The Bumble CEO has returned to run the struggling company she founded, and says she has a plan for getting Gen Z back. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Chapter 1: What is the live event Lulu is announcing?
Hi, everyone. It's Lulu. Before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know about something exciting we have coming up here at The Interview. It's our first ever live show. It'll be at the Tribeca Festival in New York City on Thursday, June 12th. I'll be talking with actor Sandra Oh. You might know her from Grey's Anatomy or Killing Eve. I'm really looking forward to it.
Tickets are on sale now at tribecafestival.com slash the interview. Hope you can come. From the New York Times, this is The Interview. I'm Lulu Garcia Navarro. And this week, I'm interviewing Whitney Wolf-Herd, the founder and CEO of the dating app Bumble. Now, when I started dating, the apps weren't an option. I met my husband the good old-fashioned way through his ex-girlfriend.
Chapter 2: What is Whitney Wolfe Herd's background with Tinder?
But I wanted to talk to Wolf-Herd because her story really maps onto our culture's fraught relationship with technology and female business leaders. In 2012, Wolfherd was just out of college when she co-founded Tinder, the dating app that was squarely aimed at her generation of millennials. Tinder gamified finding love, introducing that addictive swipe feature.
But Wolfherd went on to have a messy breakup with Tinder. In 2014, she left the company and sued them, alleging that she'd experienced sexual harassment and discrimination from one of her co-founders with whom she'd also had a relationship. The company denied responsibility and they settled the case.
Soon after, though, at only age 25, she started Bumble, which built itself as this safe space for women to find love, where they made the first move. Wolfherd then became a darling of the so-called girl boss era when women were making real strides as leaders in tech. Cut to today. Our love affair with dating apps is dying.
Post-pandemic and with Gen Z very much wanting IRL connection, Bumble shares have taken a tumble and female tech leaders like Wolfherd are even more rare than when she began. So after stepping down as Bumble's CEO just last year, Wolfherd is back at the company as of March with a plan to turn its fortunes around.
It involves Silicon Valley's latest transformative technology, AI, a broader vision for the app beyond dating, and some perspective on what tech can and can't do for us. Here's my interview with Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfherd. Whitney, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me.
You just stepped back into your role as CEO of Bumble in March after being away for more than a year, I think. You've been in tech, though, since your early 20s. And I'm wondering what it was like in that time away because you haven't had a break.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Whitney face after leaving Bumble?
It was amazing. The time off was incredible. 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. If you think about it, I was 22 years old when we were starting Tinder. And then I became the Tinder girl. And then I became the Tinder lawsuit girl. And then I became the Bumble girl.
And this became an extension of my identity. I am the type of founder, CEO 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. It took a level of release of control that I didn't know I was capable of.
And so it was very, 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 maybe hoped in terms of the narrative. And for somebody who has been building a consumer brand and has been in the public eye to some degree, narratives can hurt.
Explain to me what the narrative was that you were unhappy with. Stock was down at the time, who knows, 80%. So the world was seeing that as a failure. So here was 10 years of what was a lot of progress. I mean, 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 where it was when we started, objectively. And to have it reduced down to, oh, she failed. She must have been kicked out. I mean, there was so much fodder around why I was leaving. And it hurt my feelings.
What was the real reason you left? I was exhausted.
I was completely exhausted. I wanted to see my children. I wanted to get still in my own mind and I just needed a break. I wanted to see my mom. I wanted to see my husband. I wanted to... be with friends. I just needed to take a breather.
I guess that leads me to the question of why you came back. Because you are coming back at a high-stakes moment for the company. As you mentioned, Bumble's stock price has been on a low, 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 to the company?
I had no intentions of coming back. I mean, here I am. I'm just in the groove of being this kind of removed founder. I was meditating every day. I was really working on these inward practices, but very still involved. I mean, all the board calls, but I'm not running the show. And I had a phone call with my prior CEO, who I still think the world of.
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Chapter 4: Why did Whitney decide to return to Bumble?
