| "How does one date in a pandemic?" Shar Dubey had just become CEO of the biggest internet dating company in the world, and she didn't know the answer. In the spring of 2020, users all across Match Group's multibillion-dollar portfolio—Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match—were retreating into lockdown. If they weren't prepared to share air with a new person, much less a drink or a bed, courtship seemed kaput. And then something weird happened: The users came flocking back. They swiped like mad; they messaged and chatted and subscribed like mad; they turned what should have been a catastrophic year into one of the company's most profitable. And Dubey was there at the top, coolly dispensing the ideas and intuitions that have made her a legend in the industry. (Example: "Sometimes we need to be told who we should like.") Senior writer Arielle Pardes tells the story of Dubey's rise, from her roots in an Indian steel city where arranged marriages were the norm to her stint as a corporate enforcer at Tinder to her pandemic year in yoga pants. "I'm a technologist." Dubey says. "I may not sound warm and fuzzy." Yet her instincts, Pardes writes, helped Match Group grow "into a horizontally integrated marketplace for every conceivable type of lonely heart, from the Gen Z swiper to the boomer divorcé." And those same instincts are telling her something about the post-Covid future: "The line between virtual and IRL is starting to blur." Anthony Lydgate | Senior Editor, WIRED | 
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