When Tennesha Wood moved to San Francisco after nine years in the Army, she landed a job in sales and began to explore the online dating scene. It was 2010, and searching for love online involved logging into a website on a computer, not swiping on the many apps people have on their mobile devices today. “I met a lot of really great guys that way,” Wood says. “But not everybody you meet is going to be your Prince Charming forever, and there are some frogs in there. Most of the guys I met were really cool — they just weren’t for me. There wasn’t that spark and chemistry.”

The men Wood met weren’t necessarily right for her, but that didn’t stop her from seeing their potential for someone else, and so she started to exercise her matchmaking muscles. “So I kept in touch, and when I met girlfriends, I would connect them,” Wood says. “Once I moved to New York City, I kept doing that until I became that person that friends would always ask, ‘Hey, do you know anybody?’”