Mandy Ginsberg talks about her life, a year after stepping down as Match Group CEO

Fate forced life-changing circumstances on Mandy Ginsberg.

Her home in North Dallas was in the path of the October 2019 tornadoes. Then she discovered in January 2020 that her doctor had been trying for two months to reach her for a serious talk.

That’s when she decided to step down as CEO of Dallas-based Match Group, a company she spent 14 years helping to build.

“My doctor wanted to fire me as a patient because I didn’t listen to my voicemails,” said Ginsberg, 51. But the wife and mother of two daughters had been busy. Four days after the family’s house was destroyed, Match Group was reporting earnings.

“We didn’t have a place to live,” she said, “but the quarter was good.”

Ginsberg describes herself as a “heads-down operator” who rolls up her sleeves and works with teams. She was used to spending 40 weeks a year on a plane as Match Group built a worldwide business.

“I had to reevaluate,” she said. “Should I transition out?”

The decision was easier because Match was performing well, she said, and she would be succeeded by a woman. Ginsberg calls her successor, Match CEO Shar Dubey, her “closest friend in the world.”

Shar Dubey has been CEO of Match Group since March 1, 2020.
Shar Dubey has been CEO of Match Group since March 1, 2020.(Match Group)

The two had advanced together at Match as management partners, with Dubey on the technology side and Ginsberg in marketing and operations. “We’re a Venn diagram. Our skill sets are different, but our values are the same,” Ginsberg said.

A year later, Ginsberg, a Dallas native who broke through in the male-dominated technology world to become a CEO twice — at Match and earlier at the Princeton Review and Tutor.com — is writing her next chapter. In her words, she’s “having a blast.”

Houses are replaceable, and last month her family moved into a new one, also in Dallas. Last week, she joined the board of thredUP, the online consignment and thrift store company.

She’s also dealt with her health issue.

Ten years earlier, Ginsberg chose to have a preventive double mastectomy due to a high risk of breast cancer.

Her doctor was trying to reach her last January to tell Ginsberg that her implants had to be removed as soon as possible. They had been recalled after being linked to cancer.

Ginsberg decided to be open about her health when she announced her resignation Jan. 28, 2020. The week before, she had the second surgery. She shared the details in a memo to Match Group’s 2,000 employees, believing it might help others.

Her openness motivated several people at the company to get tested. Seven women discovered they were positive for the BRCA1 gene, she said, meaning they, too, had a higher risk of developing breast or ovarian cancer.

Both her mother and aunt died from ovarian cancer, and it was her mother’s cancer diagnosis that brought Ginsberg, at the time a single mom, back to Dallas. The 1988 graduate of The Hockaday School grew up in Preston Hollow.

After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992, she had gone to live in Tel Aviv and then moved back to California and to Pennsylvania to get an MBA at Wharton.

“I never thought I would come back to Dallas, but it was the best decision of my life,” she said. “I didn’t realize how much was here and what an exciting time it was to be here. And now I never thought people in New York and California would be jealous that I live in such a great place.”

Mandy Ginsberg, former CEO of Dallas-based Match Group, describes herself as a “heads-down operator” who rolls up her sleeves and works with teams.
Mandy Ginsberg, former CEO of Dallas-based Match Group, describes herself as a “heads-down operator” who rolls up her sleeves and works with teams.(Lola Gomez / Staff Photographer)

She doesn’t rule out being a CEO again someday but says that’s not her current goal. She was a director of J.C. Penney from 2015 until late last year, when the board was dissolved after Penney was sold as part of its bankruptcy reorganization.

So she knows firsthand the challenges of the retail business. She says her daughters are educating her about the secondhand market behind thredUP. They’re both thrift shoppers — her almost 13-year-old is into retro fashion and her 22-year-old prefers it for environmental reasons.

Patricia Nakache, general partner at California-based Trinity Ventures and chairwoman of thredUP, takes credit for bringing Ginsberg onto the thredUP board. Years ago, they had worked together on the board of Care.com, a family services company.

“She was one of those people you meet in your career and say, ‘I want to work with that person again sometime,’” Nakache said.

