The user experience of Lolly moves away from the functionality of swiping in favour of clapping. What inspired that?
We've completely got rid of the old swiping mechanism, which I think has almost corroded our ability to build intimate relationships with other people. You don't find someone attractive; you swipe left. When has dating ever been that binary? For Lolly, we looked at social networks. The best dating platform isn’t Tinder – it's Instagram. We want to emulate a bar-type situation where you see someone that's cool and want to meet them. So, you clap their content. You tap and hold your screen to clap. Then, if you're interested, you slide into their DMs. If you're not, you just skip their video. That's it. You don't take this categorical decision to just axe someone's entire identity because they're not your type.
In previous years, Gen Z were noted as being less open to social encounters than previous generations. Do you expect this mindset to change as we emerge from the pandemic?
People are going go to go back to these in-person experiences in a big way. New behaviours and technologies that have been adopted will stick around. But at the root of it, a year of the pandemic is not enough to reverse hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection. We will go back to socialising in groups. But now that we are in an era of cleanliness, we’ll be more particular about who we hang out with and where we go. I think Gen Z are going to be conditioned to wearing a mask, and we’ll be a cleaner generation. I don't think there'll be a huge hedonistic wave, but travel is going to blow up after Covid. We're still going to go to clubs. We're still going to do heinous things.
