the number of people willing to try meeting people online.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
The biggest drawback is concerns over sensitive data like your driver’s license. We use an identity verification vendor that is used by major banks and is SOC 2 compliant, business-speak for cybersecurity. Marshmallo does not keep a photocopy of any of our users’ government-issued photo IDs, and we do not extract or store identifiers like your driver’s license number or your physical address. Marshmallo also adheres to cybersecurity best practices. Our app is hosted in a secure cloud environment and everything is encrypted in transit and at rest.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”?
- Make sure you are addressing a real problem. I’ve seen some people who were enamored with the idea of being their own boss that they create something that does not address a real need.
- Make sure the technology you are using does something that isn’t currently being done. When starting something new, there are almost always going to be other companies or organizations that are doing something related. It is impossible for a nascent organization to 100% match all the capabilities of existing competitors which is why it is so important for there to be a strong differentiating factor. A novel application of new technology is a reason to use a new product even though competitors may be better in other aspects.
- Leverage existing tech vendors to achieve feature parity in the areas where you aren’t innovating. One of the things that surprised me in building Marshmallo was how easy it was to solve relatively big problems like messaging. People probably overestimate what tech companies are doing for themselves. The internet economy has evolved in a way that every little problem has been addressed by a company that is 100% dedicated to that little problem. For instance, I use the same company for messaging as Yelp and several other large established dating apps. This company has 99.999% uptime which is truly exceptional. A professional A+ solution was as simple as finding the right vendor. There are companies dedicated to computer-based content moderation, human-based content moderation, uploading photos and videos, push notifications, complying with data privacy regulations or translating text into foreign languages. A lot of the tech vendors that are used in Marshmallo are also used by major dating apps so feature parity was much more easily achieved than I originally anticipated.
- Leverage open source software to save time and money. All companies use open source software. The question is to what extent. The advantages of open source software aren’t just that it is free. Because open source software is often used by many different companies, there is communal economic interest in making it reliable, secure and performant. I’d even consider minor design tweaks to use more open source software given these advantages.
- If you are building an app, consider using a cross platform framework. It used to be the case that cross platform frameworks involved a lot of compromises to the application, so to deliver the best user experience, companies would build an iPhone app and then an entirely separate Android app. Building 2 apps for 2 platforms doesn’t just mean 2x the cost, 2x the time and 2x the potential for bugs. Having 2 apps also means that it is 2x as painful to make any changes or upgrades.
Today, cross-platform frameworks have very few tradeoffs. Marshmallo uses React Native to have an iPhone and Android apps with 1 codebase. 1 codebase enables us to add and refine features a lot more easily. The two leading cross-platform frameworks right now are React Native and Flutter. I think React Native is better because it can support highly-performing web apps whereas Flutter cannot. Marshmallo does not offer a web app at the present moment, but because we built the app with React Native, we can eventually offer one without a ton of expense. In that case, React Native would be enabling us to support 3 platforms with 1 codebase. The other advantage of React Native is that it uses Javascript which is the most popular programming language. Flutter uses a special programming language called Dart which is not used outside of Flutter. React Native also has a bigger community and more free open source code. Flutter used to have a performance advantage over React Native, but React Native’s new architecture closed those gaps.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
It feels good to do good.
Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.
Scott Berkowitz the founder of Rainn, the largest anti-sexual violence organization in the U.S. I would like to discuss with him what motivated him to pivot in his career and create this organization.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can learn more about Marshmallo at https://marshmallo.com. We also have a good page about online dating safety at https://marshmallo.com/dating#safety-tips. You can follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and TikTok. Check out the app in the Apple app store and on Google Play, and tell all your friends looking to meet people safely online to download and join Marshmallo.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Andrew Hendel of Marshmallo On How Their Technology Will Make An Important… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.