He treats falling in love like a market that can be designed - and a few hundred thousand college students have taken him up on it.
Every November, on more than a hundred campuses, thousands of students open an email that promises them a backup spouse. They answer fifty questions about their values - how often they want to argue, whether they would ever hand a kid a smartphone - and then they wait for a single name. That ritual belongs to Liam McGregor.
McGregor is the founder and CEO of Marriage Pact, the company that runs the matchmaking. He did not set out to start a dating empire. He set out to get a grade. The product just refused to stay small.
Today the operation pairs students on what they believe rather than what they look like, and it has matched hundreds of thousands of people. McGregor frames the whole thing in language he borrowed from his Stanford economics seminars: he calls economics "the quantitative study of people," and he uses code to reach those people at scale. The result is less a swiping app than a yearly civic event with a spreadsheet underneath.
Most dating products optimize for the next thirty seconds of attention. Marriage Pact optimizes for the question you actually care about: who would I still want to be standing next to in a decade?
Source: liammcgregor.com, Stanford Magazine
"We hope you don't need us... but better safe than sorry."
The class was Econ 136: Market Design. The professor was Paul Milgrom, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on auctions. The assignment was a paper. McGregor and his classmate Sophia Sterling-Angus pitched something else: an online solution to the "stable marriage problem," the textbook puzzle of pairing two groups so that no two people would both rather swap.
They expected maybe 200 responses. Sterling-Angus named it the Stanford Marriage Pact and made a flyer. It went viral by text in a single afternoon. Within four days, 3,400 students had filled out the survey. By the time the matching ran, more than 4,100 had signed up - close to 58 percent of the undergraduate population.
The reveal landed late on a Monday during Dead Week, the stretch before finals when nobody is supposed to be thinking about romance. McGregor remembers the texts coming in from friends who were resident assistants: "Liam, Donner is melting down right now." An entire freshman dorm, undone by a class project.
The survey skips looks and net worth and goes straight to the nonnegotiables - the values that quietly decide whether two people can actually live together. An algorithm ranks compatibility and hands each person their single best match.
McGregor noticed that a campus full of eligible people can still feel lonely when everyone is buried in coursework and careers. The pact gave that crowd a low-stakes, slightly funny excuse to find each other.
The founders guessed at a couple hundred responses. The campus had other plans. Here is how the first run compared to the modest expectation - and how far the idea has traveled since.
Two numbers explain the whole company: the share of a student body willing to answer fifty intimate questions, and the number of schools that now repeat the ritual every year.
Long before Marriage Pact, McGregor was on the early team at Luminar Technologies, the lidar company, helping push its valuation up an order of magnitude. He learned how to take a fragile idea and make it big.
He worked in data science roles at Microsoft, sharpening the quantitative instinct that now decides who gets matched with whom.
His personal rule isn't only "what can we build?" but "what should we build?" - a useful filter for anyone holding the dating data of an entire generation.
McGregor is an internationally competitive classical guitarist, the kind of detail that recontextualizes a founder photo taken under red stage lights. He has made award-winning music videos with an a cappella group and keeps a hand in musical theater, photography, and graphic design.
He also describes himself as a "closet urbanist" - happiest, apparently, when thinking about cities, transit, and the way good architecture nudges strangers into the same room. Which is, when you squint, exactly what the Marriage Pact does to a campus.
It reads like a poster slogan until you remember he turned a homework assignment into a tradition on a hundred campuses. He also calls curiosity and "asking great questions" the most underrated professional skill - fitting for a man whose entire product is a questionnaire.
"Economics is the quantitative study of people."