Bumble Founder: World’s Youngest Female Self-Made Billionaire: Whitney Wolfe Herd

It was a lot of these tiny hacking concepts that made no sense. No one had ever done these things before, but if you understand what moves and motivates people, then you have this opportunity to connect with them. And so that's been a superpower of ours over the years.

It's been pretty dark. It's been pretty heavy.

It was soul crushing. I was being described in all sorts of ways. I had reporters trying to go through my window and it was really violating. There's a whole persona that's been created about me out there in the world. How am I ever going to escape this? I was 24 years old.

I don't know.

I think probably broken gender dynamics growing up. I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. I don't know if you know much about Salt Lake City, Utah. It's a very LDS, the formal religious term, or better known as Mormon place. And my dad is Jewish and my mother is Catholic. So I'm already a total anomaly in this place. And it's a very tough community to fit into when you don't look, act, behave like everybody else or have the exact same belief systems. And the Mormon faith and the LDS faith, not to generalize, but it's very much a community, or at least it was. I was born in 1989. So, growing up back in the '90s, it was very much a man's world where the man is the breadwinner, the man is out, mom is at home in an apron, and everyone follows rules, lots of rules, very strict rules in fact. And I think I always grew up with a conflicting set of values to my community, to this ecosystem I was placed in or was raised in rather. And then that started to come out in relationships. So my first real boyfriend that I ever had, it was quite toxic. And these were kind of the undertones of my entire life that would then set the stage for my entire career.

Yeah, it was a new experience for me. I was a young girl at the time and I think there was this set of behaviors I was expected to adhere to, to be on his rules, what he believed was right. And it was quite demoralizing, frankly. And I don't think at the time I fully recognized what was taking place until later in life, but it set the stage for me about unhealthy relationships. And I recognized just how unequal women were when it came to their romantic relationship. So if you were to fast forward, here I am running this business where women make the first move, which when I put that into the product in 2014 was scoffed at and eyes were rolled and people couldn't understand why we would do such a thing because women aren't supposed to talk first. So if you look at that moment of a business being born, there's so much more than just a eureka thought. It's really pent up years and years of confusion, passion, purpose brewing to essentially be born into this moment of Bumble.

I think there was two sides of that coin. There was the side that wanted to fit in, desperate to be a part of my community, desperate to be a part of what was around me and to fit in and to fit the mold because that's humans. Humans want to fit into their environments. They want to be accepted. No one wants to be the child sitting alone at the lunch table. This is what devastates humans, to be left out, right? So, there was a part of me that so desperately wanted validation and to fit. And then there was a part of me that said, 'This is wrong. This doesn't feel right. This feels against my soul. This doesn't feel like how things should be.' And I feel like that's been a theme of my life. There's been duality on this topic in every situation I've been in. And that's part of navigating it.

Yeah. I think for me at least, I have to live in a place of authenticity. And I've lived in chapters of my life that were not authentic. That I knew what I was participating in or what I was doing didn't feel authentic to what I really believed in or what I knew to be right. And genuinely, authenticity wins. That's my fundamental belief. And I think that when you follow and chase that authentic space, the world opens up for you. The world unlocks.

Of course. You have to leave the tribe.

Terrifying. It's almost unimaginable for people. And I've been there. I've felt that feeling before. And I think this is why so many people stay in whatever situation they're in. Stay in a marriage, stay in a business, stay in a church, stay in a team, stay in a you name it. This is what perpetuates the cycle of the quest to fit in versus just truly being who you really are. And so that age-old saying, 'Be yourself,' it's harder than it looks. It's really hard and it comes with a lot of risk and it's scary and it's dangerous and what if I fail and what if no one likes me and what if everyone judges me? These are real things but at the end of the day nothing could be worse than having a broken relationship with yourself, right? I personally think a broken relationship with yourself is more toxic than a pseudo phony good relationship with a hundred other people. But it's hard to give ourselves that love and compassion. We're hard on ourselves. The things we say to ourselves is something we would never say to another ever. I mean, think about that rhetoric, the internal self-talk. We would never say those things to other people, right? And the compliments we pay others, it's very hard to pay ourselves. So when you think about that narrative, how can we expect people to have the confidence and courage to be authentic to themselves if they're not even willing to accept themselves? So I think that's a big piece of it, right? And I've watched over the years women I grew up with in Salt Lake City just now in their 30s, they're coming out of their cage. They're quite literally coming alive and they're taking to TikTok and to social media and they're taking to all these platforms like a roaring lion saying, 'I'm alive and I've been hiding and I've been living by standards and I've been living by rules and I've been living by X, Y, and Z and it's not authentic.' So at some point it will burst open. The truth does prevail.

