Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd: Small changes with big impact

0:00Scaling a business in the US can feel like a maze. Each state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, pulling your focus away from growth, which is why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert, plus Fortune 500-level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one. So, if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com. slash MOS and get up to three months free. One of the patterns I've seen over and over and speaking with successful founders is this.

0:40They don't wait for HR problems to show up. They build solid systems early on so their company can grow without tripping over itself. JustWorks is one of those systems. JustWorks is the human resources platform that helps you scale without sacrificing your team's needs. It handles automated payroll, benefits, compliance, even international hiring, so you can scale your team without slowing your momentum. JustWorks secures your hiring systems so they don't cost you time, money, or people, which is how you scale with confidence. JustWorks for your people.

1:24And you have friends that are beginning to become young adults and they want to go out to the club and the only club in your area has one step in order to get into it and you're in a power wheelchair. That sort of doesn't go well together.

1:42I found video games to be that outlet where I could take my Super Nintendo into my friend's garage and we could hang out for hours. We'd be playing our Street Fighters or Streets of Rage and that kind of fighting games with my pals that were super into beating each other's butts.

2:05That butt-beating virtual street fighter is Stephen Spahn, COO of the non-profit Able Gamers. I found the deeper I delved into the world of gaming, the more I felt like I was just like everyone else. We're all the same. We're all just gamers. Steve got into competitive gaming, which requires quick reflexes and precision timing in order to win. But he was facing a far greater challenge. So my disability is spinal muscular atrophy, which essentially means that over time my muscles get weaker and weaker. What happens is I lose abilities as we go along. At the same time that Steve's muscles were weakening, video game controls were getting more complex.

2:52But Steve was determined to game on. My hands started getting weaker, and I had to find a way to continue to do what I was doing without being able to do the same physical movements. And I am a technology guy, so I knew there had to be technology out there somewhere that could bridge this gap between my abilities and my desire. During his research, Steve turned to Able Gamers. At the time, it was a blog aimed at helping disabled gamers continue to play. There was an article that the founder, Mark Barlet, had put up about you can't play World of Warcraft with only one arm. And I knew that that was baloney.

3:35So being the adolescent 20-year-old that I was, I was like, ha ha, Mark, you're wrong. This is why I'm right. And you suck. And instead of turning me away like the snot-nosed little kid that I was, he was like, oh yeah, you think you can write better? Write better. And I'm like, oh yeah, well I will. I'm going to do better than you. Despite that adversarial beginning, Steve and Mark soon hit it off. Mark and I got to work and we created a guide for developers to be able to make their games as accessible as possible. Many of these measures were simple tweaks that would have huge impacts for millions of disabled gamers.

4:16But the biggest stumbling block was the classic game controller. Picture it. Small buttons clustered close together. Teeny twin joysticks positioned to fit under each thumb. It's a design aimed at amplifying the smallest of movements into on-screen glory. But for disabled players, it can be a frustrating, alienating obstacle. Not everyone's abilities include being able to grab a standard controller with both hands in order to play. One day, a giant of the gaming world came calling Microsoft. So AbleGamers got to work in secrecy with Xbox for over three and a half years. They basically said, you need to see the super cool thing that we're doing, and we think you have some amazing advice for us.

5:08We went, yeah, cool, this sounds awesome. That super cool thing was called the Xbox Adaptive Controller. It was quite literally a game changer for disabled players. These kinds of adaptive controllers allow you to capitalize on your abilities. Maybe you have only one arm, or maybe you don't have the ability to rapid fire, push your pointer finger. Our assistive technologies can take those controllers and change where the buttons are. We can take technology, we can change them just a little bit, and we can make them better for everyone.

5:47The Adaptive Controller is just one example of how small but thoughtful tweaks can change everything. I believe the smallest feature can make or break your product. You've got to have incredible talent at every position. It's like this huge push. There are fires burning when you're going home. Can you believe it? Such an idiot. And then you go back to, this is totally going to be amazing. There are so many easy ways. I have no idea what to do. Sorry, we made a mistake. But you have to time it right. Oops. Working out of a three-bedroom apartment. Stuff that just seems absolutely nut balls. Ten years later, we're like, well, that's just how you do it.

6:27We haven't made it just how you do it.

