Dating app restricted to the elite

Invitation-only social network Raya filled with rich, famous

Daniel Gendelman, founder of Raya, has stepped forward for the first time since releasing the exclusive dating app to discuss future projects.
Daniel Gendelman, founder of Raya, has stepped forward for the first time since releasing the exclusive dating app to discuss future projects.

LOS ANGELES -- If you've felt a lingering disturbance in the Internet's social order -- a vague and unsettling sense that there is a raging party happening just out of view, that all the people cooler, richer and better looking than you are blowing off steam together in some VIP hideaway while you waste your life on Twitter and Instagram -- I have some bad news.

This place exists. It's called Raya. Maybe you are one of the more than 100,000 people on the waiting list?

Raya first appeared several years ago as a dating app aimed at people in creative industries. It has expanded into an invitation-only social network populated by movie stars, fashion designers, pro athletes, tech executives and too many Instagram models to count.

"It's the Soho House of dating apps," said Hayley Greenberg, 27, a social media manager in Los Angeles who joined Raya in 2016 and used it for several months. "They have the really good-looking guys, the athletes, the actors, the guys that have like 500 followers on Instagram but got accepted because they're a DJ."

On Raya, Greenberg said, "everyone's someone."

The app costs $7.99 a month, but joining is no small ordeal. Prospective members are evaluated by an algorithm and human gatekeepers, who consider factors like the size of an applicant's Instagram following, how many Raya members he or she knows and other, less quantifiable attributes.

About 8 percent of applicants are accepted, making Raya a slightly harder nut to crack than Harvard Business School.

NO CREEPS

Inside, the rules are simple: Don't be a creep, and maintain strict privacy. Users who take screen shots receive a stern pop-up message, and disclosing information about other members is strongly discouraged. Stassi Schroeder, a star of Vanderpump Rules, has said that she was barred from the app for publicly discussing her match with Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte.

Snooty? Well, yeah. But Raya is filling a market niche. At a time when open tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are struggling to rebuild user trust after a flurry of scandals, Raya stands out as an example of a social network that is succeeding by emphasizing exclusivity over scale, and turning privacy into a selling point.

There are other elite dating apps, such as the League, which reportedly has 300,000 active users. But Raya may be the first app that has successfully created an atmosphere of intimacy and trust while revealing almost nothing about itself.

Its website contains no mention of investors, founders or staff members, and the company has never spoken about its origins. For years, members have speculated about who was behind it. A Hollywood superagent? A lonely tech billionaire?

Last month, after pushing Raya for answers, I received a text from a man who said he wanted to meet in Los Angeles and out himself as the company's founder.

The man said that telling Raya's story would be cathartic and that it was time to set the record straight on what the app was really about -- what kinds of people it was meant to bring together.

'SOMEONE WHO CAN CHANGE A LIFE'

Daniel Gendelman, 34, is handsome and thinly bearded. He wore a white T-shirt and ordered plain oatmeal when I met him recently in a Venice Beach restaurant.

In 2014, he was staying in Israel, recovering from the failure of his previous startup, a social discovery app called Yello. And he was striking out on Tinder.

"I was looking for coffee in a new neighborhood, and a little bit of a human connection with someone nice," he said. "It was just a miss."

Gendelman had hung around the creative upper crust and he knew that online dating didn't work for everyone. Celebrities avoided it out of embarrassment. Artists and musicians didn't necessarily want to be on a platform that lumped them in with bankers and lawyers.

Instead, Gendelman thought, what if there were an app that felt more like a dinner party -- an intimate, thoroughly vetted collection of interesting people having candid conversations? He put together a small team and began to build. He called the app Raya, after the Hebrew word for friend, and seeded it with a group of his friends in Los Angeles.

"I tried to solve a big problem for a small amount of people," Gendelman said.

Raya went live in February 2015 and took off quickly, boosted by an early user base that reportedly included actresses Raven-Symone and Kelly Osbourne. (Gendelman would not confirm or deny any users' names, such as John Mayer, Ruby Rose, Zach Braff, Jeremy Piven and Cara Delevingne, who have all reportedly been spotted there.)

The app -- which is only available on Apple devices, naturally -- gathered buzz among Hollywood and media insiders, who called it "Illuminati Tinder" and begged to be invited. One desperate applicant offered $10,000 in cash for a Raya account. Others put together elaborate resumes, complete with press clippings and glowing testimonials.

REVIEWS ARE MIXED

Among actual Raya members, reviews are mixed. A friend confessed that she loved it and had used it to score several dates, including one with a Grammy-winning musician. Others described it less charitably as a meat market where A-listers and models were outnumbered by trust-fund try-hards and "quote-unquote photographers."

"It felt nice to be accepted," said Terence Telle, a model in New York who joined Raya last year. On other dating apps, Telle said, women often accused him of being an impostor using fake photos to get dates.

Their suspicion may have stemmed from his eight-pack abs and frankly ridiculous jaw line. He did not have that problem on Raya, where everyone has eight-pack abs and ridiculous jaw lines.

"It's way better," said Telle, who is now dating someone and has stopped actively using Raya. "I matched with a lot of models and even one celebrity."