Well, the answer of what I really wanted to be was not what I would have said because I would have said something to fit in. Right? That's standard. So, I think the young women when I was in college all wanted to go work for a fashion brand or get a job at a bank or be successful and they wanted to get married and they wanted to find someone that they could marry, settle down with, have kids with eventually, maybe not next year, but that was part of the program, right? This dating game exists as college students. And this is where the undertones of Bumble started to really form because I remember being in college and being completely judged and made fun of by girlfriends of mine if I texted a guy first. I remember I went on a date which was so out of my character. I really, believe it or not, being so ingrained in the dating world, I think I've been on maybe three dates in my life. That sounds weird, but I went on a date and then I texted the guy afterwards. And they were like, 'Oh no, you have committed a sin. A sin. You should be ashamed of yourself.' It made me cry. I felt so embarrassed. I felt so ashamed. And I remember thinking, 'This is wrong. What is wrong with you? Why can we not text? Who wrote these rules? What are these rules? These rules are ridiculous.' So this desire to break the rules, change the rules, rewrite the rules was something I inherently felt deep down. But everybody's felt that, you felt that, everybody has felt that. It's just who chooses to go and actually act on it is the difference.

You know, it's a good question. And I have two little boys right now. And I think a lot of this is imposed on us as a society. I really do. I think the toys we buy our children and the clothes we put on our children and the shows we show our children, you have to really ask yourself, is this not truly forming what they're interested in and what they care about and what their ambitions are. I do believe that there may be something, and I see this in men too, to folks that genuinely want to have a family and have children and be part of that type of a life. And then folks that just genuinely don't. But I don't really see it as a gender thing. I really think that these are just a personal soul level thing. But I think society comes in and puts bows on it or puts trucks on it and says, 'Here's your path.' So, it's interesting now raising kids seeing if I really believe this nature versus nurture thing. And I think there's components to it, but I think it's definitely more imposed upon us by others around. This morning, I was watching my son read a book at breakfast. I don't know where he found the book. I think it was something he found at the restaurant. But I opened it and it was a picture of a pig family in a little house and you could see everything in all the different rooms. And daddy was upstairs in the bathroom combing his hair in a suit and the piggy mom was in the kitchen in a pink dress with an apron cooking eggs. And I was just thinking to myself, here is a almost three-year-old and these are the books they're reading and it says, 'Where's Daddy and where's Mommy?' So, we have to imagine that we do some of this to the kids around us.

I took a picture of it and raved about it. I raged about it at work for about 3 hours and we will not be reading the book again.

Yeah. So, I went to a college in Texas and I really wanted to go into marketing and I wanted to go into advertising and marketing, which is funny because now somehow I've ended up there a little bit. And I sat down for the test and completely failed it. I could not answer any of the questions. It was so confusing to me. It was all about, you know, return on investment and television views and it was super, not to be disrespectful, but super boring. I was like, this is probably not for me. But anyway, I did not get accepted. So I studied international studies and that was just this huge mix of big people problems, you know, globalization, anthropology, women's studies, gender studies, international relations. I mean, it was really fascinating and that was the best marketing degree I could have ever gotten because it's the study of people. Why do people do what they do? And if you look at the business I'm in, I'm quite literally immersed all day long into why do people date who they date? Why do they want what they want? How do they behave? Why do they get aggressive? What causes aggression? What causes online abuse? Where is this stemming from? And this stuff is really interesting. So, I'd say my education really did help me connect those dots.

So, I really wanted to be a travel photographer, like a photojournalist, and had no training in that obviously, but I was just obsessed with the idea. And it's actually funny at the Bumble office right now, we have this photo of this incredible woman that I met in Burma and she is holding a Bumble lighter and it's my never made it to Nat Geo moment. But that was my dream. I wanted to be a Nat Geo photographer. And so I went traveling through Southeast Asia. And took a lot of photos. And I remember on my travels thinking, gosh, there's such a disconnect for someone trying to explore a new country place. It's only TripAdvisor. And if you follow TripAdvisor, you end up eating a hamburger in Laos at some version of a hard rock, right? And this is not really the experience. I thought, why can't I get to know a local? I want to ride around on the back of a moped in Laos. And I want to go understand what do they do here? Like where do the 18-year-olds go? What was their life like? What does their day look like? And I thought, why is there not an app that does this? Why is there not something on my phone that can put me in touch with these people? But then of course that idea fell by the wayside, went into the back of my brain somewhere and by chance one day would end up in this wild world of connecting people on the internet. So, some of these things were already brewing and already starting to bubble up in ways that wouldn't totally expose themselves yet.

