Remember how Marissa Mayer didn’t want Gwyneth Paltrow working for Yahoo because the actress didn’t finish college? Well, that same hospitality permeates dating apps too, such that the New York Times Style Sectiondevoted considerable space to The League this weekend.
While it sounds like a crusading band of superheroes or an international confederation for world peace, the League is really the anti-Tinder: not merely a dating app but a way to validate, with assurance, the pedigree of your potential mate. All the world’s a puppy mill, and sometimes you need to run your finger around someone’s gumline to assess their teeth. So the League weeds out the mutts, the rescues, and probably anybody I would know.
The app releases only five pics per day via an algorithm that takes into account both Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. Founder and CEO Amanda Bradford claims a membership of thousands, mostly based on her own professional contacts from “Salesforce and Google, Stanford and where she lives in the Marina," according to the Times. Using LinkedIn does have one bonus feature: concealing users’ profiles from people they already know IRL. That way they can hunt for Mr./Ms. Right without their colleagues knowing about it.
The League aims to give successful, ambitious women access to the higher echelons of available men, but it might also be great for guys who used to be BMOC but now have to compete with all these rich bros, too. (Upon signing up, I was pleased to see it’s available in both hetero and homo modes, but I’m number 51,324 on the waitlist, so it might be awhile before I get a push notification or a “Sup?” Especially because I self-identify as low-brow riffraff).
As you might expect, the League doesn’t take criticism kindly. In the vein of Uber’s “God View,” where employees can pretty much spy on riders at will, Valleywagnotes that you mock Amanda Bradford’s site at your peril. When user Victor Ng, a brand designer at Pinterest, posted on Facebook that he was embarrassed to share an alma mater — Carnegie Mellon — with a League user he found “basic,” Bradford came to the woman's defense in the comments. (The women are friends). Concern-trolling him and calling him a douchebag, Bradford further claimed to have instructed her “data scientist” to expunge Ng from the site.
That could be bluster, or it could be how things really work at the League, policing the integrity of the gene pool. To criticize fellow insiders is always the cardinal sin of any institution that jealously guards its membership. Either way, I'd rather get drunk and make out on a bar stool with someone whose name I didn’t quite catch.
[Via Valleywag; the New York Times; Photo via ThinkStock]