It feels like a lifetime ago, but when Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded her first company, the dating app Tinder, the overwhelming feeling about apps and screens and tech in general was optimism. This was 2012, Wolfe Herd was just out of college, and she, too, was optimistic — about being a woman in tech, about dating apps, about technology’s ability to solve big problems. In the decade-plus since, Wolfe Herd and the culture have learned some lessons.
Famously, Tinder gamified the search for love, introducing that addictive swipe feature to its target audience: millennials. It was a huge hit, but Wolfe Herd’s time at the company was brief. In 2014, she left Tinder and sued, claiming that she experienced sexual harassment and discrimination from one of her co-founders, with whom she also had a relationship. The company denied responsibility, and the case was settled.
Soon after that, at 25, she started the dating app Bumble, which billed itself as a safe space for women to find love. (The big innovation on Bumble: Women made the first move.) Wolfe Herd became a darling of the so-called “girl-boss era” — making the Time 100, Forbes’s 30 Under 30, all those women in tech lists — and got very rich in the process, becoming the youngest woman to take a company public and, briefly, a billionaire.
But post-pandemic, with Gen-Z souring on dating apps and wanting IRL connection, Bumble’s shares fell sharply, and last year Wolfe Herd decided to step down as chief executive. It felt like the end of an era and probably was one, except that the departure didn’t last. After a little more than a year away, she is back at the company she founded with a plan to turn its fortunes around: It involves Silicon Valley’s latest transformative technology, A.I., and some perspective on what technology can and can’t do for us. It also involves a broader vision for the app beyond dating: Wolfe Herd told me that she would like Bumble to eventually help users find love by learning to love themselves via self-reflective quizzes the company is developing and also to point members to local social gatherings so they can get off the app and into the world. You can decide if all this leaves you feeling optimistic about Bumble, about female leaders in tech, about human connection, or not.
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App
You’ve been in tech since your early 20s. What was it like to have time away? It was the first time I was faced with “Who am I without one of these huge consumer brands attached to me?” and that’s a very strange place to be. I was 22 when we were starting Tinder, and I became the Tinder girl. Then I became the Tinder lawsuit girl and then I became the Bumble girl. This became an extension of my identity. I am the type of founder-C.E.O. who is in every detail. I’m emailing members who are having bad experiences personally. And so to relinquish that level of involvement took maturity I didn’t know I possessed and a release of control that I didn’t know I was capable of. So it was very destabilizing at first when I stepped away because I was like, Who am I without all of this? And when I left Bumble, it was tough, because it didn’t play out the way I’d hoped in terms of the narrative.
Explain to me what the narrative was that you were unhappy with. The stock was down at the time, who knows, 80 percent, so the world was seeing that as a failure. Here was 10 years of what was a lot of progress. It’s a billion-dollar-revenue business. It’s a big company, it’s a brand that is global at this point. So in my mind, I was stepping away from something that I had seen as so much bigger than it was when we started, and to have it reduced down to “She must have been kicked out”? There was so much fodder around why I was leaving, and it hurt my feelings.
What was the real reason you left? I was completely exhausted. I wanted to see my children. I wanted to get still in my own mind. I just needed a break.
I guess that leads me to the question of why you came back, because you are doing so at a high-stakes moment for the company. As you mentioned, Bumble’s stock price has been on a steady decline. It’s about $4. You’ve announced a rebrand, which we’re going to get to, but big picture, what drew you back? I had no intention of coming back. I was meditating everyday. I was still very involved — I’m at all the board calls, we’re actively discussing things — but I’m not running the show. And I had a phone call with my prior C.E.O., who I still think the world of. We’re on very, very good terms. I think the world wants people, particularly when it’s a woman to a woman, they want there to be some rift. There’s no rift. She and I got on a call, and she let me know that it wasn’t working for her anymore. I think she had burned herself out. I felt like I was looking in a mirror, looking at myself a year prior. So you can imagine what was going through my mind. Am I going back? Who’s going to run this company? Ultimately, even if it’s not what I necessarily would have signed up for, I felt like it was happening for me. Bumble needs me back. Watching it fall from its peak has been very hard. And so I raised my hand to the board and said, “Listen, I’d like to put my hat back in the ring.”