Gendelman would not share financial information but said that he expects Raya to become profitable this year. Most of Raya's revenue comes from its monthly subscription fees, but there are lots of ways it could make money, by throwing sponsored member events or introducing paid extras for power users. There is already a feature called "direct request," which is similar to Tinder's "super like" and prioritizes your profile on another member's feed for $2.99.

Ultimately, though, Gendelman is in the rare position of running a social network that doesn't need to be huge to succeed. In fact, Raya probably shouldn't scale too quickly, given the risk of losing its cachet and allure.

Instead, his vision is to see Raya become a kind of digital Davos, a meeting place for influential people to concoct all kinds of commercial, artistic and humanitarian projects. ("We believe in meeting someone who can change a life," Raya's website reads.)

Gendelman is frustrated by the notion that it's just a hookup app for jet-setters. "I want to have people not feel what you felt -- 'it's for people that look a certain way or do a certain thing,'" he said. Raya, he said, is "for passionate people anywhere in the world who have something they want to share with other members and can do it in a respectful way."

'DIGITAL DINNER PARTY'

The heart of Raya is its screening process, which is overseen by a secret committee of about 500 trusted members who vote on every application. People who meet the committee's standards are notified that they're in, while rejects are placed on the waiting list. Gendelman said that Raya has more than 10,000 members spread across dozens of countries.

Having a big Instagram following is not a prerequisite for being admitted. Neither must you be ridiculously attractive or have lots of money. Gendelman said instead that conspicuous displays of wealth are a red flag.

"There's a lot of applications where it's just a Lamborghini, a yacht and a private plane, and we're just like, 'See you later,'" he said.

I asked Gendelman to show me some Raya applications. After swearing me to secrecy, he pulled out his iPhone and navigated to a special section of Raya's app filled with aspiring members.

First in the queue was a male fashion photographer. He is in his early 30s, good-looking, seemingly well known in his field. His phone's contacts contain more than 200 Raya members, which is a good sign that he'll fit in. But that could be a warning too -- maybe there's a reason he hasn't been accepted yet.

"It's hard to say," Gendelman said. He voted yes on the photographer but left a note on his application, asking for other committee members' opinions.

Next up was a musician, a young guy with ratty blond hair. He didn't have a ton of Instagram followers, but he did have 68 phone contacts on Raya. A Google search turned up some recent high-profile media hits for his band. The musician got a yes.

Why? "I think this person looks rad," Gendelman said. "I don't know how else to say it."

Consider, I said, my nonexistent Uncle Tony -- a hypothetical terrible-looking old man with no public profile and no Instagram following to speak of. If he applied to Raya, he'd be an automatic rejection, right?

Gendelman shook his head.

"Is Tony decently interesting? Is he passionate?" he asked. "I'm not kidding -- we're interested in curating digital dinner parties, so to speak, and that comes in all forms."

AMONG THE CARB ENTHUSIASTS

After we met, Gendelman gave me my own Raya account, so that I could see the community's diversity for myself. He made me promise not to name any members I met there, a condition I accepted on the grounds that many of the famous ones have already been outed.

After agreeing to abide by the rules, I opened the app and created my profile using a few carefully chosen photos and an Imagine Dragons song I pulled randomly from iTunes. (Raya uses full-screen slideshows set to music, in lieu of static profile photos.)

Within the first day of use, I spotted an A-list musician, several TV news anchors, a household-name comedian, two NFL players and a high-ranking tech executive. I saw lots of nonfamous people too -- college students, designers, seemingly the entire editorial staff of Conde Nast. Everyone was either very attractive or the kind of person to whom very attractive people would be drawn.

There is something thrilling, and a little embarrassing, about this rarefied air. To go on Raya is to enter a strange and alluring world filled with thirsty elites, a place where fame is measured in Instagram followers and humble-bragging is a high art ("I direct things," reads the profile of one successful filmmaker; a well-known television actress describes herself only as a "carb enthusiast"), and where the average BMI seems to hover in the high teens.

It's hard to remember now, but there was a time in which niche interest groups were exclusive and self-moderating. The nerds had their subreddits and MetaFilter threads, the artists had their 'zines and Tumblrs, the 9/11 "truthers" had their email lists and subway pamphlets.

SAME THREE APPS

Then social media companies came along, broke up the clubs and forced all the gamers and sports fans and Instant Pot moms and neo-Nazis onto the same three apps, then acted surprised when nobody got along.

It's not shocking, in other words, that Raya exists as an elite response to the homogenization of digital culture. The popular and beautiful have always had private parties, invitation-only conferences and VIP rooms. Why would the Internet be any different?

What's stranger is how little of the Internet works like Raya, a digital space that is designed for its users' specific wants and needs. It's genuinely odd that in an age of plenty, when we have 300 varieties of mustard and lifestyle brands for every conceivable micro-demographic, we're still satisfied feeding all of our digital communication into a handful of giant, boring platforms.

Whether Raya fulfills its Utopian ambitions, it is at least dangling the possibility that not all digital products have to connect the entire world -- that the Internet may still allow for some secrets.

High Profile on 07/15/2018

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