Born: 1970, India
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Sharmistha “Shar” Dubey is an engineer and businesswoman who is largely responsible for the success of online dating apps like Match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, and Hinge. She joined their parent company, Match Group, in 2006 and rose to the position of CEO in 2020, navigating the $40 billion company through the COVID-19 pandemic before stepping down in 2022. Born in India in 1970, she was the only woman in her graduating class at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in 1993. She would later earn her Master’s at the Ohio State University and begin working as an engineer at Texas Instruments in 1998.
After more than a decade at Match Group, Dubey was named Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Tinder, overseeing the rollout of the paid Tinder Gold service. She is credited with the addition of the “Likes You” function—available only on the paid tier—that tells a user which other users have already expressed interest in them. It helped make Tinder the world’s highest-earning non-gaming mobile app, changing the online dating business forever.
“The reason the Likes You feature is so popular is because of that deep gratification we get from knowing who’s liked us and so we like them better, so the chances of that turning into a match becomes that much more,” she told Vogue when she was named the magazine’s Tech Leader of the Year in 2021. “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.”