6:33This is Masters of Scale.

6:38I'm Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, partner at Greylock, and your host. And I believe the smallest feature can make or break your product. The challenge is recognizing the impact of that feature and making sure it's actually positive. As a founder or a product manager, you should always be on the lookout for small changes that can have an outsized impact. While small changes typically lead to incremental improvements, every so often the impact is exponential. I wanted to talk to Whitney Wolfe Hurd about this because both of the products she's launched are known for a single distinguishing feature that set them on the course for massive growth.

7:23She was a co-founder of the dating app Tinder, famous for letting users swipe right on potential matches. After leaving Tinder, she founded another dating app, Bumble, which has grown to 50 million users and$200 million in revenue. Bumble's success also lies in the seemingly small tweak Whitney made to the established dating app format.

7:51Like Tinder, users swipe through profiles of potential matches. If they like what they see, they swipe right. If not, they swipe left. If two users swipe right on each other's profiles, they can message each other. But here's the key difference. On Bumble, women have to make the first move. This tweak doesn't just change how dating apps work. It aims to change how dating works, period. It rewrites our cultural assumptions about how people connect. And connecting with people, understanding what makes them tick, has always been Whitney's drive. I remember telling my father right before I went to college, I want to go into advertising.

8:35I want to go into marketing. I want to connect with people. And I remember my dad saying, I don't know if that's advertising and marketing that you're saying that you're passionate about. I think you're passionate about something else. As it turned out, her father was right. So I show up at university and I try to apply to the advertising department. Well, I flung to the exam, bombed it. I did not get accepted. And it was shocking to me because every question on that exam lacked empathy and emotion. There was no human connectivity involved. It was all about eyeballs on the commercial that you played.

9:08It was clear from the cold, hard numbers, staring out from that exam paper, that Whitney wasn't cut out for that type of marketing. She wanted something with more heart and soul. I ended up going into humanities and studying global studies. So the classes I took were globalization. What's the impact of putting a smiling Ronald McDonald versus a frowning Ronald McDonald in different countries? It changes the game. It's all about humans and emotions and connecting with the individual, wherever that individual is. It's hyperlocality, and that's marketing. Whitney is remembering here a famous corporate case study.

9:47It turns out that certain cultures mistrusted the broad smile of Ronald McDonald. When Ronald offered a more subdued expression, customers poured in. This learning from McDonald's of all places stuck with Whitney. And there's a lesson in it for all of us. If you recognize both the universals of human nature and the hyper-local nature of human culture, you can literally turn a frown upside down from millions of potential customers. Whitney brought this ability to read a room and a market with her to Tinder. It was 2012, and Whitney was visiting college campuses to promote the app. Strangers connecting was not something that that group of people, millennials, if you will, wanted to touch.

10:39I was really taking it and convincing my peers that it was great to connect with people you didn't have access to. Whitney visited dorm rooms and student unions, convincing people to give the app a try. Her persistence and persuasion pulled them in. But what kept them using it was Tinder's secret weapon, the swipe. And it's fascinating to see that you can take a virtually similar product because let's be real with each other, Tinder was not the invention of dating apps. They've been on the market for a very long time and not just one or two. I mean, there's a full app store of them. OK, the famous Tinder swipe, that wasn't actually in the very first versions of Tinder.

11:23But the novel mechanism that required users to both like each other was there. People tapped a green heart for yes and a red X for no. It was this tweak to the dating experience that set Tinder apart from the other dating apps that filled the app store. And this small tweak soon had people swooning for it. Nowadays, you can swipe for just about anything. Shoes, apartments, tweets, dinner options, baby names, when you want to adopt a pet or even a child. The swipe has become as much a part of our shared user interface as the double click or the desktop trash can. The swipe made Tinder hugely popular.

12:05Within two years of launching, it was processing a billion swipes per day. But the swipe also contributed to a darker side of the Tinder experience. It was a side Whitney and her Tinder co-founders had not foreseen. We had this product, and we were getting all of these people to basically get on it and then go free, match with each other, talk to one another. You're on it now, do as you want. But no one had really been able to imagine just what could come. I don't think at that time we were thinking, well, people are going to get married and have babies, or this is going to end in a really dangerous state.

