CEO Series: Whitney Wolfe Herd, Co-Founder of Bumble

WWH (Clip):

Our Northern Star is how do we end misogyny as a company, as a team, as a brand, as a movement? Our user base can participate, right? What are the vehicles to do that? 

And those are our values: kindness, accountability, which is so important. There's such a lack of accountability with the way people behave digitally and in real life. 

Empowerment, equality… How can we live those values in everything we do?

SCS (Intro):

Hey there, can you believe we are almost at 100 published episodes?

Neither can I; and frankly as I was reflecting on some of my learnings over the last almost 2 years that have been captured here, I thought it would be remiss for me not to also feature some of my writings on other platforms as well— in particular my Billion Dollar Moves CEO Series. And so, to celebrate the coming of age of this podcast and our community, I thought it would be a nice touch to also do a special breakdown series of the great CEOs I’ve studied over the years that have in turn, made me a better investor and partner to founders.

You’re tuning into a special feature of the Billion Dollar Moves CEO Series: Whitney Wolfe Herd.

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You may have heard the news, yes, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd has stepped down as chief executive after nearly a decade running the dating app company.

As of January 2nd 2024, Whitney was succeeded by Lidiane Jones, a longtime tech executive who has been serving as the CEO of the workplace communication service Slack. Whitney will remain at Bumble as executive chair.

And while challenges remain with a more dampened revenue forecast underscoring the need for a revamp of the dating-app experience; let’s not discount what it took to get Bumble here. Let's do a quick rewind.

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Whitney Wolfe Herd, CEO and founder of Bumble. Youngest Woman to take a company public.

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Hours after she became the youngest woman ever to take a company public, Whitney Wolfe Herd blinked back tears. These were not however tears of joy and relief, but frustration at the way her narrative was being told by the media: focused on Whitney’s alleged harassment and toxic relationships at previous company, Tinder where she was credited as the co-founder and VP of Marketing.

WWH (Clip):

Our blood, sweat and tears went into this business, right? So when I left, it was completely devastating because I wasn't just leaving this rocket ship of a business. That's one thing. 

But I've just been essentially one day in a 24/7 environment with the same people for more than two years to the next day, never seeing any of them ever again.

And in the middle of that, ending up on the front page of all sorts of magazines and newspapers because of the narrative of the ending. So you can just try to imagine what every day looked like to both morning grieve my exit from Tinder and deal with all the logistical pieces of it, and the media pieces of it which were coming at me.

I had reporters trying to go through my window at my little apartment in Beverly Hills from some rag magazine. I mean, this is just crazy for me.

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And yet of course, these experiences are what led her to building Bumble, a dating app that continues to challenge misogyny in tech, and where notably women in heterosexual relationships “make the first move”. 

WWH (Clip):

We have this barrier to entry, right? We have this safety net within Bumble, the dating site. Women must make the first move. That's what it's all about.

I just wanted to give the women in my life the opportunity to be in control of their relationships. And that's really how this all started.

I really just wanted to help women see that they had the power to be treated as equals in their relationships.

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Today, Whitney Wolfe Herd is a recognizable name, at 31 years old becoming the youngest female CEO who had taken a company public in 2021.

To call her career trajectory a “comeback” is an understatement and this is why, Whitney makes first on the list of #BillionDollarMoves we should all be learning from.

WWH (Clip):

To see a leader be vulnerable, it makes people feel connected. 

We need to rewrite the rules. Don't hold yourself back by society's perception of who you are.

1. Don’t be afraid to make radical bets, especially on yourself

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Despite the less than favorable end in 2014 where she sued Tinder for sexual harassment and began receiving death and rape threats on social media, she decided to bet on her belief that the dating culture was ripe for change. 

WWH (Clip):

Bumble has always been about us saying, we're not here to dictate your relationship. We're not here to say, you cannot have something casual. We're not here to say that you must get married on this platform. 

We are here to say that the way the conversation, the way the connection starts needs to be empowered. It has to be confident, and it has to be where the woman has equal power to the man.

And a lot of people early on like “Bumble, such a rude company”, “it's sexist”, “you're trying to hurt men”. And we said, no, no, no. If you look at the landscape of connection and who holds the cards and by having a woman make the first move, you're just leveling it out and you're making it about equality. 

And, you know, feminism is about the equality of everybody and treating everyone with the same respect and standards.

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Even when it felt like the world was not ready for it, encouraged by Bumble backer and builder, Andrey Andreev (then, CEO of Badoo, a multi-billion social network in Europe) to do what she’s good at; Whitney created the first women-first, major social platform to embrace behavioral guardrails and content moderation as part of its business model.

WWH (Clip):

He really got me to rethink the need for dating to be empowered, right? So we were going to go and build the female internet and focus on socializing. Let's go in and disrupt dating.

What really has been the driving force for us is that it could be perceived as a small change, but this small shift in behavior has driven not only our company, our success, but has driven well over a billion first moves made by women. 

If you think back throughout the course of relationship history, from the beginning of time, women have really been told to wait and been told their place in relationships.

But as society has progressed and as modern times have evolved, women have taken positions of power in boardrooms or politics. But time has stood still in relationships. 

This antiquated idea that a woman should wait for a man in a heterosexual relationship to approach her has still plagued society. And so back in 2014, when I was frustrated with that reality and I watched far too many incredible, brilliant women struggle with this, I thought, well, why?