And then it was about just taking her down. And it paralyzed me. I'll never forget Bloomberg. came. I was pregnant with my first child. Bloomberg came to follow along. As we passed a law for cyber flashing to create, you know, protections online for women because we were seeing that so many women were being subjected to unsolicited lewd behavior and images.
And we were doing our best to try to create some accountability. And this was in Texas, which eventually that law passed. The law passed. And so we brought the reporter with us to the Capitol and to testify. And in my mind, we were just following along. The article came out, and the headline was some version of Bumble's not feminist, it's just feminist marketing.
And it sent me into 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 my best to make this safer for women online. And even doing that, well, a lot of the, not to be disrespectful, but a lot of the male tech CEOs are not trying to pass laws to make the internet safer, right?
So I just felt like, oh, this is what happens to you when you're a woman CEO. You can't survive. 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 that the culture now looks at Sheryl Sandberg, the lean-in era, and that moment with a lot more skepticism, right? And there is this idea of what is performative and what is actually the structural challenges that women face to get ahead. Are people taking advantage of zeitgeist or are they actually trying to change fundamental underlying things that make it difficult?
I think this is where I struggled during those years. I think what became a challenge for me was I felt like anything I did would just auto get labeled back to this woman CEO. She must be a faker. She must be a this. She must be a that. And it just felt like you couldn't catch a breath during that chapter, which the reason why I bring any of this up is I think it led to the depletion that I faced
three years after being a public company CEO, with all of those challenges, where it's like, I can't do this anymore. I have to get out of here. And by the way, the other thing we do need to touch on, Bloomberg probably was not entirely wrong. Bumble's not perfect. Nor was it perfect then. It's not. Women have been treated very badly on Bumble.
I actually think that there are times where we have... overshot the benefit to women. in a marketing moment or whatever that is, than what we've actually been able to do. I think my point back to the Bloomberg moment was that it felt like that was just another gotcha attempt in this culture of which CEO that's a young woman can we go get next? Does that make any sense?
I don't feel like it was done because they authentically wanted to cover the company and they wanted to find the fair flaws and the fair benefits I did feel as if it was like, oh, this is a target that hasn't fallen yet. Let's go get her. I am curious, when you say there were fair flaws, what do you mean by that? Well, a woman sending a message on an app is not going to save the world. It's not.
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Chapter 5: How does Bumble differentiate itself in the dating app market?
They were not active. They were talking about workplace culture from kind of the earlier Bidu era, if I remember correctly. Yeah.
There was a range of allegations from different times. The article came out in 2019. Right.
But I think the bulk of the article was covering things that had been kind of earlier days. So what I'm getting at, 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,
I mean, we've all seen the movies, the WeWorks and the Ubers, and there starts to be this consistent picture of, you know, when you close your eyes and think about a tech company in 2012, you see beer pong and you see, you know, all the men together. I don't think you close your eyes and think back on like a progressive office space. What do you take away from this?
I don't know, you could call it whatever you want. 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 also seems like 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? Did you sort of feel like this was an incredible opportunity to really tackle things in a new way? Yeah, I did.
I did. To be able to get on an app, see who's around you, And instantly connect with them. And then all of a sudden end up on a date with someone that you would have never in 100 years met had it not been for this interface. That felt really transformational. But so did being able to order a black car on Uber. We were just at this moment.
And gosh, if any Gen Z people are listening to us right now, they're going to be like, these people, what? Did they live in the dark ages? Hey, listen, I remember the time before cell phones completely. So, you know. Yeah, I mean, but you know where I'm going with this. That was a huge leap in terms of efficiency and ease. And so I couldn't believe we were at the center of this as well.
And then, and I don't say this in a self-promotional way at all, it's really hard to do it twice. It's really hard to do it twice. And so many people over the years have been like, God, she's just lucky. She wore a lot of yellow. She's blonde. You know, they assumed it was all these things that made it happen.
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Chapter 6: What are the generational differences in dating app usage?
Of course. So I'm certainly not saying that we don't care about retention and we don't care about engagement. My point is, if you look at a social network, TikTok, for example, people are spending like 10 hours a day on TikTok.