So, the chance was that I went to a dinner in Los Angeles one night with one of my very dear friends and she had been friendly with a couple of these guys in LA and we all ended up at dinner because I didn't end up driving back to my mom's house that night. It got too dark and it was quite a long drive. So, we all had dinner and I was staying at her house and one of the guys at dinner was the general manager of this incubator and was telling me all about this incubator and here I was a 22-year-old, just barely 22 if that, a young woman that needed a job. I needed to make money. I needed to find my way in the world. And I had just been kind of adventuring and seeing the world and exploring and taking this very risky path of not going straight into a career and going to travel and going to see the world and find my passion. And he said, 'Well, maybe you could take a marketing job.' And I said, 'Okay, I'll try. I mean, I'll call you tomorrow.' And he's like, 'Okay.' Probably thought I'd never call and I did. Long story short, that incubator would be the incubator where we ended up launching Tinder. So it was by happenstance that that connection happened. But I think it was about taking advantage of an opportunity, right? Seeing an opportunity and it didn't feel perfect. And I think this is a good lesson for people. The way it was described to me at that dinner, people think, 'Oh well, she got so lucky. She met the so-and-so of so-and-so.' That's not what it was like. This concept of Tinder was never mentioned. It was never called Tinder at the time and it was a totally different opportunity, but it was putting my foot in the door of something that would then turn into something else and something else. And I think so many people wait around for the most perfect headline when it comes to an opportunity that they can't really see or read between the lines. And everybody has that potential. Everybody can do that. They just have to be willing to say, 'Well, this is a stepping stone or this is a door that I could bust open, right?' And I think that's kind of how I've tried to approach most things in my career.

And people have a tendency to be like lean-in people or kind of just lean out people. Even when the world is changing, crypto, Bitcoin, blockchain, all these things, Meta, all the typically people lean in or lean out. And I think people that lean in are the ones that end up creating opportunity, which looks like luck in hindsight. Yeah, I agree with you. And being brave enough to just say even if it doesn't work out, at least I explored it, right? I think what I've seen and it's something that I'm guilty of as well in my life is it's a risk and we have to be willing to get excited about risk instead of being afraid of it.

Right, and for me not very guaranteed personally because it's like what do you have to lose? Are you creating risk for yourself? Not really. But I do think that it's scary to pick up the phone and make that first move, right? Which would then become Bumble's entire mantra and tagline and product and everything. But making the first move and taking that first step can change your life, but you have to do it. No one can do it for you. And I learned that the hard way. I had very little support along the way in terms of advocates or community. You know, I had a handful of people I could call upon, but candidly, even when I was starting Bumble, all of my confidants, with the exception of a couple, were like, 'No, don't do this. Why? Why would you expose yourself to this? What's the point? That won't work. There's already dating apps. They're going to eat you alive.' And you can get bogged down in that. It's easy to drown in that noise.

Bebo, the old social. Oh, no. It didn't go to the US. It was just predominantly. Sure, I remember that. It was like Facebook here before Facebook.

For people that don't know what a fraternity is, what's a fraternity? Uh, so I guess in the UK it would be like college clubs maybe. Do they have like members clubs or something like that? So basically sororities and fraternities are a house of women and fraternities are a house of men and there's different names. So they all have these Greek names, right? So for example, the one I joined was Kappa Kappa Gamma. You could have Tri Delta. There's all sorts of them. And essentially a lot of college students, they do something called rush where they rush and they go house to house and they meet all the women or all the men and then they basically prep. They put in the name of the one they would really love to be a part of and then they see who accepted them back. It's been criticized up and down and there's a lot of things that are not spectacular about it, but this is a way a lot of people find friendship and community. It's a community gathering for their college campus. So with Tinder, I essentially went back to my alma mater at SMU. I had just graduated. So, a lot of my best friends were still in school. So, I got access to the campus and I would start at the sororities and then go to the fraternity. So, I'd essentially have all the young women download it and then run to the fraternity and then they would download it and then everyone would start connecting. So, you know, is that good? Is that bad? How do you want to chop that up 10 years later? Who knows? But that's the reality and you know, can't escape the truth.

Yeah. Because network effects really matter, especially in the dating game.