12:46Small changes to a service can amplify behavior, for good or bad. And it's hard to rein in once this change has caught imaginations and become part of what your users love about your product. Although these small tweaks can be the key to hitting massive scale, they can also have unintended consequences.

13:15People loved the new approach to finding matches. Like a pompous monarch, a simple flick of your finger could decide the fate of a person. You could select someone as a potential suitor or banish them from your life forever. Many of those matches were based on nothing more than a profile picture and a brief self-introduction. There were worries that the casual flicking through hundreds of profiles was desensitizing. It encouraged people to dismiss other human beings in milliseconds. At worst, it encouraged people to be shallow and insensitive, predatory and vain. And this affected how people viewed each other and how they interacted.

14:02Tinder soon became a byword for meaningless hookups. The platform was also rife with reports of misogyny and harassment. No one was thinking of the consequences. And I think what I learned from my time at Tinder was the minute you encourage someone to use a piece of technology, you are inherently responsible. And so I think that always lingered with me as I was there and then as I left. What are the consequences of this technology? And I think what we've seen with this explosion of tech dating or tech meetups is there is a dark side to it. Whitney got firsthand experience of this dark side when she left Tinder following an acrimonious departure.

14:49After leaving, she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company. As part of the settlement, Whitney is very restricted in what she can say about that time. But she can talk about the aftermath and the very public attacks she was subjected to. I became under attack by strangers. And so I was on the other end of what it might feel like to be exposed on the Internet to people. When I was being bullied online, I just couldn't understand why this was the place that young girls and women were meant to be all day long. And I think that was really what started to shape the next thing for me. It was a dark time for Whitney, but it also helped shape her resolve to try to make a change to how people talk to each other online.

15:41I really started thinking, how can I approach this from a unique perspective and take my experience that I've had in building a brand, building a user base, and then my understanding of data and technology at this point. How can I really rethink social media in the context of kindness? And I understood that just like bad behavior can become addictive and viral, good behavior can also be contagious. And kindness can also be contagious. This is proven psychological theory. Note how Whitney wasn't simply throwing up her hands and saying the technology itself was the problem. Rather, the optimistic product creator in her believed there were good aspects to social networking.

16:24We just needed to tweak the technology in such a way it amplified the good while mitigating the toxic. But you could claim that altering the entire way discourse on social media was conducted was a lofty, and perhaps foolish, goal, even if well-intentioned. However, lofty goals do not necessarily fail because they are too ambitious. Rather, they can sometimes fall apart because the methods to make them happen are too forceful. Imagine the options for saving the Earth from an imminent asteroid impact. The most forceful and spectacular would be to launch a barrage of nuclear warheads and blow it out of the sky.

17:08However, while that might solve the problem, the resulting debris cloud could create a whole bunch of new things to worry about. Goodbye satellite network, telecoms, and GPS systems. Hello, radioactive rocks raining down upon us. A safer approach would be to detonate a carefully calculated amount of explosive. Do this close enough to the asteroid, and we could tweak its orbital path, nudging it off its collision course with our planet, and avoid blowing that asteroid to smithereens.

17:48Similarly, Whitney didn't want to explode the norms of online behavior. She wanted to nudge them in the right direction. Her idea was a social network named Merci that had one small but impactful difference to all the other social networks that had gone before. The caveat was you couldn't just leave a random comment. No comments, only compliments. And this was in an effort to engineer and to create contagious digital behavior. Note how Whitney pictures the cascade effect that this small tweak could have. Instead of just a simple like, it would be a like attached to a compliment. And those compliments were going to be very much focused on non-physical compliments.

18:37So instead of saying somebody looks thin or somebody looks beautiful, it's going to be, you know, you light up my day. Or when you walk into a room, people feel happy. It was going to be compliments that were very much focused on the antithesis of what society has really focused on, which is beauty and weight and a lot of these more superficial accolades, which I was trying to get away from. Whitney was caught up in this idea. She was certain that making the right tweaks to the standard blueprint for social media could change things for the better. She was also certain of one other thing. I never wanted to hear the word dating again.

