When it comes to my own company, I know what the hell I'm talking about. I mean, for two or three years, I knew the right answer and people would talk me into the wrong answer. I'm just a young girl, what do I know? But I always knew.
I'm back. Wouldn't you have heard? Welcome to the burnouts. Y'all are the best.
Thanks for having me. Do you remember how we all met?
How did we meet? I think your team DM'd us and then we met.
You met her at a Stanford event. I met you at Stanford, and then you had told me about what you guys were starting, and then we all started chatting. We were on a group chat.
That's when you told us we should have a FIA scale, which took us like a year to figure out. Thank God we're there now, but we should have listened to you very, very early on.
We first met Whitney when we were at Stanford, and Whitney has been instrumental in us creating the company, advising us as we learned how to raise capital, how to build a product, how to hire people, and has honestly been there for us just from the beginning.
So, I'm twenty-two. Sophia's what, twenty-three. You started Bumble at twenty-four.
I was just turning twenty-five.
How did you decide to take that leap? Was there ever a moment where you were like, I have no idea what the hell I'm doing?
I still don't know what I'm doing, but that's what being an entrepreneur is. I think, has any entrepreneur known what they were doing? No, truly. But that's what makes somebody a founder — is you go into the unknown with conviction and belief in what you're trying to do, and you figure it out along the way. That's exactly what being an entrepreneur is.
And that's why it doesn't work for everybody, because so many people in my opinion need to know the manual. I'm much more of the type of person that says, 'Give me a compass. Let me pick my direction and I'll navigate it. I'll follow my instincts and I will listen — I will listen to whoever I'm trying to serve as the member base, and then I will be guided.' And I just think so many people need A-to-Z instructions, and that's not how founders roll.
Was there anything when you were first in college or like early entrepreneurial experience that helped define you? We were reading online that you sold bamboo tote bags to benefit BP oil.
Yeah, y'all, I was always hustling something.
Really? Wait, tell us more.
I don't know, I was just — my sister used to tease me. My apartment was above an Ann Taylor. Do you all know what an Ann Taylor is? It's like business lady suits. And my sister, I would always be taking calls, and we were in college, and she wanted to go, I don't know, shopping or to the bar or whatever — we're like young college women — and she'd be like, 'Do we need to go to Ann Taylor and get you a business suit?' And I was like, 'I'm busy. I'm running things.' And so it was just this running joke that I always was doing business lady things. I've just always been inclined to want to build and create something.
I think something we really struggled with was our first hires were not super technical. You're not a technical founder either. How did you figure out who to hire at first? Did you have that thinking that you needed to hire older people? Did you hire people similar to your age? How did you find your first team?
Okay, so this is controversial, but basically things started to fall apart when I hired all the smart older people. That was when the wheels started falling off during that chapter. It's because they're far away from the customer. Now, there are specialized people that you do need — you certainly don't want to hire someone in their first year of finance experience to run your finance org. But where I think founders get things wrong is they assume that the chaos means they need to hire some quote-unquote adult in a suit to figure it out.
But really the people you need to report to or look to are your members, and listen to them. So I think the further you get away from your core audience with these people that candidly don't understand the vision or understand what problem you're solving — that's where companies lose their way. So there have been times in my career where a leadership team under me looked at the company and saw it as a business problem to solve for. They're like, 'Okay, how do I take the revenue and multiply the revenue?' But they would ignore the members. I said, 'The members are the revenue.'
Do you think you'll end up hiring fewer people in the future because of AI? Do you feel like we're there yet or we'll get there?
We're getting there. I mean, you just said it yourself — none of us are going to be able to get on a computer and code an app by ourselves. But you know what you can do right now? I've already done it completely with zero technical skills. You can build an app overnight. Where it becomes complex is integrating it into existing data sets and plugging it into trust and safety teams that are pre-existing.
So it's not that you can't build new things quick, which is why y'all are in a very opportunistic moment. I'm sitting on so much legacy infrastructure and legacy data, legacy platforms. It's very, very hard to take legacy systems and then just say we're going straight AI. Now, I can start to slowly rebuild off of modern infrastructure that is largely powered with and by AI, but y'all can really launch yourselves this way.
So, for example, we purchased a company called Geneva. It's a great tech business. It's going to be the kind of go-forward infrastructure support for BFF. So if you look at Geneva, they are using all of the latest and greatest tooling, largely AI-oriented as well. And the way this system works, the way it moves — it's just unbelievable. So I think this legacy framework of old tech is gone. You don't need seven thousand tech people. There are these amazing companies that are doing like half a billion of revenue and they have thirty team members. So my advice is less is more — the fewer the better.