We’re going to talk about your plans for the company, but I do want to start by going back. When you started Bumble in 2014, the big difference between Bumble and other dating apps was women had to send the first message. The media at the time called it “feminist Tinder.” Is that how you saw it? I didn’t think about the word “feminist” back then. I did not come out of a liberal-arts college somewhere in the Northeast. I was at S.M.U. in Dallas, Texas, and then ended up in a not extremely feminist tech environment [at Tinder]. This was before MeToo, before Time’s Up, before Target started selling all the girl-power T-shirts. Feminism had not gone mainstream. I didn’t wake up and see some market opportunity to go build a feminist this or a feminist that. None of it was an angle. It was genuinely a real lived experience where I felt that as a young woman who had dated, I did not feel like an equal. You couldn’t text a guy first in college. You were considered crazy, desperate. So this was just my natural environment. And then, of course, the media and everyone else said, “Oh, it’s feminist, it’s girl power,” and I was like, Well, yeah, I guess you could technically call it feminist because it’s about trying to level the playing field.
This was the girl-boss era, and you were one of its best-known figures. I’m curious how the term “girl boss” sat with you at the time, and if you look back on it any differently now? I don’t know how to properly answer this. I do remember vividly being at Tinder and having Sophia Amoruso’s book “#GIRLBOSS” and feeling inspired. And then somewhere along the line, this girl-boss arc just turned dark. I don’t really know what happened. I watched a lot of peers fall. My era, which sounds like we’re talking about something 600 years ago —
You’re in your early 30s? I’m 35. So this was like 2016 to 2019. That era was all about the young woman who was building something, and then it was just about taking her down. I’ll never forget: I was pregnant with my first child, and a reporter from Bloomberg came to follow along as we passed a law for cyberflashing — to create protections online for women because we were seeing that so many women were being subjected to unsolicited lewd behavior and images.
This was in Texas, and eventually that law passed. The law passed, and so we brought the reporter with us to the Capitol, and in my mind, they were just following along. The article came out, and the headline was some version of “Bumble’s not feminist, it’s just feminist marketing.” It sent me to a very dark place, because I felt like I could do nothing right. Here I was, doing my best to run a company and pass a law to try to make this safer for women online. I just felt like this is what happens to you when you’re a woman C.E.O. You will be scrutinized. You will be taken down. And I think that was the beginning of the end of me feeling confident in what I was doing.
I think the culture looks now at the Lean In era and that moment with a lot more skepticism. The idea of: What was performative and what actually are the structural challenges that women face to get ahead? And are people taking advantage of the zeitgeist or are they actually trying to change fundamental, underlying things? Totally. What became a challenge for me was I felt like anything I did would just auto get labeled back to this woman C.E.O., she must be a faker, she must be this, she must be that. And by the way, the other thing we need to touch on: Bloomberg was probably not entirely wrong.
Explain that. Bumble’s not perfect, nor was it perfect then. Women have been treated very badly on Bumble. There are times when we have overshot the benefit to women in a marketing moment. A woman sending a message on an app is not going to save the world. Let’s just be honest. It was a small step to try and recalibrate thousands of years of power dynamics in relationships. But yeah, maybe we’ve oversold ourselves along the way. I’m OK to say that. We are a part of the problem in this bigger cultural landscape of online love. We’re not perfect.
I am curious, beyond the broader cultural moment, how you felt you were received as a young woman within the tech industry, especially after your lawsuit against Tinder. No one wanted to associate with me, no one wanted to work with me. There was only one person that was willing to give me any opportunity, and that was my former business partner.
That was Andrey Andreev, who was the head of Badoo and was a co-creator of Bumble. And then you faced another workplace scandal after Bumble started, involving him. In 2019 Forbes published an investigation, and he was accused of creating a toxic and sexist work environment at Badoo’s London headquarters. He denied these allegations but ended up selling his majority stake not long after the article was published. It’s striking that you had to deal with a second high-profile case of alleged male bad behavior in your professional life at the same time you were building a company whose brand was about empowering women. What do you make of that now? I mean, horrible. Absolutely the worst-case scenario. I obviously felt sick for anybody that felt the way they felt, and I did not know about any of these allegations, which to a lot of people, they’re like: “Whitney’s a liar. Of course she knew all these things, and she’s covering up for this guy.” The frank truth is I was in Austin running Bumble very much as a stand-alone business. It’s not like I was sitting in [Badoo’s London] office all day and intersecting with those people, and so it was gutting to me. When Forbes called me and told me this, I was speechless. I was shocked. It was really important to Andrey that I be honest about my personal interactions with him, which, the frank truth is, I had never seen anything to that degree. However, I would never question a woman or another person in their experience, and I said that. And I believe those allegations were stemming from several years prior. They were not active.
