Whitney Wolfe Herd: Dating app entrepreneur

23:31Whitney hired a former sorority friend. She also hired a couple of ex-Tinder employees to help develop the app. In fact, it's got a similar swiping functionality. So the app was still being built, but Whitney set about marketing it straight away. She followed a very similar playbook to launching Tinder. She visited universities in bubble t-shirts, handed out free thongs to sororities and beer to the fraternities. She also paid meme creators to create humorous content. So this was kind of new at the time. I mean, nowadays, if you have a meme page on Instagram, pumping out memes will give you big bucks for marketing brands.

24:04But this is very much almost at the cutting edge of marketing, you could say. Yeah, so she hired more friends. the company felt a bit like a sorority. Although hiring friends was partly due to the fact that Whitney had had trouble hiring other people after the Tinder lawsuits. Some early employees actually felt that Bumble was dominated by privileged white sorority sisters. Although Whitney herself said she put into place practices to try and make it less cliquey. Well, the whole idea of a sorority is cliquey. So anyway, the app went live in December 2014 and in its first few years saw very quick growth.

24:36By 2017, it had 22 million users, second only to Tinder's 46 million. And crucially, it was also catching up to Tinder. It was actually America's fastest growing dating app company, with 70 % year-over-year growth compared to Tinder's 10%. And she was working hard during this time. She admitted to waking up every two hours during the night to check her inbox, her emails, although she said she was trying to cut down on that. And she also launched a bunch of brand extensions, which were aligned with the kind of female-friendly image. So that included Bumble BFF for finding friendship. This is what she was imagining when she was travelling, don't forget.

25:11And Bumble Biz, which was for professional networking. At the Bumble Biz launch, Whitney said, the power lunch is no longer just for men. We all deserve a seat at the table. And this kind of feminist, female empowering marketing really kind of chimed with the sentiment at the time. Because, you know, don't forget, this was the era of Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign when, quote unquote, girl bosses were leaning in. And, you know, that whole Sheryl Sandberg book messaging about women finally taking charge in business. Yeah. And the other thing is, is that the economics of this looked a bit different.

25:44People, because the women were in charge, were prepared to pay a bit more than for other sites where they just get inundated by messages from men. Yes, 100 percent. So Bumble was actually making money, which Tinder at the time wasn't. Yeah, and in 2017, Whitney appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine, business publication, chronicles the lives and the riches of some of the wealthiest in society. And she's on the cover of that at age just 28. Very few women make a cover. It's normally graced by middle-aged white men. So at this point, she is a centimillionaire, but the cover line hailed her as the$1 billion queen bee of dating apps because Bumble is now worth a billion.

26:21So earlier that year, Whitney had been approached by Match Group, the dating giant who owned Tinder, Match.com, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish and many others. And Match Group initially offered$450 million for Bumble, but Whitney turned them down. She did a classic kind of founder move and she said no to the money. Yeah. Forbes reported they came back again with a company valuation well over a billion dollars. Why do we think Bumble was so valuable? So I think this had to do with the fast growth because 70 % year-on-year growth for an app is incredible. But they were also monetizing it successfully. So you could have a free version of Bumble, but more than 10 % of the users paid$9.99 for a monthly subscription to access extras.

27:04So that's compared to 5 % of Tinder users who were paying a little bit extra to use extra features on that app. Is it true that Bumble was becoming an app that people went to find longer lasting relationships, whereas Tinder was a bit more casual? I'm sure neither app would want to be known as the kind of casual dating app. But that is certainly what happened to Tinder, maybe because so many people signed up. And obviously, when you have huge amounts of people signing up, maybe quite a lot of them will be interested in keeping things casual. So Tinder's owners match group are still not giving up on their attempts to buy the fast growing Bumble.

27:38But Bumble responded with a pretty sassy public letter published on their website. Dear match group, we swipe left on you. We swipe left on your multiple attempts to buy us. Copy us and now intimidate us. We'll never be yours, no matter the price tag. We'll never compromise our values. A great little marketing twist. That's very clever to turn that kind of corporate action into some very positive publicity. So this intimidation that you might have picked up on refers to a lawsuit that Match Group brought against Bumble for allegedly infringing on two of its patents. Bumble countersued for alleged plagiarism.