If you were spending 10 hours a day on Bumble, we would be doing our job the wrong way because the goal is to get you to a match, to get you to conversation, to get you on a date. So what I'm getting at is retention does very much matter for us. Are people coming? Are they swiping? Are they getting into good, healthy conversations? the more quality member base we have.
And when I say quality, I don't mean elite standards. I don't mean beauty. I don't mean, you know, there's some of these apps out there that have been like, if you don't have a job and you don't make this much money a year, you can't be here. All I'm saying is,
show up, fill out your profile, have the maximum amount of photos, put your ID verification in so we know that you are actually who you say you are, and come and engage in a quality way. So if you can imagine a hypothetical world where 100% of our member base was that, you want to talk about growth, it goes up and to the right if that is achieved.
I mean, you're quite bullish on AI. I've heard you talk about it. How are you imagining AI functioning in this next iteration of the app?
Okay, so for example, let's just talk about AI through the lens of safety for a second. Let's say we could train AI on thousands of what we perceive as great profiles. And the AI can get so sophisticated understanding, wow, this person has a thoughtful bio. This person does have 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 AI 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. So the goal for Bumble over the next few years is to become the world's smartest matchmaker.
So that you can get on there and you can be match made with wonderful people. And this is beyond love. You know, we have a friend product with a very broad member base. And it's really beautiful. Most of our success stories we're hearing now are actually of all the friend dates going on. I don't know if you've ever met anyone that uses the friend finding product. I've been on it.
And yeah, it's it's yeah. I mean, it's interesting. A lot of people are finding roommates, you know, navigating life stages with that. So for me, I don't say, oh, like, what is the future of a dating app necessarily? What is the future of connecting people through technology to really meet people that they can love, whether that's a friend they love, whether that's a romantic partner they love?
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Chapter 7: What issues does Whitney acknowledge about Bumble's marketing?
What about opposites attract? What about... Finding people that you would never think you had anything in common with, but it works.
I mean, so this is this is you're now touching on the other side of the coin 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. I don't know why, I just did.
So 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. I'm a firm believer of this. You can be completely opposite. 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. These are personalities.
I personally, and maybe you can argue this, I personally have never met a couple that stayed the course when their values didn't align. And you can argue with me on that, but I personally have never seen it work.
Can AI read values, though?
If we ask you to input them. So what are the inputs for values? What are you thinking of asking? Beautiful quizzes that we would work with very, very experienced therapists and relationship experts that we're currently working on as we speak. And if you go and speak to a couples therapist, they will tell you the 10 books that that they have used with thousands of couples throughout their career.
They will tell you the most important questions that they've asked the couples they've worked with over the years that have had the most impact. Why would we wait for a couple to have to end up in therapy?
Why wouldn't we go and take all of those learnings of what truly drives compatibility and love and health of relationships and help you get to know yourself first so that we can help you better find what you're looking for? And so this is really just leveraging technology to make love more human.
Whitney Wolford, thank you so much. And we're going to talk again. Thank you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. After the break, I call Whitney back and we talk about how broader political and cultural shifts are playing out in Silicon Valley.
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Chapter 8: How did Whitney feel about the challenges faced by women CEOs?
Hi.
Good to see you again. How are you doing?
I'm good. I know I'm interrupting vacation time.
Oh, no. No worries. I just sent my little boys out the door on an adventure, so we are good. You're not going to be interrupted by two little whatever costumes they're wearing today.
So thanks so much for taking the time again. In our last conversation, you mentioned that many female leaders in tech who were your contemporaries have left or been pushed out. And that is true. And I am wondering, why do you think things seem to have moved backwards?
Oh, goodness. I mean, listen, I think it's been hard for women. It has been. I mean, I've talked to so many of them and they face a lot of challenges.
Venture capital firms are giving less money to female entrepreneurs than a decade ago.
It's really hard, Lulu. It's moved back. It's really hard. I'll tell you another thing that I have observed. I've seen this with so many young women I've spoken to. So 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. Like 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. They're like, oh, no, it's an idea. Yeah. Like, how did you get $13 million? So I am shocked by just how little we have moved forward.
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