I think we are at one of the more interesting moments to lean into love in all formats. And I think I went on this quest of self-love for a year, Adam. And what I realized was, oh my god, I've walked away from the most powerful vehicle I have, which is Bumble, to actually scale and facilitate love for human beings around the world. I can't let it die. So that's why I'm back because Bumble needs to outlive me.
You did some rethinking recently. You stepped down from Bumble and now you're back as CEO. So I want to hear the backstory. Why'd you leave? Why'd you return?
Well, I, you know, I had been in this building founder mode era since I was 22 years old. And I think it just became a part of who I was. And I had never really taken a break ever. And if you think about the decade that we all lived through, you know, I went from Tinder to a lawsuit to starting Bumble to building Bumble to selling Bumble, then taking Bumble public, pandemics in the middle, two babies in the middle, all the things life throws at you. And I was super burnt out. I was exhausted. And I think, you know, I woke up one morning and just didn't really feel alive anymore inside and just felt like I had lost my joy. And I love Bumble. I've always loved Bumble, but I needed to find who I was outside of Bumble. So, I took a breather. And I actually had no intention of going back, Adam. But I realized, you know, with all the twists and the turns, Bumble and I, you know, we weren't done. So, I'm back with renewed purpose and perspective.
How are you different as a leader now?
I would say the biggest difference is their space. I don't think Bumble is the end of the world anymore. So, when I was leading the company beforehand, all I had in my mind, everything that existed on planet Earth was Bumble. It was my whole life. It was my bubble. And when I stepped away for a year, I realized that Bumble is just one component of my life. I was stuck in the same gear for a decade. And I came back and now I know how to shift gears. So even in a day, we could have tough things going on. And I know how to shift out of that gear into the next gear, compartmentalize, have focus, have clarity, have control over my thoughts. And I didn't have that before.
It sounds like along with compartmentalizing you also de-identified a little bit with Bumble. I'm thinking about organizational identification and when we study it in organizational psychology we often use an overlapping circles measure where we say okay one circle is your identity as a person. The other circle is the organization's identity. Who are they and what do they stand for? And then you know are the circles totally separate? Do they partially overlap? Like Bumble's circle and your circle were one and the same and now they're a little bit more separate and they overlap only partially. Is that accurate?
Yeah. Well, first of all, I think that's a brilliant framework and the short answer is for a decade the circles were on top of each other. I don't even know where one began and the other one ended. They were completely intertwined. And it was suffocating probably to team members as well because if that was my whole circle then it was expected to be their whole circle. And now I would say that the circles completely separated for about a year, right? It was a forced separation where I almost went to the extreme where I stopped wearing the Bumble hats and I kind of took all the yellow out of my closet and really went on this like breakup with Bumble, if that makes sense, to force an identity reset and to really force myself to carve out my own circle. And now with me returning after a little over a year away, it was like I brought that circle together to create harmony and like this nice overlap, but they don't suffocate each other anymore and they don't blend in an unhealthy way anymore. And I think that I really am doing my best to maintain those boundaries because Adam, I don't know if you've seen this, but I don't think the circles are cemented. I think they can move. And I think the more you practice keeping those circles in the place that feels healthy and good for you, the better. But if you lose sight of it, they can start to kind of overlap too much or pull apart too much. So, I like to check in with myself. Even yesterday, I said to my husband, I said, "I think I'm feeling a little bit burnt out." And I just left my phone at home for 2 or 3 hours. I took a walk. I went with the kids and I felt better afterwards. So now it's like really making sure those circles stay in a healthy position.
I think that most of the investors and board members I know they want CEOs and founders who have no space between the circles. They want you to live and breathe and sleep your mission and your company and your values. So tell me more about suffocation and what was so problematic about that.