There was a range of allegations from different times. Right. But I think the bulk of the article was covering things that had been earlier days. I’m not trying to recuse myself from anything. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m trying to say if you look at the early 2010s, we’ve all seen the movies. The WeWorks and the Ubers. When you close your eyes and think about a tech company in 2012, you see beer pong and all the men together. I don’t think you close your eyes and think back on a progressive office space. What do you take away from this? I don’t know. Maybe I just found myself in two of the only situations, or was this painting a bigger theme of what was pervasive in tech culture at the time?
The other thing about that period is that it’s such a moment of tech optimism. All these apps were coming out, they were backed by incomprehensible amounts of money. They promised to solve so many of the world’s problems. Did you believe that back then? I did. To be able to get on an app, see who’s around you, instantly connect with them and all of a sudden end up on a date with someone that you never would have met if it had not been for this interface, that felt really transformational. So did being able to order a black car on Uber. We were just at this moment — gosh, if any Gen Z people are listening to us right now, they are going to be like: “These people, what? Did they live in the dark ages?” [Laughs]
Hey, listen, I remember the time before cellphones. So you know where I’m going with this. That was a huge leap in terms of efficiency and ease. I couldn’t believe we were in the center of this, and then — and I don’t say this in a self-promotional way at all — it’s really hard to do it twice. So many people over the years have been like, “Gosh, she’s just lucky, she wore a lot of yellow, she’s blond.” I’m not entirely sure people realize just how hard it is to get critical mass on an app twice.
The next era of Bumble, you had a lot of growth during the pandemic when everyone was stuck on their apps. It was a huge moment. You go public in 2021, ring the bell, baby on your hip, and the very next year user growth starts to slow down. What do you think was happening? My opinion is that I ran this company for the first several years as a quality over quantity approach. A telephone provider came to us early on. They said, “We love your brand, we want to put your app preprogrammed on all of our phones and when people buy our phones, your app will be on the home screen, and you’re going to get millions of free downloads.” I said, “Thank you so much but no thank you.” Nobody could understand what in the world I was doing, and I said it’s the wrong way to grow. This is not a social network, this is a double-sided marketplace. One person gets on and they have to see someone that is relevant to them. If you flood the system just endlessly — you’re not going to walk down the streets of New York City and want to meet every single person you pass. Why would you assume that someone would want to do that on an app? This is not a content platform where you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and scale drives results. What happened was, in the pandemic and throughout other chapters, growth was king. It was hailed as the end all be all.
So this is like users, how many people are joining the app, engagement, etc.? The more the merrier. The more people here, the more money, the better. The world started focusing — and when I say the world, I mean even our team started focusing on outputs. What are outputs? Outputs are revenue growth, payers, sheer volume of registration. A good business does not focus on outputs. A good business focuses on the core inputs that matter most. So for us, what are the core inputs that are the most critical? Are our members actually getting what they came here for? That question stopped being asked for too long. We were chasing growth. When you chase growth, you get it, but then you lose it.
You’re talking about the expectations on the street and from investors as one of the reasons this was a difficult period, but one of the things that I was thinking about was that you were the age of the average user when you started Tinder and Bumble. These were millennials when the apps were new. But Gen Z grew up with the apps, and the data says they are very much over them. Seventy-nine percent report dating-app fatigue. We’ve seen that dating apps are highly generational. That seems challenging to be constantly chasing a new user base, because if the idea is helping your members find love, success obviously means that they no longer need the app. I have a very different framework here. I think the reason Gen Z has abandoned the apps is because they’re getting on the apps and they’re not seeing who they want to see and they’re feeling two things, which I take full accountability for at Bumble. They’re feeling rejected and they’re feeling judged.
