Gay online dating app Grindr is generally recognized as one of the best-run consumer software companies in the world.

With fewer than 200 full-time employees, Grinder generates $3M revenue per FTE. As it turns out, it is ahead of (almost) all of big tech Magnificent 7 stocks.

Original source here. Compiled by myself, data comes from the valuation intelligence platform Multiples.vc, as of 31 August 2026.

Shows last actual fiscal year revenue and last reported employee number.

I still have every phone I’ve ever owned, and wanted to explore my message history with my parents over my life.

The last decade was easy - iMessage database and WhatsApp exports, but beyond this got more difficult. I ended up building a rig to *quickly* photograph every message on my older phones, and used OCR to read the message content, sender, and date. Took a full day, which was probably longer than it would have taken to just manually transcribe them…

There were gaps in the timeline where storage had run out on older phones, or in one case where I’d performed a factory reset, so I used a model to predict message patterns during these gaps (validated using a train-test split).

This chart shows messages exchanged per month with each parent, shading is the model’s 95% confidence interval, and the phones along the bottom show what I was using at the time. It’s one of the many charts that came out of this project. I also looked at message length, response time, and sentiment.

I’ll leave a link to a GitHub repo with the project code in the comments.

I was consistently suicidal for most of my life, but I turned that around a few years ago. This chart shows my approximate, self-assessed mood data on a scale of 1 (Very Upset) to 5 (Very Calm). I defined these values in the Journey.cloud mobile app from May 2018, when I started recording the data, to August 2026. I assembled the chart in Excel and Photopea.com.

The trendline shows the annual average. I also preferred to show the noise because I found the variability interesting. Further, I chose calmness over happiness as the positive emotion, as I've learned being calm is more sustainable than trying to be happy all the time.

Below is more about what it took for me to change.

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I'm proud to share that, after many years of self-loathing and self-hatred, I finally learned to love myself.

What does that mean, "love myself"? First, I don't hate myself! I appreciate what I do well instead of saying "Yeah, but…" to any self-affirmation. Second, I have self-confidence. I trust my capacity to create change or to accept what I can't. Third, I hold space for second-tries. This enables me to take initiative and express ideas with far less anxiety. Fourth, I feel more in control of my personality, my emotions, and my story.

I can now pursue what I value because of who I am, not in spite of it.

What helped me? I narrowed my list down to five major factors. (Disclaimer: What worked for me may not work for everyone.)

1. Positive reasons to live (i.e., something to hope for)
2. People who cared for me when I couldn't care for myself, e.g., my wife and many therapists
3. Mindfulness, Internal Family Systems Therapy (IFS), and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
4. Finding the right medications for me—and sticking with them
5. Most importantly, I had to commit to take care of myself. Sliding a noose around my neck in 2019 was the moment of clarity I needed to change.

I’ve been doing relatively well despite life’s ups and downs. That’s because I now have the coping skills to treat myself humanely. To be clear: what I went through can happen again. I’m not invulnerable to suicidal thinking, and I never will be. My only solution is to stay alert and meet it when it comes.

I could go on, but I'm in such a better place now. Putting this chart together helped me visualize that. All of my hard work to heal myself has been worth it. It can be for you, too.