Why not do it a different way? Why can't we flip this on its head? Why can't we reduce harassment, toxicity, bad behavior and rejection? In fact, making it better for men by just putting women in control.

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Catapulting herself back into the dating space that she was scared by, and further calling out current bad practices was a radical bet she made when it would perhaps have seemed less contentious to have exited the industry completely and stayed out of the limelight.

WWH (Clip):

So how do you pick yourself up in a dark moment? Listen, we're all going to have dark moments and people have had a lot darker moments than I have. 

Everything is relative and I know how fortunate I am. But I think whenever you're feeling like it's the end, you have to remember somebody else. Many others are feeling that way.

And how can you take something that breaks your heart and build a solution out of that?

1. Success can be built on personal setbacks and challenges

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According to TIME’s interviews of Whitney’s friends and family, her clash with Justin Mateen, co-founder of Tinder, was not the first abusive relationship she had been in. 

Whitney’s mother alleges a high school boyfriend threw a watch at Whitney’s head at a family birthday party, while a friend recalls going to that same boyfriend’s house after being told he had threatened Whitney with a gun. 

Whitney’s drive to change the landscape of dating is deeply rooted in her early trauma and experiences; to create a world where women feel safe connecting with others online and developing healthy relationships. 

A well-rooted founder's purpose is one of the key success indicators investors take note of and Whitney clearly checks the box.

WWH (clip):

People don't talk enough about the misogynistic epidemic that we all live within and so if you're not going to push those values, even if it means risking everything. 

Even if the company had crashed, I would have been able to sleep at night because we had done the right thing. And that's truly how I think every founder in this generation needs to operate.

1. Building and upholding a purpose-driven brand identity

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Of course, focusing solely on her story of redemption minimizes Whitney as a strategic leader who built a brand that continues to stand above the crowd in what would have been deemed a red ocean of dating apps. 

From the consistent nods to the app’s namesake from the reference to the company’s headquarters as “the hive” to the color yellow, which notably strays away from the standard blue (Facebook, Twitter, Skype) or red (Tinder, OkCupid, Pinterest), Bumble’s brand identity is one that consumers can easily recognize. 

More importantly, is how Whitney continues to bake in the company’s core brand value of inclusivity; taking a rare stand against non-compliant users in what could have otherwise become a PR nightmare.

WWH (Clip):

As a founder and as a CEO, Iit is on you as an entrepreneur to be able to decipher what matters most. And so we've always really tried to make informed decisions for the mission, even if it meant sacrificing a huge growth opportunity or short term when really saying, how do we stay the course for the long term? 

How do we make the best decision for the customer in the long term that will not impede on our mission and values in any way?

Truly, people want to invest in authenticity and in a genuine mission, and so just always stay rooted to that and never shift gears for what you might think someone wants to hear. 

Just stay very true to your brand and to your mission at all times.

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At a moment when most tech executives are making excuses for why they should not and can’t be held responsible for the behavior on their platforms, Whitney’s team took this opportunity to address a woman’s “atrocious” experience on Bumble with a man named Connor in an open letter, “Dear Connor”, that said in no uncertain terms that the behavior he showed was unacceptable on Bumble. The letter went viral and had more than 1 billion impressions. #ImWithAshley

WWH (Clip):

Actually, the woman that just read the letter, that's Alex Williamson and she wrote it. She's our chief brand officer. And so it was a labor of love from this small unit of our early female team. 

We were group texting one morning and it was like, I don't know, Tuesday or something. And we sent through some of these screenshots that had been posted on Twitter, and it was the woman that Connor had abused and she had publicly posted his behavior.

So we weren't invading anyone's privacy, but we all talked on this group text more like, we have to do something about this. Let's call her. Let's call his mom. And we were going all extremes. 

And we said, you know what? Actually, no, let's use this as a moment. Let's write him a letter. Let's write an open letter. 

Not to Connor, not just to Connor, but to every Conner out there.

Anyone that might want to behave like Connor. Anyone that might feel like that's cool or expected. And you have to also think about this moment in time. 

Digital connection, it was going rampant in the abusive direction and Bumble has been this incredible catalyst kind of reverse engineer that. But so that was the thinking around Connor. 

And now we had been told by several people, you cannot do this. Our firm will not represent you anymore and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever. And so that's why we did it. 

You have to follow your values. Why would you go into business if you're not going to build a business to progress society or to do something differently or better, or make the world a better place in some way, shape or form.

Here are three actionable questions you can ask yourself to think like Whitney:

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1. Instead of jumping head first into a radical bet, ask yourself, what is a small risk that you can take on yourself to prove out an open question you have? What are the possible outcomes? Challenge your status quo bias.
2. What setbacks and challenges have you experienced in your life that you can turn into an opportunity? Remember that your unique experience could be the very reason why your solution has the strongest value proposition: because of the depth of your understanding of the problem.
3. What is your current brand identity? What is that of your company? Go beyond a self-inquisition and ask your stakeholders/customers/followers/peers. Are they aligned, and if not, how can you better do that?

It’s clear that Whitney Wolfe Herd will remain one of the most notable self-made businesswomen I’ll be watching; even as more challenges lay ahead for her and her business. To follow her lead, we must be open to an uncertain future, drown out the naysayers, and bet on ourselves.

How else has Whitney Wolfe Herd inspired you? And let me know, who you’d like me to cover next!