Seeking’s Las Vegas founders look to redefine the dating platform

Brandon Wade founded SeekingArrangement.com in 2006, a dating platform that drew attention for connecting wealthy, typically older men with younger women in relationships that could involve financial support, gifts or companionship.

The Wall Street Journal even dubbed him Mr. Sugar Daddy after he gained notoriety for the website.

Wade, a Las Vegas entrepreneur and MIT graduate, went on to launch other unconventional dating platforms, including WhatsYourPrice.com, where members bid money for a first date, and MissTravel.com, where travelers paid a companion’s expenses. The businesses drew criticism from people who characterized them as forms of prostitution. Wade also fueled the controversy with a 2014 CNN opinion piece in which he wrote, “Love is a concept invented by poor people.”

His views on relationships have since changed. Wade met his fourth wife, college student Dana Rosewall, on his platform in 2020, and the couple married in 2022 without a prenuptial agreement. Wade was 51 at the time, and Rosewall was 21.

SeekingArrangement was renamed Seeking.com in 2022 as the company repositioned itself as a luxury dating site with the slogan “Date people who make life better.” In 2024, Wade and Rosewall became co-CEOs. Seeking now says it is not a sugar-dating site and states on its home page that “sugar dating and all forms of transactional relationships are strictly prohibited.”

The Review-Journal interviewed Wade, 56, and Rosewall, 26, at Seeking’s Las Vegas headquarters. Their answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q When and why did you move your business to Las Vegas?

A Wade: I moved here in 2009 for lots of reasons. When I first launched a business in San Francisco, my issue was hiring and keeping people. This is a much more business-friendly environment and I was able to hire and keep people here. That was my main issue. The Bay Area is just much more competitive that way.

RJ: What has been the biggest challenge of being married and co-CEOs?

Wade: I think the challenge, as with any sort of co-things, is about alignment and the ability to communicate. We communicate every day. Even if we are in separate meetings, we come back together in the evening and we communicate and we align on everything. My challenge being a CEO myself is I had nobody, in a sense, to bounce ideas off of. Over time, I surrounded myself with a lot more yes people. And then when I met Dana, we built a relationship based on trust. So when I make a decision, I’m always running that by her so that it’s a balanced decision. If she sees something that is not great, she’s going to speak up and I’m going to listen to her because we have that relationship and trust. That’s the biggest difference between when I was running it myself versus now that I’m doing it with her.

Rosewall: It’s always communication. That’s where all breakdowns happen. It’s important, especially if you’re in a lot of meetings with a bunch of people, to make sure that you’re aligned at the top. We try to resolve everything together before going out and making any decision externally and running it by the company.

RJ: How many members does Seeking have?

Wade: It’s up to about 56 million now. That is the total number of people who have joined the site over the years. But on an active basis, it’s about a million active members every single month.

RJ: What are the membership fees and female-to-male ratio on the site?

Rosewall: It’s $150 for a platinum membership. That’s just to be able to message someone on the site. They can receive messages as a standard member, but they have to upgrade to respond to the message. So it’s a really good revenue model for us because you can get that message and then you’re more inclined to upgrade. And we also have a diamond membership that’s $375 a month. There’s a few perks to that. You get a badge that says diamond, which on our site makes a difference because of the relationship dynamic that people are looking for on our site. It signals more wealth to someone. It’s about 99 percent men in that category. But it’s about a 4-to-1 ratio of female to male on the site. That’s unheard of in the dating space. It’s very effective for our users. Girls naturally get more dates on dating sites. But our site essentially guarantees men dates because there’s four women to every man.

Wade: Usually, it’s the opposite. On Tinder, 80 percent of the users are males and 20 percent are females. This is the reason I founded Seeking. Because it’s very difficult on normal dating apps. It’s about how you look, very superficial things. But my success or what makes me different than all the other guys, it’s not coming through. Seeking solves that because I built it for guys like myself who have done the work. The guys on Tinder have their big biceps and good looks. I don’t have that but I can instead peacock other things that I have. I went to MIT, I could provide people a good life, I travel a lot. So life with me is different in that sense and that attracts a different set of women.

RJ: Why did you change the name from SeekingArrangement to Seeking?

Wade: Because arrangement has the component of people thinking it’s transactional, and that’s not what it is. It gave us an opportunity to really sort of separate us from that segment of the population that we felt were too transactional.

Rosewall: It was synonymous with the raunchy part of sugar, so we had to remove it. Plus, Seeking as a domain is way more searchable and SEO friendly. Most of our traffic comes from that, honestly. Seeking as a dating name is amazing.

RJ: How would you respond to critics who contend the site is still sugar dating under a different name?

Rosewall: We could talk about the type of technology we implemented on the site. They would see it’s not that because anytime someone tries to send $500, for example, we have AI technology that stops it before it even gets to the person. You literally cannot type transactional language on our website and send it out. That’s the best way to stop it, because they realize very quickly that’s not what the site is about.

RJ: As co-CEOs, is it hard to separate work from marriage?

Rosewall: It is so difficult because it’s your life. I always say we have a great work-life balance. We work all the time, seven days a week and 12-hour days. We almost have to force ourselves out of the environment. Walks are really good for us. But even during a walk, it’s challenging to not vent about the problems. But we’re very selective about what we bring to each other. Planning vacations or looking forward to something in the future and talking about it is a really great way to not be stuck in that loop of just complaining to your spouse.

Wade: We decided if relationships are really about doing things together, solving problems together, playing together, having fun together, dealing with situations together, that if we can do this together, in a crazy sense, it’s proof that the relationship actually works.