Love The Leap
Test-and-iterate optimises; conviction plus tolerated failure is what actually moves things
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
One of Hinge's named cultural principles, written into the company's 'How We Do Things' book. It draws a hard line between the big-tech habit of testing an idea, seeing it fail and moving on, and the founder habit of holding a thesis and trudging through repeated failure until it works. Small incremental optimisations can be good, but the things that matter require much larger innovation leaps, and most of those leaps won't land. The leadership work is therefore about lowering the personal cost of visible failure — which McLeod argues can only be done by modelling it from the very top. The principle is now evolving into 'Love the Problem', because at Hinge's current scale the leaps should follow deep research and conviction rather than founder intuition.
Origin
Written into Hinge's culture book after the 2015-16 reboot, where the team's own honest post-mortem showed that copying the competition and shipping safe increments was what had stalled the company. McLeod points to his own history — many iterations of Hinge before the successful one — as the case for it.
Core principles
- 01Incremental optimisation and genuine innovation are different activities with different failure profiles.
- 02Not being afraid of failure is a precondition for big leaps, not a nice-to-have.
- 03Cultural inertia against looking bad grows as the company grows.
- 04Cultural attributes have to be modelled from the very top or they don't take.
- 05At scale, replace founder intuition with a deep thesis on a researched problem — then still expect to fail repeatedly.
How to run it
- 1
Distinguish the leap from the optimisation
Classify each initiative as an incremental optimisation or a genuine innovation leap, and expect completely different hit rates from each.
Watch out Applying test-and-move-on logic to a leap kills theses that only work on the fifth attempt.
- 2
Build conviction from a deep thesis
Before committing to a leap, go deep on the problem with real research so the conviction is informed rather than a hunch.
Pro tip This is the 'Love the Problem' refinement McLeod was rolling out to the company at the time of the interview.
Watch out At any real scale, wild leaps based purely on founder intuition are no longer defensible.
- 3
Model failure from the top
As the leader, publicly admit your own mistakes and talk openly about your own development plan so that failure is visibly survivable.
Pro tip Hinge's entire culture book is written as a catalogue of the mistakes they made and how they did it wrong — explicitly to give people permission.
Watch out Incentive structures push people to do only their job; without top-down modelling, nobody volunteers to look stupid.
- 4
Keep going through the failures
Hold the thesis and keep trudging through failed attempts rather than concluding from one miss that the idea is bad.
Watch out Fighting cultural inertia gets harder as headcount grows — the pressure to not make mistakes is deeply human.
In the wild
McLeod argues that had he treated Hinge as a test — throw it out there, see nobody uses it, conclude a dating app is a bad idea and go build a car-hailing app — Hinge would never have existed.
→ The successful Hinge only arrived after two full reboots and years of failed versions.
'How We Do Things' is deliberately framed as the story of lessons learned — we did it all the wrong ways, and that led us to learn to do it the right way.
→ Failure is normalised as documentation rather than punished as deviation.
Common mistakes
Treating a thesis like an A/B test
Ship it, watch it not work, move on to the next thing — a habit McLeod attributes to people from larger tech companies, and one that guarantees you never get the big leaps.
Preaching risk-taking without exhibiting it
If leaders never admit their own mistakes, employees correctly read the incentive as 'don't take that risk and be made to look stupid'.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders whose teams have become good at optimisation and bad at attempting anything that might visibly fail.
Not ideal for
Contexts where failed attempts are genuinely catastrophic — safety-critical or heavily regulated operations.
From the transcript
“you have to suffer through a lot of failure to make like the big innovation leaps”
“we have to not be afraid of failure because when you make those much bigger innovation leaps, a lot of them like won't of course…”
“you exhibit failure from the top”
“you have to go like really deep and develop a deep thesis on a problem”
From the episode
Hinge Dating App CEO: Everyone Said Hinge Was A TERRIBLE idea! The 7 Love & Dating Secrets From Hinge’s Founder! AI Will Change Love & Dating!
Justin McLeod