What Sean Rad and his founding team at Tinder have achieved thus far is nothing short of remarkable. Tinder has built an amazingly intuitive product with a beautiful user interface, they have successfully handled explosive growth in the last 2 years — which surely required incredible scaling challenges — and all without any major hiccups; by no means an easy task. Because of this, Tinder has significantly increased the size of the dating market and has fundamentally challenged the notion that word-of-mouth growth is not possible in the dating industry. Despite the frat boy image and the nasty scandals that have surrounded him over the past few months, I still had (and have) great respect for Rad’s achievements.

So, it was with mixed emotion yesterday that I read he will be stepping down from his position as CEO of Tinder. As a fellow entrepreneur and founder, I can’t imagine how difficult these past few months have been for him. How did this happen?

In my opinion, it boils down to one thing: Rad failed, or rather, refused to see Tinder for what it is — a dating app. Furthermore, he did not recognize that in dating, more than any other type of social network, the quality of connections and behavior of the community is everything. When Tinder first came out, their audience and community were great; everyone you came across seemed normal, harmless, and even interesting. Each connection felt refreshing and cool. However, due to its explosive growth and less than impressive efforts on behalf of the Tinder team to maintain the quality of interactions taking place on their platform, things quickly deteriorated. So what’s the Tinder experience like today, you ask? Most profiles you’ll come across are completely irrelevant. The endlessly swipeable profiles make it too easy to treat people as a commodity. Every “It’s a match!” is as meaningless as the scores you tally on family game night. Unfortunately Tinder has become “just another dating app” that makes me cringe every time I get on- with perverts lurking around, waiting to flaunt their frontal nudes and spam or curse at every chance they get (and unfortunately ruin the experience for majority of people who don’t engage in such behavior).

Instead of working on the many things that could have ensured a safe, pleasant and relevant community for their users, Rad and his team focused on trying to make Tinder “go beyond” dating. They prioritized their time developing features like “Matchmaker” and “Moments,” which all but forced their users to use Tinder for anything but dating — clearly not the intention anyone has when they download a dating app. (Who would want to use Tinder to match them with potential employees?!)

What is really interesting about Rad’s failure to safeguard and protect the Tinder community is the significantly worse effects such negligence has on their female audience over male audience. Let’s face it, who primarily engages in spamming, trolling, and dick pic sending behaviors within dating services? It is no surprise that recently trending platforms like Bye Felipe, which allow you to share these types of often racist, misogynistic, and simply disgusting online dating encounters, are created and run by women. The content they post? Absolutely ridiculous.

If the scandals that have plagued Tinder over the past few months have any kernel of truth to them, I’m not surprised that Rad failed to see the importance of protecting the members of Tinder community. Most often, start-up products are a direct reflection of the founders’ values and the company’s culture. Tinder’s “brogramming” culture is likely to blame for the company’s inability to recognize the problems that are experienced mainly by their female audience as an important issue to address.

So my advice for Sean is this: It takes two to tango, so it may behoove you to foster a safe community for your entire audience, not just the dudes who get off from showing their naked pics to strangers.