In fall 2017 at Stanford, I was taking a class called Econ 136: Market Design. We were supposed to write a term paper, but I didn’t want to do that—so I made the Marriage Pact instead.
A “marriage pact” is an informal agreement between two people—if both of them remain unmarried and without prospects by the time they turn 40—to simply marry each other. Why leave such an important decision to chance, or a backup plan? I thought at first. But then: If you’re going to make such an agreement, who would be the best person to make it with? Could we find that person for you?
We put together a proof of concept, 4111 Stanford undergrads signed up in a week, and a tradition was born. Over the next three years, I incubated the Marriage Pact through class projects and five independent studies with different professors. Marriage Pact is still around in part because I was able to explore every one of my interests through Marriage Pact—from data science to ethics and from market design to machine learning with graphs. It was a remarkably easy way to talk with professors.
Eventually we wondered: is this just a Stanford thing? Well, we assembled a small team of fellow students and, starting in Fall 2020, it started growing to other universities beyond Stanford. It grew slowly at first, and then more quickly—as of December 2021, 220,000 students have been matched through the Marriage Pact at 66 colleges.
The thing that amazes me is quite simple: it works. Our feedback data shows that if you meet up with your match, there's a 10% chance you’ll date them for a year or longer. A startlingly high number given those people’s lives are changed forever—like, their lives will never be the same for having had that relationship.
Further, even people who were totally disappointed in their matches—for whom the core value prop seems to have failed entirely—email the Marriage Pact every week asking when they can participate again. This kind of love for an experience is exceedingly rare.
The Marriage Pact is one-of-a-kind. We didn’t set out to make a dating app or a social network, so it doesn’t resemble one of the last 20 years—there’s no profiles, no search, no swiping. It’s a dating experience that, for the first time ever, lets you to just be yourself. You don’t have to filter yourself—you’ll get the best result just by being authentically you.
On the face of it, there are plenty of reasons why it shouldn’t work. But a quarter of a million people later, it seems pretty clear it does work. Historically speaking, many of the best inventions were obvious only in hindsight.
In developing the Marriage Pact, we’ve earned some unique insights into the problems we face as humans and the ways we may be able to solve them. The kinds of problems we're looking to tackle are those that just about everyone faces in life: meaningful relationships.
After food, water, and shelter, what does anyone want? A life that meant something? To know that you meant something to someone else? Or perhaps to know that your life was meaningful because you had people in it who mean something to you?
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I mentioned earlier that, at Stanford, I found the Marriage Pact to be a fertile medium in which I was able to explore all kinds of different interests. This is a secret superpower.
When you, as an individual, are creating anything—whether it’s a work of art, a social movement, or a startup—you should strongly consider your founder-market fit. It’s similar to product-market fit—whether or not the product is desired by the market—but instead it’s whether or not YOU are a good fit for the problem space. Do you have the interest, the passion, the tenacity, and the conviction to tell this story or work on this problem in particular?
The challenges we tackle with Marriage Pact are so significant, so close to my interests, and so close to my heart—I expect I’ll work on these problems for the rest of my life.