I have come back a much better CEO. I actually don't think it's healthy when people can't see outside of themselves or outside of their organization. I actually think it's where you start to lose sight. It's almost like you live in a vortex in a bubble and you can't see things from the outside. The biggest gift I was given with that year plus away was I was able to see Bumble from a different altitude, from a different lens. When you're always looking at something from the inside, from the center, from the nucleus, your perspective is inherently different than being able to kind of zoom out and take a pause and step out and look at it from a different corner of the room. I do think a lot of founders, you know, a lot of them, I know a lot of them, some of them are my best friends, it's almost such an insular view that it's impossible to be the customer. It's impossible to be the competitor. It's impossible to be the naysayer. You cannot wear those shoes if you are unwilling to step out of this like center stage role. And candidly, I'll be frank with you. I do believe there are seasons and starting a company. I'm not entirely sure you can get a company off the ground without that crazy obsession. I don't think Bumble would be where it was today had I not had those circles so on top of each other. But I think at a certain point you have to outgrow it and you have to evolve and you have to allow growth to take place or you stifle your opportunity. That's my fundamental belief.
So, it sounds like you're saying that whatever you might lose in terms of the sheer time and energy devoted to the company, that cost is outweighed by the benefit of having more perspective.
Yes, I think perspective is the most underrated asset for a CEO or for a founder.
You definitely seem less stressed now.
Yeah, I'm less stressed now. Thank god.
That's a good thing. The other thing though that I'm wondering about is is there such a thing as too much perspective?
I mean there's a version of this, you know, of separating the circles that basically leads to eh Bumble's just a company. Like companies, you know, they get founded and they grow and they die. And at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.
I actually feel very opposite to that. I see Bumble as a catalyst to the thing I care most about in the world. So, I see Bumble as more than a company. I see Bumble as a vehicle to deliver love to people's lives. And if I thought of it as just a mere company, I probably wouldn't be back as CEO. Candidly, Adam, I would have gone and done something else. I cannot find something on planet Earth that feels more important to me than helping bring the world closer to love. Especially in this moment of division, of loneliness, of people falling in love with their chat bots. I think we are at one of the more interesting moments to lean into love in all formats. And I think I went on this quest of self-love for a year, Adam. And what I realized was, oh my god, I've walked away from the most powerful vehicle I have, which is Bumble, to actually scale and facilitate love for human beings around the world. I can't let it die. So that's why I'm back because Bumble needs to outlive me.
Listening to you describe your passion for the mission, I'm realizing what I was hearing was you saying an app is not that important, but Bumble is much bigger than an app. Bumble is so much bigger than just an app and I actually think apps are going to be irrelevant in a couple of years.
So, you know, the high-level goal with Bumble as a company beyond it being an app is to really build the world's smartest, most emotionally intelligent matchmaker. But that starts with matching you with yourself. So, how do we actually use Bumble to help you get to know yourself, get to understand yourself so that you know when you're actually ready or not ready for a relationship with others? How can we use it as a vehicle to both find your person with Bumble, which is dating, and then find your people with Bumble BFF, which is Bumble for Friends. So, I see this living both online and offline. I see this being integrated into whatever future tech we're all living with, whether that's some device we're not even familiar with yet, or if it's a humanoid in your home. I mean, Bumble will outlive the iPhone is my hope.
Wow. A future with no apps. This is such an interesting and enticing vision. One of the things I have to react to that you said a minute ago is that you wanted to scale love. And maybe I'm just overreacting to Silicon Valley speak, but I'm like, you can't scale love. Like the whole point of love is that it's not scalable. Does that tension bother you at all?
Well, I think maybe we're thinking about scale in different ways because scaling love I don't mean in a social network capacity like more members, more downloads, more this, more that. I'm not doing the Silicon Valley jargon when I say that. I actually mean how do we help people like themselves again? How do we help people out of this rut of loneliness? I think we're in a self-hatred epidemic. I actually think we're walking around with people who have been trained to hate themselves through social media, through candidly the dating apps, right? I think we've had a role in the disconnection and the lack of real connectivity, right? I don't mean digitally. I mean real eye contact, real connectivity. And so I don't think Bumble's perfect right now. I don't like a lot of current Bumble and that's what the team is actively rebuilding as we speak. But from where we started 11 years ago, there's no way to argue against the impact it's had in the world. I mean, I can't go to a grocery store without meeting Bumble couples. I literally don't go outside my house without meeting someone who met on Bumble. So, it's quite magical. Or whether that was another dating app. I think, you know, one to two to four people meet online now. And so, when I say let's scale love, I mean, let's use the power of technology and these millions of profiles that we have to bring love back online.