ThredUP’s parallels to Match make Ginsberg “a terrific match,” Nakache said. “She understands the demographic of Gen Z and has demystified online dating. The shift in public perception is a remarkable thing. That’s happening now with thrift shopping.”

Here's how thredUP was set up in a J.C. Penney store early last year. The department store retailer no longer has a partnership with thredUP. Macy's and Walmart.com do.
Here’s how thredUP was set up in a J.C. Penney store early last year. The department store retailer no longer has a partnership with thredUP. Macy’s and Walmart.com do.(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

Match Group, a $2.4 billion-a-year business with eight brands, including Hinge, OKCupid and OurTime, says 40% of relationships now start online and the stigma of online dating has fallen away.

Likewise, forces such as environmental concerns and other trends are making secondhand purchases more mainstream. GlobalData forecasted that the secondhand market will hit $64 billion by 2024 from $28 billion in 2019 and overtake the traditional thrift and donations channels.

ThredUP has expanded from an online-only business into providing resale as a service to other retailers, including Walmart.com and Macy’s and earlier at J.C. Penney. The idea is to help traditional retailers plug into the resale business and grow consumer demand.

Ginsberg says she cleaned out her closet recently and filled one of thredUP’s signature white and green polka dot bags. She took it to the post office, expecting to have to explain what it was. But the clerk was unfazed and told her they get them all the time.

Ginsberg said she was attracted to the thredUP board because it’s mission-based. “I saw the passion for the business in [CEO] James Reinhart. If you can’t help the world, why bother?”

Secondhand can have a bigger place in the market, she said. It’s an alternative to fast fashion, and it’s not a new idea that “one person’s trash is gold to someone else.”

A thredUP sorting facility in Phoenix shows some of the thousands of garments in its inventory.
A thredUP sorting facility in Phoenix shows some of the thousands of garments in its inventory.(Matt York / AP)

At Match, Ginsberg was in the business of helping people find each other, and now she says she realizes that “I haven’t done anything but work.” She’s concentrating on other parts of her life, including rediscovering her hometown, where she has a lot of family, and seeing it through a different lens.

“Dallas is an incredible community with a lot of philanthropy,” she said. She speaks Spanish and has helped translate at the Hope Clinic in McKinney and the COVID-19 megacenter at Fair Park.

Ginsberg is also on the board of Uber Technologies and said that being exposed to other companies that are disrupting markets and where “the sky’s the limit is so much fun.”

She’s not ruling out running a company again someday, and she believes it’s only a matter of time until women have parity in the C-suite.

At Match, Ginsberg said she and Dubey were able to attract “rock star female talent.”

In fact, Ginsberg was sued for recruiting Dubey after they had met at a previous job. The lawsuit was settled, and over the next 12 years, the professional acquaintances formed a leadership partnership and became friends.

At the beginning, they were the only two women in senior positions at Match. “We ended up hiring a lot of women and they now make up 38% of leadership,” a high number for a technology company. Ginsberg over the years also led a pay equity audit at the company.

“People say it’s very lonely at the top, but we didn’t feel that way. We were in it together,” Dubey said. They still talk multiple times a week.

Ginsberg is convinced the technology business will transition the same way medicine did over the past 50 years.

She tells her daughters, Maya, 12, and Talia, 22, they can become anything they want.

“I think one day my kids and grandkids will be surprised to find out that there used to be a lot more men CEOs than women,” Ginsberg said.

This family photo shows (from left) daughters Talia and Maya with Madhu Rajendran and Mandy Ginsberg on a family vacation to Paris in 2019.
This family photo shows (from left) daughters Talia and Maya with Madhu Rajendran and Mandy Ginsberg on a family vacation to Paris in 2019.

AT A GLANCE: Mandy Ginsberg

Title: Board member at thredUP, Uber Technologies

Former jobs: CEO of Match Group, The Princeton Review and Tutor.com

Age: 51

Grew up: Dallas

Education: Graduated from The Hockaday School in 1988; earned a bachelor of arts from University of California, Berkeley in English and Spanish literature in 1992; and an MBA from University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School in 2001.

Personal: Married for 14 years to Madhu Rajendran, co-founder of Dallas-based Bloom & Give, an organization that develops and creates handmade goods to help girls in India go to school. They have two daughters.

Twitter: @MariaHalkias

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