19:18When something out of the blue happened and the dating world came knocking on my door. It was my now business partner who's been instrumental in Bumble. He is a pioneer of the dating space, just not so much domestically, very much overseas. That partner is Andrei Andreev, founder of the dating network Badoo. He was excited at the prospect of applying the Merci model to online dating. But at first, Whitney wasn't interested. I said, no, Andrei, I don't think you understand. It's not going to happen. We basically spent days and days negotiating over how could I change the internet for women and girls?

19:58and how could he be happy by working with me? Andre and I got fortunate to run into each other because had I sat in a room with any other entrepreneur, particularly any other male entrepreneur, I just don't know if they would have seen what I was trying to say. And he understood so clearly because he'd been dealing with data and insights of user behavior for a decade. and he knew firsthand that if you can't get women, you really have a lopsided experience. And so as he heard me really speaking passionately about this concept of making a safe digital ecosystem for girls and women, I think he had his own aha moment, which was, wait a second, this doesn't mean we need to go our own ways and we can't work together.

20:51If I can convince her to do a dating app, Maybe she can find a way to build this mission into dating. Whitney found herself back in the dating app game. It was the last place she had expected or wanted to be after Tinder. She just had to hit on the feature that would set Bumble apart. Discovering this small tweak would reignite Whitney's passion for an industry that had burnt her out. And it just might change the entire way online dating worked. We'll hear all about Whitney's journey back into the dating app world right after the break.

21:38Real leaders don't back down when the stakes are high. They innovate, they push forward, and then they take the stage at the Masters of Scale Summit. Join us in San Francisco, October 7th to 9th, to hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. Apply now at mastersofscale.com slash apply25. That's mastersofscale.com slash apply25. If you're ready to take your startup from idea to impact, then AWS is your launchpad. From data storage to machine learning to secure app hosting, AWS gives you the tech trusted by the world's fastest scaling startups.

22:28And here's the best part. Join AWS Activate today and you could score up to$100 ,000 in AWS credits tailored to your stage and network. Go to aws.amazon.com slash activate and start building. Expanding your business in the U.S. can feel like a maze. Every state has its own payroll, benefits, and compliance rules, which can pull your focus away from growth. That's why founders use Deal. Deal is the professional employer organization, or PEO, that gives you a dedicated HR expert plus Fortune 500 level benefits for your team. The National Association of PEOs says businesses can grow twice as fast if they use one.

23:11So if you're scaling, make it simple with Deal. Go to deel.com slash mos and get up to three months free. Before the break, Whitney took the unexpected leap back into the world of online dating apps with their new business partner, Andrei Andreev. and they were determined to find a way to break from the rampant toxicity that was becoming the norm. We were sitting around and kind of banging our heads against the wall and saying, okay, what's this going to do? What's this going to do? And I was sitting there and I said, all right, I need to understand dating. What's broken in dating? What's broken in dating?

23:50And all of a sudden I just had this somewhat hurricane moment in my mind. And I said to him, okay, I think I've got it. what if we take the standard dating platform but there is a catch once the match takes place only the woman can initiate conversation so this is basically like a woman and a man locking eyes at a bar but he has no way to contact her and she understands that he's interested because that match or that lock eye has taken place but it's on her the only way to have contact is that she has to unlock it. So I said, women must make the first move. This is going to reduce harassment. This is going to reduce bad behavior.

24:34Women are not going to be spammed and women will be empowered and encouraged to actually be in the driver's seat.

24:46The more Whitney thought about it, the more she saw the potential to rewrite the rules of not just dating, but social interaction. It was another small tweak that could have a massive effect. We essentially made very subtle design changes in the sense that the user flow was very familiar, right? We weren't trying to reinvent the wheel. We were just trying to reverse it. And so everyone was familiar and comfortable with the experience, yet there was that caveat of once that match was made, the woman had to speak first, which was so contradictory to what the expectation had been. And the past hundreds of years of dating.

25:25And then, of course, the past few years of digital dating. And so it truly was such a small product change, but with such an interesting social impact. But even such a simple concept explained in such a simple way was hard for people to grasp. We have to really reshape behavior because women are taught not to make the first move. Women are taught not to speak first. They're taught never to send that first message, never to initiate. And men are taught to be very aggressive and really beat down that wall until she says, yes, that's Disney. That's everything. Beauty and the Beast. Exactly. Cinderella, the carriage you know is going to turn into a pumpkin at midnight.