Ren You will give you $10,000 if you find him a long-term relationship

By Madison Underwood | munderwood@al.com
Everyone has a bad date story. But Ren You’s bad date story – well, it’s just awful.

The kind that makes you want to spend $10,000 to avoid repeating it.

“There was some weird stuff that happened,” You says of one particular event. “She showed up like an hour late, and she couldn’t find the restaurant we were supposed to meet at, and I had to pick her up in a parking lot, which I thought was kind of weird. I thought I was going to get stabbed or something. When she got out of the car she was smoking a cigarette, and she says she didn’t smoke. And she was missing some of her teeth.”

He bought her dinner anyway, and afterwards drove her back to the lot. That’s when the date got ugly. According to You, she asked him if he is racist. “I was like, ‘No, this has nothing to do with race, I just don’t think we have chemistry, I’m sorry.”

“As she was stepping out of the car, she muttered some racial epithets at me,” You says. “It was pretty bad. It was really just not pleasant.”

Although that date was an “outlier” in its awfulness – “they’re normally not that bad,” he says – You says dating the traditional way, and through online dating websites and apps like Tinder, has failed to set him up with the right woman.

Ren You wants to find someone he can date long-term or marry, and avoid those terrible, no-good dates. To do that, he’s set up a novel experiment: Through a website he built, DateRen.com, You is asking for suggestions of women that would be good for him. And he’s offering $10,000 to whoever can set him up in a relationship that hits the six-month mark.

That’s right. If you suggest the right person for You, and they date and their relationship lasts for half a year, you’ll be compensated handsomely.

“I don’t know if it’s going to work out, but I thought I’d give it a shot,” he says.

It may not be the most romantic tale ever told. It may not work. But as of this weekend, You’s trying it.

A transplant from Boston

Ren You moved to Birmingham from Boston about a year ago. The 29-year-old works long hours at a private equity firm, which means dating cuts into his limited free time.

“I’m at the office probably 12 hours a day, seven days a week, something like that,” You told AL.com. “It just doesn’t leave me a ton of time to go on these dates.

“Basically, going on dates has been one of my only recreational activities for the last nine months or so, and it’s really time-consuming. There’s other stuff I’d rather be doing if it’s not going well.”

You started thinking about how to design a better system. “I was an econ major in undergrad and I work in finance now, so I think a lot about markets,” he says. “I think a lot about market design, and about how to make things work more smoothly through some sort of market mechanism.”

What he came up with was the proposal on DateRen.com – if you set him up with a relationship that works for the long-term, you get paid.

“I’ve always kind of wanting to experiment with stuff like this,” You says. “I’ve been kicking around this idea that I could pay someone on a contingent basis to help introduce me to people, that would actually save me a ton of time. It would help get around some of that kind of adverse selection problem that you get” from online dating services or Tinder, he says.

With You’s idea, the potential dates aren’t self-selecting into a dating site. Instead, friends and strangers are suggesting the dates, which is a sort of outside endorsement. And the money is an incentive to recommend the kind of person You might want to date for a long time, and the kind of person who might want to date him.

Although the website has only been up for a few days, You says it’s working. He says he’s received about 20 suggestions (along with a handful of requests from media). He hasn’t had time to vet them, but he’s glanced.

“I’m getting a lot of young professionals, people like doctors and lawyers and other sorts of folks that wouldn’t frequent a dating website normally, or people maybe too afraid of blemishing their professional image (by appearing on a dating website) – which apparently I’m not afraid of,” he says, laughing.

“Those are the kind of people that I feel like are being referred to me now,” You says. “Which is kind of cool, because they don’t have to expose themselves the way they would on a dating website.”

“It’s a little overwhelming, even at that level, because I’ve got like, work to do,” You says, laughing. “But it’s been good so far. I’m trying to find a balance so far between actual results and ridicule.”

Ridicule is something he’s braced for. He knows some will be critical of tying money in with dating.

“I feel like finding relationships is something that a lot of people don’t want to associate with a dollar amount, for obvious reasons,” You says. “But if you think about the amount of money that people spend on other things… 10 grand can’t even buy you a decent car. I would argue that finding somebody that you date long-term or even marry, that’s a lot more valuable than a crappy car, or I would argue more valuable than the realtor fees on a house you’re buying, which probably comes to 10 grand as well.”

He says $10,000 is, in some sense, a lot of money. But, he says, “for me, it’s kind of no risk for me, because if it works out, then I’m happy to pay.”

One thing that’s been raised to him is the possibility that two people might work together to scam him.

“Frankly, if two people – or at least one person – is willing to put in six months of basically full time work, charming me, and hanging out with me all the time, dating me and all this, and they’re successful at fooling me for six whole months, I think they’ve earned the five grand or whatever is their cut of the scam,” You says. “That doesn’t actually concern me all that much.”

“I’m a pretty good judge of character, and, given six months, you can find out a lot about a person,” he says. “If someone’s willing to put in that much effort, they’ve earned five grand.”

But would he bail out of a relationship at the five-and-a-half month mark to avoid paying the $10,000?