I feel like this new trope is going founder mode, or being like, 'I'm going to take over and make a decisive decision when it comes to the company.' Have you had moments like that where you've been like, 'Okay, people are telling me one thing but I know in my gut this is the right decision'?
Oh yeah. I mean, for two or three years I knew the right answer and people would talk me into the wrong answer. And I did it because they would kind of do this thing where you're like, 'Oh, you're thirty-two, you're not a coder, you've never been to Harvard' — all of this stuff. And I kind of took it — they depleted my confidence for a long time. And there was just a lot of this like, 'I'm just a young girl, what do I know?' But I always knew — like, I do know.
You were right about FIA two years ago. Instincts. I mean, I'm not right about everything — I'm wrong about a lot of things. But when it comes to my own company — I love it because they need you, I know how I'm talking about. I love it so much. I'm back and now everyone has to kind of listen to me because I was kind of right.
So I'm huge on brand marketing, as you guys know. I'm a big believer in surprise and delight your members. So for years I would get on the phone in random towns and be googling florists in Nebraska because some woman would have had a bad experience on Bumble and she was in Nebraska, and I got her address and I'm like, 'Flower shops in Nebraska,' and I'm sending flowers. And then the accountant starts looking at how much we've spent on flowers, and then some operational person's like, 'You can't be sending gifts to members because what's the ROI? Where's the ROI?'
But what they failed to realize — I said, 'This is our growth. Treating our members with care, kindness, and unreasonable thoughtfulness — this is our growth. This is exactly why we are Bumble.' Because time and time again, we have reached out. We've apologized when things have gone wrong. We've celebrated the things that have gone right. We have shown up in ways that make people's day. And then they go to dinner and they tell their friends. And then their friends tell somebody else, and on it goes.
And so here I was listening to some data-oriented assumption that there's no ROI, when in reality that was exactly the magic. And so now it's like, okay, maybe that wasn't so wrong after all.
Two questions. Have you ever done flowers for someone going through a breakup that they met the guy on Bumble? And have you ever done flowers for a Bumble wedding?
Oh my God, yeah, a million times. I love that. Tons of Bumble breakups that I will write letters. I've sent so many self-help books that helped me in breakups. Lots of flowers. And then Bumble weddings — oh yeah, we go wild on Bumble weddings. We've cleared registries. We've sent Bumble wedding cakes. We've done all sorts of stuff. It's like the 'do things that don't scale' advice.
I also know you had told us that when you were really early on in your career, you would do things like send people in crazy t-shirts into college campuses. What were some of the early easy hacky marketing tricks that you used?
We bought all these ridiculous bee Halloween costumes, these huge inflatable bee looks, and we would just have people walk down the street and hand out flowers and compliments to people in a full bee outfit — a huge inflatable bee outfit. We had people handing out all sorts of little goodies in ridiculous beekeeper/bee vibe looks. We would order hundreds of yellow balloons and just take over libraries, having people running through with balloons. We did so much random stuff. I'd stand on the top of my car and hang up banners on trees and just leave them there for like a week — college campuses. Yes. This is how we grew. And it was just scrappy. It was surprise and delight. None of it was traditional. I never did the old-school ROI-driven marketing. That's not how you capture people's attention.
How do you capture people's attention now?
Well, now it's all about how do I re-engineer this? And the number one thing I think we should be doing — what I would recommend you all do too — is just talk to your members. Just talk to the people that want to use your product and need your product, and take them for what they have to say. Don't run away from criticism. Lean into it. When you screw up or you send them a product that isn't high quality or something goes wrong, don't ignore them. You talk to them, you help them, you champion them. And I just think your members are your biggest marketing vehicle, and they matter. They matter so much.
How would you think about FIA marketing stuff? We've tried some influencer marketing, some paid ads. How do you think about what actually converts and what should we do differently?
Community. Do really thoughtful gatherings where you bring together all of the people that you perceive as the ideal FIA customer, bring them together and give them something special — give them an interesting experience. Do something out of the box. I think that brand Revolve did a good job by really focusing on bringing people together and creating these moments. So I think you should come up with: what would the FIA woman want to do? Where does she want to go thrifting? Where does she want to eat? What's her favorite cocktail? What's her favorite coffee? And just bring people together. Make it community-oriented.
Something I want to return to is also just the concept of making hard decisions. I know that Bumble was really a pioneer in this idea of women making the first move. How did you land on that concept, and how have you thought about that over the last few years?