28:11Yeah, it was all a big legal mess, but Bumble and Match Group eventually reached an agreement to settle all the litigation between the two companies. So things were going well up until 2019 when Forbes published an investigation into Bumble's majority owner. Yes, Andre Andreev, by this point a billionaire himself, was accused of overseeing and allowing a misogynistic work culture at Bumble's parent company, Badu's London headquarters. Thirteen former employees described a work environment that was toxic and misogynistic, which included internal engineering updates named after porn stars and a widely circulated video of one employee receiving oral sex from a sex worker.

28:49So pretty grim stuff. Yeah, Whitney said she was mortified by the allegations. She said, though, she'd never seen any toxic behaviour in the office, adding Andre has never been anything but kind and respectful to me. Andre denied the allegations against him, but he left the business. He sold his majority stake in Bumbo's parent company to an investment firm named Blackstone for$3 billion. So by 2020, Whitney, who's on maternity leave at this time with her first baby, took over as chief executive of the parent company, now renamed to just Bumble Inc. And this coincided with a huge milestone for the app.

29:22They'd hit 100 million users in 150 countries. So riding high, this is the perfect time to do something we've discussed a lot in these podcasts, which is to go public, to sell shares in an IPO. And in February 2021, Bumble Inc. went public. And at 31, it made her the youngest female chief executive to take a US company public, a company she had nearly 12 % of the shares in. Whitney wore a bright yellow Stella McCartney suit and yellow Manila Blahnik's classic Bumble kind of marketing move. Obviously, the app is branded yellow. And she was carrying her 18-month-old son when she rang the NASDAQ bell.

30:00It's quite iconic, that stuff. You've got her baby on the hip ringing the bell. People refer to that to this day. Anyway, the sale went incredibly well. It exceeded expectations. Bumble was valued that day at nearly$9 billion. Yellow balloons and confetti fell and with good reason, because Whitney had just become the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire with a net worth of$1.5 billion.

30:34So she's a billionaire aged 31, but it was short-lived. In the autumn of that year, in the quarterly earnings call, the company posted a decline in overall user growth for the very first time since its IPO. And in the tech world, if you post declining user growth, your stock, your share price gets massacred. So this spooked investors. It caused Bumble's valuation to fall. By November, Forbes reported that Whitney was no longer a billionaire. Her net worth was now an estimated$940 million. So she was only a billionaire for 10 months. And since then, the stock prices continued to fall. I had a quick look at the share price before I came in to do this.

31:13At its height, it was about$70,$70,$80. Now it's at about$10. So it's lost seven-eighths of its value, or 80-odd percent. So, yeah. Gosh, that's not very good, is it? Not very good. And since then, it's worth noting, Whitney has never managed to make it back into the billionaire club. And would you say the stock decrease is actually a trend among companies that went public during that time? I think there was a real mania for tech stocks around that period. And the faster your growth in user numbers was, the more lofty your valuation was, which meant that if your user numbers began to wobble a bit, the downside for your stock was very, very high indeed.

31:52Indeed. And, you know, it wasn't unique to Bumble. Match Group, for example, Jones, Tinder, their share price also dropped during this period. And there may have been, well, a dating app fatigue. Is that a thing? Oh, 100 percent. I think so. And actually looking at the date. So the IPO was in 2021. You know, we're now in 2024. I would actually say that the predominant trend in dating over the last few years has been that kind of fatigue and frustration with dating apps. I think a lot of single people have felt that dating apps are too onerous. You know, in some ways, what was positioned to us as being convenient and easy and you have an endless access to potential dates has actually made dating more complicated and frustrating.

32:33So, you know, this is the era of people coining terms like ghosting because it's very easy to ghost someone on an app. You just stop replying to their messages or you block them. Much harder to ghost someone if they're a friend of a friend that your mate introduced to you and said you got on really well with each other. But what's going to happen to a generation of people who've gotten used to dating apps as a way of meeting people? What's going to replace that? Interestingly, I do think there is a trend towards people wanting in-person events. So, you know, you get people now saying things like going to a run club is how you meet people, going to pottery class.