Glad to hear that. I think, you know, at some level this is much easier for Bumble BFF than it is for dating because with friends, physical attraction is mostly off the table. With couples, I don't need to tell you how much more difficult it is to design to overcome that problem. And you made major headlines not too long ago with some provocative comments about how our own AI concierges are basically going to date each other to try to screen. Are you a major mismatch? Do you have deal breakers? Do you really think this is going to happen?
Okay, so this is hilarious. I was speaking to a couple like top people in AI recently and they said, "You know what you should do? You should build dating agents for everyone." And then the agents talk to other agents and they essentially go through thousands of agents and they declare who is right for you and who is not. And I got basically laughed off the stage. But it's not wrong because if you look at the way AI agents are being used in so many industries, this is already happening. People have already built this capability in other functions. And candidly, Adam, if you have the data that I have, some of the biggest complaints that people have with dating apps is dead-end matches. Like, people end up on these dates and they're like, "Ugh, that person is wrong for me." Like, why did I waste my time and energy going out and meeting someone who I had nothing really in common with? You don't have to replace the humanity in love. You can actually just save people time, effort, stress, rejection, judgment by leveraging technology to actually procure better compatibility, right? And so, is this tomorrow? No. Is this a reality in the future? Certainly. And if I don't do it, somebody else will. I've already been pitched three or four companies that are doing precisely this in the last few months. So, it's not that obscure when you think about it. And frankly, everyone laughed at us too in 2012 with Tinder and laughed at me with Bumble in 2014, like, "Oh, you're going to meet a stranger on an app? Oh, that's so crazy. Why would anyone do that?" Well, you blink 10 years later, everyone's gotten married off one of these apps. So, you know, everything seems crazy until it doesn't.
What does this look like, though? Is there essentially going to be an AI agent that's swiping left on people?
Here's what it actually could look like. And by the way, it's not so dissimilar from current day algorithms, right? Machine learning is essentially looking at signals and matching you accordingly, right? So, it's all about predictability and preferences and personalization. It's not supposed to be so crazy and out there and sci-fi. It's really just about better predictability because I think if you were to go around and chat with a bunch of singles that are using Bumble or various other apps, it's kind of needle in a haystack. You're kind of just playing a guessing game until something works out. And we don't want you to do that. We want this to be really relevant to you and productive. And back to your point about Bumble for Friends. A lot of relationships start as friends first. And the reason why people become friends is because they have shared values and they have shared interests and they have shared personality quirks or they're attracted to each other's minds and spirit and the way they go out in the world. And so when we reimagine this and relaunch this, this is actually our moonshot is like friends first. And if it leads to love, spectacular. But friendship is the foundation. And I do believe that's the future of love.
So that means though that people are going to have to be more selective about their friends if they're finding friends in the hopes of finding love. Right.
Well, I don't think it's so much like that because I also think there's a lot of serendipity and spontaneity involved here. So, we hear countless stories of young women or people going out and meeting someone on Bumble for Friends and then that friend introduced them to their friend group and they fell in love with someone in that group. Had it never been for that connection on Bumble for Friends, they would have never met that person. So, it doesn't have to be this direct like we matched on Bumble and we fell in love because we chatted on Bumble. And so I think it really is that ripple effect of just taking the first step and making that first move and just building a connection with someone.
That speaks to something I've been wondering about a lot lately, which is do we put too much emphasis on the matchmaking part and too little emphasis on the how do we actually interact?
Well, I also think meeting people in groups is a lot easier than meeting people one-on-one. So, you know, it's not this awkward, hey, are you Adam from your profile? and like sitting down at a coffee shop randomly. It's much more about showing up to that Bumble safe event or that Bumble pickleball thing or whatever it might be and just hanging out in community and in groups. Humans are designed to be in groups. Like we love to be in groups. It's actually quite awkward to be one-on-one in the beginning. And so I think this group format is incredibly interesting.
That's fascinating. It also I think to your earlier point, it has the potential to kill two birds with one stone in terms of helping people overcome a little bit of loneliness. And that it's a lot more efficient, too, thinking about all the one-on-one dates you could do versus showing up to meet a group of people and you know, okay, like I have somebody I'm interested in talking to or maybe I don't, but I didn't have to meet all of them separately.
That's exactly right. And you know what's interesting too? If you meet in a small group, the chances, it's just math. The chances of hitting it off with someone goes up, right?