You’re quite bullish on A.I. I’ve heard you talk about it. How are you imagining A.I. functioning in this next iteration of the app? Let’s say we could train A.I. on thousands of what we perceive as great profiles, and the A.I. can get so sophisticated at understanding: “Wow, this person has a thoughtful bio. This person has photos that are not blurry. They’re not all group photos. They’re not wearing sunglasses. We can see who they are clearly and we understand that they took time.” The A.I. can now select the best people and start showing the best people the best people and start getting you to a match quicker, more efficiently, more thoughtfully. The goal for Bumble over the next few years is to become the world’s smartest matchmaker. This is beyond love. We have a friend product with a very broad member base, and it’s really beautiful.
I’m a bit of an A.I. skeptic. I’ve heard a lot of people say that it can be my own personal concierge and act as my personal assistant. Lord, may that day come. But when we’re discussing the human heart and people’s desire for actual connection, I do wonder if having A.I. mediate is actually what people want. I don’t think you and I are actually thinking about this too differently. We are rolling out human dating coaches in the product because I have the same belief. I don’t want an A.I. to be my therapist, personally. I want to talk to a real person who has heart and understands. However, where I do think A.I. is unbelievably beneficial — it can condense and summarize information like I’ve never seen before. So if you were to build toward a future where you have the human matchmaker and you have the human dating coach at your fingertips through our product, but find a way to use A.I. to read your profile and to extrapolate different learnings from you — loves weekends in the countryside, loves to be outdoors, huge hiker. Where A.I. is brilliant is that it can learn patterns. It can then scan hundreds of profiles if not more and it can say, “Hey, I think you should meet this person because they have similar values.” That’s where the sorting and the machine learning can be really powerful.
What about serendipity? What about opposites attract? What about finding people that you would never think you had anything in common with but it works? You’re now touching on the other side of the argument of dating apps. Half of the people I’ve spoken to throughout my career that met on Bumble, they said, “I would have never thought I would like this person in real life but there was something about their photo, and I just swiped right.” Serendipity will take on a life of its own. However, what I will say is that I think opposites attract but opposite values don’t attract. You can like sweets and they can hate sweets. You can wake up early and they can go to bed late. It doesn’t matter. These are lifestyle choices. These are quirks. I personally have never met a couple that stayed the course when their values didn’t align.
Can A.I. read values though? If we ask you to input them!
What are the inputs for values? What are you thinking of asking? Beautiful quizzes that we’re working on with very, very experienced therapists and relationship experts. This is really just leveraging technology to make love more human at the end of the day.
Earlier you mentioned that many female leaders in tech who were your contemporaries have left or been pushed out. Venture-capital firms are giving less money to female entrepreneurs than a decade ago. Why do you think things seem to have moved backward? I’ll tell you something that I have observed. I’ll have a young woman founder who comes to me, and they don’t just have an excellent deck or an excellent pitch. They have real numbers. They have sales. They have something to show for themselves. And they just can’t get anyone to take a meeting with them. And then a young male founder will come to me, and they’ll be like, “Oh, I just secured $13 million on this valuation.” I’m like, really? Let me see the product. Let me see what you’ve done. “Oh, no, it’s an idea.” How did you get $13 million? So, I am shocked by how little we’ve moved forward.
There is a moment right now, and it’s not just in Silicon Valley. There is a tech bro-ification of everything. You’re seeing it in politics, you’re seeing it in the media. What do you think about the fact that men in tech have become so powerful outside of the companies they run? I feel it too. I think it’s how we’re measuring power, right? Perhaps we’re assigning influence to people that maybe aren’t thinking about the integrity or the safety of the things they’ve set out to do. But I also think people got fatigued, candidly. People felt stifled by the level of things they were being asked to advocate for or champion, and they’re like, “Can’t we just get our work done?” I had someone who identifies as very left actually last week say, “I’m so happy to be in an environment where my whole week is not taken up with cultural issues and we can focus on work.” I think we’re just back to connection and we’re back to relationships. I’m staying out of all the fodder and all the ickiness of the world and I just want to focus on love. I genuinely just want to drive a love company. That might sound cheesy and ridiculous, but that’s where I’m at.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations. Listen to and follow “The Interview” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music or the New York Times Audio app.
Director of photography (video): Josh Harmsworth
Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a writer and co-host of The Interview, a series focused on interviewing the world’s most fascinating people.
The post Can Whitney Wolfe Herd Make Us Love Dating Apps Again? appeared first on New York Times.