33:05There's a new kind of excitement and interest in in-person events where you could be meeting strangers for the first time. I suppose music festivals as well? Exactly. My daughter is currently at a music festival with her longstanding boyfriend, I should point out as well. She's going to kill me for mentioning that. Anyway, in January of this year, 2024, aged just 34, Whitney stepped down as the chief executive of Bumble. She moved to the role of executive chair and former Slack boss. That's that collaborative working application. Lydian Jones took over as CEO and Whitney said she was passing the baton to a leader and a woman I deeply respect.

33:43So despite Whitney trying to pave the way for her successor, Bumble's shares actually hit an all-time low following the announcement that she was leaving. So clearly, she's still pretty synonymous with the brand. Yeah, all this means today that her net worth is just 400 million. So a big discount from when she had just over a billion. So in that interview with BBC News tech reporter Shona McCallum, just before Whitney announced she was stepping down, she spoke about how few young women who came up in tech in the 2010s were left. It is disappointing to see just how little women have advanced. I've watched the fall of what people call the girl boss era.

34:22That's tragic, in my opinion. We had a handful of women founders who raised historic amounts of money for women, who hired teams that had never been hired by women before, and yet they've all been decimated, particularly by the media. Now, if they were bad actors or they behaved poorly, that's not my role to judge. But I will tell you that a man would have gotten away with it. Interesting, because there was that brief, as you talk about, she was a key figure. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook was seen as pretty much in charge of Facebook at that time, operationally at least. And she's now stepped down.

34:59There seemed to be this brief flaring of female talent at the top of tech, which has not caught fire the way a lot of people would have wanted it to. It's interesting because I think she points to something that a lot of people forget in that a woman founding a company or taking charge of a company that is then valued at billions is a news event in the way that a man taking over sort of isn't, relatively speaking. Because we assume that men are the types who take over companies or like build billion dollar companies, but women aren't. But with that increase in media attention, that also means that a lot of people start gunning for your downfall.

35:33Yeah, there's some horrible statistics of how many women raise how much money in early startup companies or accelerator companies. And it's well below 10%. So whereas there has been some progress in the boardrooms, so you have more female directors, you have a lot more female non-executive directors, there's been some movement on the gender pay gap when it comes to founding companies and attracting capital is still a long way to go. That's really interesting. So Whitney's story actually kind of charts the rise and fall of that girl boss era, as well as the dating app era. Yeah. So anyway, she's only 34, pretty young to judge someone, but let's have a go.

36:09We've got a number of different categories, which we're going to judge zero to 10. And we start with wealth, their absolute wealth and how they wear that wealth. Whitney was the world's youngest self-made woman billionaire, but, you know, only for 10 months. Yeah, Forbes ranked her number 84 in America's richest self-made women for 2024. So she's still pretty high up there, but a fraction of her wealth. And in fact, given the fact she's only worth 400 million, it's debatable whether she should even be in this list at all. But she's such an interesting figure, we decided to include her. She really is.

36:42She doesn't appear to have tried to flash the cash in a particularly ostentatious way. Having a baby on your hip as you ring the bell at the New York Stock Exchange is kind of like, you know, a hands-on mum kind of thing. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, her wedding appearing in Vogue is classic rich people behaviour. But, you know, it was no Ambani wedding, for instance. No, for sure. Well, very few are, if any, ever. And we'll get to the Ambani's later on in our series. OK, so, well, I'm going to give her a one. In fact, I might even give her a zero because she's not even a billionaire. Oh, I would be a little bit more.

