Dating Apps Are Broken. Bumble's CEO on What Comes Next. | Whitney Wolfe Herd | The Interview

Thanks for having me.

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, it 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 so 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.

The 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 'she must have been kicked out.' I mean there was so much fodder around why I was leaving and it hurt my feelings.

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 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 were, we're actively discussing things, but I'm not running the show. And I had a phone call with my prior CEO who I still think the world of.

Yes. And she's an amazing woman. We're on very, very good terms. I think the world wants people, particularly when it's a woman-to-woman situation, 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. And I think she had burned herself out. And I felt so deeply for her because I felt like I was looking in a mirror. I felt like I was looking at myself a year prior. I could tell that she was exhausted and that she herself had made some of the same mistakes I had made, which was working that extra hour, putting in that extra trip. So, you can imagine what was going through my mind. Am I going back? Who's going to run this company? And ultimately, I felt like even if it's not what I necessarily would have signed up for willingly, I felt like it was happening for me. I did feel like, oh, this is happening for a reason. Bumble needs me back. It's an extension of me to some degree, and watching it fall from its peak has been very hard. And I did feel, this is a bit of a crazy story. I had this strange epiphany a week before she quit where it's like, 'Oh my god, my life's work was to help people get closer to love.' And I literally, because I love Oprah and everything she talks about, I had been doing her exercise of, you know, don't tell the universe what you want, tell the universe to use you, what it needs from you. And so I've been like, just use me for love, just use me for love and light. And she left a few days later. And so I was like, I've got to go back in. And I kind of just raised my hand to the board and said, 'Listen, I'd like to put my hat back in the ring.' The board could have chosen not to put me back in. The board did their diligence. They convened and they called me and said, 'We'd like to have you back if you'll do it.'

So, I didn't think about the word feminist or feminism back then. You have to remember I did not come out of a liberal arts college somewhere in the northeast where it was super progressive. I was at SMU in Dallas, Texas for college. I then ended up in a would-not-say extremely feminist tech environment. I was 22 and then 23 and then 24 years old in a time that was before Me Too, before Time's Up. I call it the pre-pink Target era. Do you know what I'm talking about? Where this was before Target started selling all the girl power T-shirts. Feminism had not gone mainstream. I didn't wake up and see some marketing 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. I felt like women had to wait for men to choose them. You couldn't text a guy first in college. You were considered crazy, desperate. So, this was just my natural environment. It's not like I was sitting around saying, 'Oh, how do I come up with a new angle at Tinder?' as some revenge plot. That's not what happened. What happened was I just built a solution to the problems myself and my friends had. And then of course media and everybody else said, 'Oh, it's feminist and it's this and it's girl power.' And I kind of was like, 'Well, yeah. I mean, look at the definition. I guess you could technically call it feminist if you wanted to because it's about trying to level the playing field.'

It's so funny. I don't know how to properly answer this because for me I do remember vividly being at Tinder and having Sophia's book, Girl Boss, about Sophia Amoruso who wrote the book Girl Boss. And I do remember feeling inspired, like, oh wow, look what she's done. And I had never seen any representation of a woman building something before. I just had never seen it. And now of course you had the greats at the time which were Sheryl Sandberg, but again she was a COO, it wasn't a woman that had founded the business. I love Sheryl. I think she's amazing. And so at the time, I just thought the girl boss narrative was fine. And then somewhere along the lines, somewhere along the years, 2016, 2017, 2018, this girl boss arc just turned dark. I don't really know what happened. See, again, I was in such a tunnel building this company. However, I watched a lot of my peers fall a lot. My era, which sounds like we're talking about something 600 years ago — a few years back, you're in your early 30s — I'm 35 to be clear. So, this was like 2016 through, call it 2019. That era was all about the young woman who was building something 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 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 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 I was like, I can't do this anymore. I have to get out of here. Like I need to leave this world behind. So, 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.

Well, a woman sending a message on an app is not going to save the world. It's not. Let's just be honest. It was a small step to try and recalibrate thousands of years of power dynamics in relationships. But yeah, I mean maybe we've oversold ourselves along the way in certain ways and I'm okay to say that. We are a part of the problem in this bigger cultural landscape of online love. We're not perfect.

Nobody wanted to associate with me. Nobody 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. I kind of had to be scrappy and take whoever was willing to see past it. The tech, you know what it was? A lot of people outside of the tech world didn't know about this. I didn't care. I mean, it's like the world goes on. When it comes to that tech space, oh, you just don't talk to Whitney Wolf. Why would you ever talk to her?

I mean, horrible. Like, 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, 'Oh, Whitney's a liar. Of course, she knew all these things and she's covering up for this guy.' And the frank truth is I was in Austin running Bumble from Austin very much as its standalone business. It's not like I was sitting in the 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. And you know, it was really important to Andrey that I be honest about my personal interaction 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 remember, this is an important note for listeners. I believe those allegations were stemming from several years prior. They were not active. They were talking about workplace culture from kind of the earlier Badoo era if I remember correctly. 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 all the men together. I don't think you close your eyes and think back on a progressive office space.

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?

Yeah, 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 a hundred 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.' They assumed it was all these things that made it happen. But I'm not entirely sure people realized just how hard it is to get critical mass on an app twice. I mean, there are thousands and thousands of dating apps that hit the app store and none of them work. None of them scale. I mean, what, there's two or three or four that have ever scaled to our degree of scale.

My opinion is that I ran this company for the first several years as a quality-over-quantity approach. There were opportunities throughout my career at Bumble where huge-scaled operations offered us — a telephone provider came to us early on in Bumble. They said, 'We love your brand. We actually want to put your app pre-programmed 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.' And I said, 'Thank you so much, but no thank you.' And 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, that they want to see. And if you flood the system just endlessly with — you're not going to go walk down the street of New York City and want to meet every single person you pass. That is the truth. So 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, the more the merrier, the more people here, the more money, the better. Let me put this simply. The world started focusing, when I say the world I mean even our team started focusing on outputs. What are outputs? Outputs are revenue growth. Outputs are payers. Outputs are 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? And that question stopped being asked for too long. We were chasing growth. And so when you chase growth, you get it, but then you lose it.

Okay. It's very different than Bumble.

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. If you look at the way these products were designed with the swipe function, yes, but it's not even just swipe. It's paradox of choice. It's the math. It's the volume. It's the scale. Our brains were not engineered to behave like this. I mean, not that we were engineered, maybe. Who knows? But you get where I'm going with this. We were not born to have this. And this is why social media is changing the brains of children as well. This is not natural to humans. And so to go through 100 people and just — so again, I'm being very vulnerable and very accountable here by telling you these things and I'm bringing you into the sausage-making of how we're doing things differently. Gen Z doesn't like dating apps in my opinion because they get on the app, they essentially have to judge people and reject people in order to get to a match. You're saying no. You're looking at someone and determining if they're a yes or a no. So, you are judging someone. That means you're being judged on the back end. None of those things feel good. I think that Gen Z is fatigued and burnt out on feeling bad. And I think they do prioritize mental health more so than maybe the first round of Bumble members. And so the way the app is functioning for them right now is not going to work.

100 is a private number. Okay, I would love to tell you, but unfortunately that's not something as a public company we don't disclose it.

No. That's why I have to reimagine it.