NO MORE MR. NICE NERD
Geeks are getting the girls — and behaving as badly as Wall Street bros
WHEN Tinder first launched in 2012, a beautiful greeneyed New Yorker who works in public relations flew out to California to stay with the company’s co-founder Sean Rad during a business trip for the dating app.
Apparently, Rad wanted a bit more pleasure with his business — she learned after the fact.
“Unbeknownst to me, he lied about hooking up with me and made up an elaborate story, which he told to valuable business contacts of mine,” says the now 30-something, who had even sent Rad a gift basket filled with Momofuku baked goods as a thank you for his hospitality.
“Trust me, that’s the only way I thanked him,” she said. “I had zero idea he said any of this until years later, and was absolutely shocked. I guess he thought he should get whatever he wanted now that he was an ‘important’ tech bro.” (Rad’s rep had no comment when reached by The Post.)
Rad’s behavior is par for the course nowadays for a group of techies who have seemingly transformed from dorky geeks to self-centered playboys overnight. Gone are the days of nice nerds hopingpg to changeg the world, such as Mark ZuckerbergZuckerberg. In are thethe EvEEvan Spiegels — the Snapchat CEOCEO whowwh
recently wed supermodel Miranda Kerr and whose hacked Stanford frat e-mails had the touching sign-off: “f - - kbitchesgetleid.”
One of the biggest offenders is Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick.
Last week, he resigned as CEO amid a string of scandals. Among the outrages? A 2014 visit to an escort bar in Seoul, South Korea, with five Uber employees, and a 2013 e-mail sent to staff during a Miami work outing where Kalanick advised his underlings not to have sex with other employees “UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic ‘Yes! I will have sex with you’ AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command. Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML.”
So it’s no surprise that women are disenchanted with tech dudes.
When Deborah, a 32-yearold who works at a media company in NYC, agreed to a date with a techie she met on JSwipe, a Jewish singles dating app, she was excited — they both grew up in the same area and went to a Big 10 school.
“Almost immediately he explained how he was the [chief operating officer] of a startup with offices throughout the country, managed a huge team of people and worked with clients across the globe, meaning long hours and calls during all hours of the night. He was very busy and very important,” said Deborah, who declined to give her last name for professional reasons.
They weren’t even through their first round of drinks when the COO grabbed his phone, said he had to take a call and walked down the block.
Fifteen minutes later, he was still on the call.
“I threw back the rest of my rosé, got up and walked home. About a half-hour later I received a text from my date saying something along the lines of, ‘My bad? Taking the call was rude but necessary.’ My response: ‘No, just rude.’ ”
Michelle Frankel, a professional matchmaker in Manhattan, says a lot of newly rich (or paper-rich) startup honchos are still figuring out how to navigate their new baller status.
“Any bachelor or any man who does extremely well — all of a sudden he has more options or feels he has more options, because he brings more to the table,” says Frankel, whose services include some basic Courtship 101.
“But just because they are extremely intelligent and making tons of money, it doesn’t mean they have emotional intelligence. A lot of them don’t know how to date,” she says.
Frankel says a common problem is techies coming on too strong too quickly, a result, sometimes, of misguided dating advice.
“I’ve actually heard of a lot of these tech guys taking these pickup classes, which don’t work,” she says. “Just because you go on a first date, [it] doesn’t mean a woman wants to be groped at a restaurant and made out with.”
One woman who moved from NYC to San Francisco says West Coast techies suffer from “Peter Pan Syndrome.”
“They live in Never Never Land and they are not incentivized to settle down until they are financially stable. But out here, the threshold for that is crazy high,” says the NYC transplant, who works in finance.
“They all have the dream that they will be the next founder of Warby Parker, and that keeps them thinking they shouldn’t make a commitment to anything so they can devote themselves to work.”
The former New Yorker says her boyfriend of six months, with whom she recently traveled to South Africa, unceremoniously dumped her on the phone when he got a plum gig at a new startup in Austin, Texas.
“He kept the news of the job all to himself until he knew he had the offer, and then said he didn’t ‘view us [as] long-term.’
“I’ve seen countless times when tech guys post online in their dating profile that they are looking for ‘high energy, low drama,’ ” says the finance lady.
“Any girl who is able to fit neatly in their life sounds great. But otherwise, they’re out.”