37:15She was the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. So I would give her, I'd be kind. I'd give her a two. Okay, I'm going to give her a one. You've talked me up by one point. So let's look at rags to riches. How far have they come on their financial journey? Grew up in a solidly middle class family, went to a university with a great sorority network, which helped her out. she doesn't really score very highly for me on this rags to riches story no father was a wealthy property developer and by contrast to some of our billionaires she's below the billion dollar mark so i'm going to give her a two for rags to riches yeah i would actually give her even lower maybe a one wow because you know being part of that sorority sister network she really worked those connections and you know she didn't have to go very far to work them no fair enough okay two from me one from you villainy what bad stuff have they done on their way to fortunes i mean there were those accusations of kind of white sorority sisters taking up space in tinder and bumble but you know versus her trying to take on silicon valley's sexism at the time i think they kind of balance each other out for sure and time magazine features as the media caster is the kill bill of the tech world that's the yellow clad woman you remember uma thurman in the Kill Bill movies, seeking vengeance after men tried to bury her.

38:37That's channeling those very same tropes that she's trying to get away from. Oh, yeah, 100%. And quite lazy as well. I mean, it's a comparison made just because Bumble is also branded yellow. Yeah. So I don't think we can say that she's done much bad here. In fact, she's more wronged than wronging. Yeah, I would agree. Like, from a personal stakes level, she really was put through the mill. Yeah, for sure. So I'm going to say, I can't find any trace of real villainy here. So I'm going to say one. I would say, however, that some people would argue that dating apps have made society worse. Yes. So this is the classic problem we always have about separating the person from the products they invented.

39:16And that would be the same for Facebook, Amazon, etc. Fair enough. Now, I think dating apps seem to me a soulless, horrible environment, which I don't understand at all. I think that only bad things can happen as a result of their existence. But that's because I'm from a different era, Zing. As much as everyone complains about dating apps, I do know more than a few happily married couples who have met on dating apps. You could separate, I think, Tinder and Bumble from the rest of the dating apps because there's something about that swipe mechanism that I think encourages people to just gamify their own dating life and treat people as disposable.

39:54Yes. In a way that other dating platforms didn't. So I remember the early days of OKCupid.com. And being on OKCupid.com was actually quite difficult because you had to fill out the bio and make yourself seem like a real person. You had to do surveys. Doing a survey would put you in a better league of matches, etc. But something about the disposability and ease of swiping binned all of that. It sounds either exhausting or awful to me. So basically, I'm going to dial up my villainy score because I just, I don't know, I either don't understand, don't get or don't appreciate. the dating app world.

40:28So I'm going to give her a three in villainy. In Tinder and Bumble's defence, they were set up with obviously the intention of making money, but also with the intention of helping people find romance, right? It's not like they were encouraging people to cheat or have affairs, unlike some dating apps, which are about cheating and having affairs. And it's all based on, you could argue, on appearance. You'd basically say swipe, swipe, swipe, and it's all basically on first impressions of someone's physical appearance. I mean, you could argue that happens in the real world as well, but you get a chance to discover other qualities in a face-to-face encounter.

41:03Right. I mean, I'm really torn on this because it's so hard to imagine a dating landscape pre-dating app now. I would say that an app like Bumble and Tinder feeds into humanity's worst impulses, but that probably isn't too much the fault of these dating app founders. OK. I would probably put it down to a 2 out of 10. Like it's really hard for me to imagine a world before these apps existed. It really is the genie out of the bottom. I think we found the thresholds where basically our experiences are totally different. This is the generation gap they talk about. Yeah, it sure is. You're making me feel out of the loop.

41:39OK, so two from you and a three from me. Philanthropy, what about that? How generous have they been with their wealth? So we actually can't find massive amounts of money donated through traditional philanthropy. but, you know, maybe worth looking at the kind of initiatives that speak to a general principle of doing good. Yeah, so Bumble was the first major social platform to positively embrace behavioural guardrails and content moderation as part of its business model, things that other platforms have been criticised for not paying attention to. Yeah, and this is really interesting. Whitney campaigned to criminalise the sending of unsolicited nude photos.

42:17That included testifying in front of both the Texas Statehouse and Senate. The law actually got through in that state. Yeah. And in 2018, she launched the Bumble Fund, a venture capital fund focused on early stage investments, primarily in businesses founded by and led by women of colour and those from underrepresented groups. And during the pandemic, Bumble created a$500 ,000 community grant programme to give businesses up to five grand each in financial support. And in 2021, this is an interesting one, Bumble temporarily closed all its offices for a week to combat workplace stress. It's 700 staff worldwide told to switch off and focus on themselves.