I mean, it just felt really simple to me at the time. I felt like because I'd been at Tinder, I had seen how my girlfriends felt using the apps — this is not a good experience. I'm getting harassed, I'm getting creepy behavior. And then I also looked at the parallels to dating before the dating apps, and I realized, oh wow, women have been getting spammed pre-internet. You go to a bar, you get spammed. You walk down the street, someone says something spammy — the equivalent of what spam would be online or harassment. I was like, man, this is so crazy.
There's never been a barrier to enter, but there's also never been an excuse to go after what you want. I don't know if you've ever felt this way, but I remember having a crush on a guy and I texted him, and I told my girlfriends, 'Oh, I just texted so-and-so.' And they're like, 'You what? Oh my God, he's going to think you're a psycho. He's going to think you're desperate. Don't ever text again.' I was like, 'Why?' And I couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to do that. And then they're like, 'Well, now the ball's in his court. Now you've lost all your power.' And I was like, what are you talking about? But this was the mindset.
So I was like, man, this is so crazy. So all of these things converged, and the internet was treating women so poorly. It's like, there's something really broken here. There's something so wrong. We have to do something kinder, better, softer. So I was like, women have to make the first move every single time. We're just going to say this is the new normal. And that was the beginning. And candidly, we've outgrown it, right? Because society has shifted, and what a woman means to different people has changed so dramatically. And you have to honor that. As all things go, society evolves and shifts, and your product has to evolve with it or even faster to be relevant.
And so now I think what we're really focused on is how do we preserve the spirit of what that did. But when you think about a woman sending a text first — that was really just a piece of the ethos, right? It was a mechanism to promote women being in control of their lives and taking charge, but it's not the only way. And so I think it's like, how do we bring that to life in other ways?
I want to talk about your future vision for Bumble and what you're thinking as you're going back. You've talked a lot about it being more than a dating app and your future vision for that, if you're comfortable speaking about that. I think that'd be really cool.
Yeah, totally. Listen, I think the thing that is lacking the most right now — and it's going to sound cheesy, but it's not — is everyone just wants love. Whether it's with friends, love of things you like to go and do, love in your job, love in your romantic life. And love is lost right now. Everything is so angry, so divided, so mean, so snarky. Where's the love? Let's bring the energy back.
And I'm super bullish and excited about Bumble for Friends. The amount of women that I know that tell me, 'I had no friends in this city. When I got a new job, I met all my friends through BFF.' My sweet nanny — she made all of her friends through BFF. She's from South Africa, and these women that she's met while she's been working with my family — she didn't know anyone. I relocated her, and she got on BFF and she's like, 'Oh, I have a great group of girlfriends now.' So the power of finding your people — it's transformational.
And never have I ever heard of a product or technology where it can actually bring you closer to your people. I mean, dating apps — we know it, we get it, ten years plus. But I think the future of Bumble is really meeting as friends first. And I also think it's the next iteration of dating. So I fundamentally believe that as we scale and ramp up Bumble for Friends, what people are going to be shocked to realize is it's going to bring in the real spirit of how people have fallen in love originally — they meet in groups of friends. They come together naturally and they kind of say, 'Oh, we were friends first.'
And so I think the power of friendship first — it can transcend just friendship. It can move into businesses. Look at this — you were friends first, now you're business partners. It's the foundation. And so I really believe the future of friendship, especially for your age group — you're so isolated. Not the two of you, but your demographic. You've gone through this social media-first life. It's deeply isolating.
How will you integrate in-person events too? Because I think a lot of that connecting over Instagram — I have so many girls I DM on Instagram because I'm like, 'Hey, I want to get your feedback on this.' I'm not afraid of a cold outreach. But the in-person element of your girlfriends getting together — how do you incorporate that through Bumble?
What we're doing is making sure that everybody is ID verified or verified in another capacity so that you know whoever's in this group or whoever is forming together is actually who they say they are, because safety is paramount. It's the most important thing to us — making sure that people can trust us, feel that they're meeting authentic, real, trusted people. And so groups is really what it's all about. Forming groups through different interests — whether that's like, 'I need someone to go to yoga with tonight,' or 'I want to go grab a cocktail.' I'm now sober, so I want to go find the best mocktail in the city, or ice cream. Whatever it is people are dealing with in their life — how do you navigate these different touch points of your life together in community?
And that's not an online chat forum. Our goal is not to keep you on the internet all day. It is to use the power of technology to matchmake you even for friendship — to be the most thoughtful, strategic matchmaker — to then get you offline to go and do great things, like what the two of you are doing in the world.
And what role does technology play in that? I'm not going to lie — I write all of my emails and all my texts now with ChatGPT. I write something...