42:55Whitney made the move to try and help with collective burnout, something that she suffered from herself. Not much traditional philanthropy, not much giving away to charity or setting up foundations. But still, I mean, quite interesting issues. She's picked her spots quite well there. Yeah. And maybe this speaks to a kind of thing among younger millennial founders and billionaires where you don't really want to go down the traditional philanthropic route. So philanthropy, I'm going to give her, it's not a lot of money, but I think it's well targeted and things that are quite consistent with her experience and her interests.

43:31So I'm going to give her a four for philanthropy. Oh, I think I would give her probably straight down the middle of five. You know, she doesn't do philanthropy in the traditional billionaire sense, but she's definitely interested in giving back in some way. OK, five for you, four for me. Power, we've talked about she became a divisive figure during the big Tinder kind of punch up and controversy. Yeah, I feel like in a way she was so visible during that whole girl boss era and she's now stepped away from that. I kind of think she doesn't really score super highly for me. By her own admission, things haven't changed that much.

44:11Although that she was a very influential person at one time, she's less so now. One of the tests we always use was, could this person pick up the phone and talk to a head of state, the President of the United States? I'm thinking a no on this case. I would say even at the height of her fame and influence, she probably couldn't do that either. I mean, she was probably influential in the tech world, but not so much on the world stage. Fine. Okay. So out of 10, I'm going to say two for power. I would give her a two or two. Okay. Legacy. Remember, she's the youngest female chief executive to take a US company public.

44:46And that day she did that, that was the height of her success. But by her own admission, she says how disappointing it is that women in tech have not gone further than they have. So any legacy she promised to have, She slightly undershot it, I think. Her case has become a sort of figurehead for Silicon Valley sexism with what happened at Tinder. And also, I think, a kind of cautionary tale, right, of tech apps trying to go after women as a market and kind of failing because, ironically, within their own ranks, they were not very female-friendly places to work at. Yeah, that's the real tension here, isn't it?

45:21Something trying to empower women. And yet, in the bowels of the buildings in which these places were actually being run from, finding exactly the same kind of attitudes and behaviour they were trying to combat. I think if you were writing a book about Silicon Valley misogyny, you would be looking at Whitney Wolfherd as a test case. Yeah, for sure. OK, so in that sense, there's a story to tell there. As you say, cautionary tale, there's legacy value in that? 100%. So I would be giving her probably a 7 out of 10. OK, I'm going to give her a 6. So six from me, seven from you. And then we have to make that decision.

45:55Are they good, bad or just another billionaire? This one's easy. She's not even a billionaire. So I don't even have to make a decision. I think that's a cop out. I think you need to judge her at the point at which she was a billionaire. Fine. OK, so she was a billionaire. The youngest self-made female billionaire. I think she's blazed a trail for women founders, chief executives, people who take a tech company public. But she was one of the co-founders of Tinder. Do I think Tinder makes the world a place? I do not. So I'm just going to say she's just another billionaire, even though she's not one.

46:31So do I think Whitney Wolfhard is good, bad, or just another billionaire? I definitely don't think she's a bad billionaire, but I know that my friends who are single and still in the hell that is online dating will yell at me if I make someone who founded one of these apps, a good billionaire. So for me, I think, unfortunately, she is just another billionaire. So Whitney Wolf heard you are just another billionaire. So who do we have next episode? We have someone who describes himself as a reluctant billionaire. And also an existential dirtbag, which is his words. Yeah, it is Yvonne Schwinnard, the founder of the outdoor clothing brand Patagonia.

47:12You might recognise Patagonia from its colourful fleeces. Its founder also has a very colourful story, which involves giving away his whole company. Good Bad Billionaire is a podcast from the BBC World Service. It's produced by Hannah Hufford and Mark Ward with additional production by Tamsin Curry. James Cook is the editor. For the BBC World Service, the senior podcast producer is Kat Collins and the podcast commissioning editor is John Manel.

47:43America is changing. And so is the world. But what's happening in America isn't just a cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere. I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. I'm Tristan Redman in London. And this is The Global Story. Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection, where the world and America meet. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.