I mean at least during my time doing this which is almost a decade now. But what's interesting is there's such a, and not to say only I could do this or only somebody else could do this, but there was a superpower in the timing of it all because I had just graduated and I knew all of these people. So if some random startup founder knocks on a sorority door, the police are coming, you know, like you can't do that. So I felt like I had this insider hook, right? Because I was technically an extension of that by proxy because I had just been on the college campus and all of my girlfriends were still there. So, they were part of these sororities and all my guy friends were there. They were part of these fraternities. So, I'll never forget I took the photo of one of my guy friends back then who was, you know, all the young women had a mega crush on him. And then I took the photo of my best friend, Danielle, who was very well-liked on campus. And I went into Danny's journalism class because she was still a student. And I basically snuck into her journalism class and used Photoshop. And I took the Tinder screens and I put the guy's face on one and her face on the other and I said, 'Find out who likes you on campus.' And then I saved it to a file because this is the olden days at this point. And I went to FedEx, which is like the office supply store across the street. And I printed a thousand copies. And I quite literally handed different students on campus $20 to go distribute them under dorm doors and to put them on windshields and to put them in their different social clubs and to essentially distribute these flyers everywhere. So this entire campus, and now in hindsight, it's probably not great. It's littering. There's all sorts of bad things involved with it, but like I'm just telling you a story. So, yeah, basically that was just one of the tactics I used to go and put it all over campus. And then I had a few t-shirts printed up that said, 'Don't ask for my number, find me on Tinder' and I had my girlfriends wear the t-shirts and we went to the bar and so I gave them a couple hundred bucks and they would go around and buy drinks and then when people would ask for their number, they'd essentially say, 'You have to download Tinder.' So, it was a lot of these tiny hacking concepts that made no sense. No one had ever done these things before. I had no playbook. It wasn't like I was reading some manual to marketing. It was just what felt around me. It was just bringing the real life dating experience to life through an app. Marketing.

So important. Just following your gut. Yeah, because that's creating something from first principles as opposed to convention. That's real innovation, right? And it creates solutions that are more suited for today and for the challenge that you're solving which no one has ever had the challenge of solving on that date ever. But naivety, this is sometimes why I think some of the best founders don't come from business school or from marketing school. The best marketers aren't marketing graduates because naivety is such a superpower. It's a superpower and following your instinct.

And if you understand what moves people and what motivates people, then you have this opportunity to connect with them on a real level. I mean, we've done things that are ridiculous. So, I remember we would make these signs that said they had the big X's like no, you know, like you're not allowed to. And they said no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble. This was like week three of Bumble or something, some ridiculous early maybe first year, I can't remember at this point. And we would post those all over the universities. So there was this association where it was like, wait, I can't do the things I really want to do. I want to sit in class and Snapchat. I want to sit in class and Instagram. The hell is Bumble? And so we were essentially seeding this psychological curiosity. And then we were actually sending young women wearing Bumble shirts into classes 10 or 15 minutes late interrupting a class of 300 people and saying, 'Oh, sorry, wrong room.' But everyone's looking at this young woman or young man, whoever it was, wearing a Bumble t-shirt. So, we were seeding curiosity in this like why is Bumble everywhere type of thing. And so, you know, a lot of people think, oh, well, I can just go start an app and I'll just buy some Instagram ads and I'll just be successful. But if people only knew the fraction of the insane everyday little hacks that I did and our team did to bring this to life. We were the first people, certainly the first tech brand to do humor accounts, to pay for the humor memes. Do you remember the humor memes? Well, we ran out of 100 million followers on meme accounts. So, yeah. So, you know all about this, but like we were way back years and years ago. I remember reaching out to one of these meme accounts, and they're like, 'Wait, you want to pay us? I'm confused. How does that work?' And we're like, 'Okay, here's the deal. We give you a hundred bucks or whatever it was.' We turn around a year later that same account is charging $100,000 a post. So there's also something about luck and timing being just right before something, you know, and if you look at Bumble, we were also beating the woman drum, the drum of we need to advocate for women, beating this drum of let's put women first. Let's elevate women. Women are not equal in their relationships. Women are not being treated respectfully. Women are being abused on the internet. Women are not being treated right. We were saying this in 2014 and then Me Too would come a couple years later. So I think we've been lucky as a business to basically be right before the wave and then we've been able to be a part of that wave versus chasing a wave. And so many people chase a wave. They look around them like, 'Well, what's cool? How do I chase that?' And I feel like we've always had the good fortune or whatever you want to call it, conviction, inspiration to go first. And so that's been maybe a superpower of ours over the years.

You're right. It wasn't. And the reason why we managed to get so many followers was because people didn't value those accounts. So, I remember buying Beef at Motivation, which had about 10 million followers, Love Food, which had about 7 million followers, and Beef at Motivation on Twitter, which had 2 million followers on Twitter. Just those 20 million followers cost me about 10 grand.

Can you imagine? It's like really good real estate. It's like buying a house in some crazy part of London a thousand years ago. And then all the other accounts were free because I offered the people jobs that ran them. You'll have a proper job. You get paid loads. I know your mom doesn't think it's a job. I think it's a job. I see you. I validate you. People like, 'Oh, you're exploiting.' Well, no, nobody valued it back then. And then they eventually did value those social media accounts. And what you're talking about the whole, you know, it was attention. It was eyeballs. And from a first principle perspective, you go, 'Well, we want attention. Eyeballs, they are here. I don't care if it's safe, cool, or the done thing. That's where we're going to go.' I saw Bumble doing that and I've seen all the things that Bumble have done over the years and it always seems to be original in its nature. It feels that way. Feels like someone has had an original thought today about how to solve a problem and not just they're not just focused on showing what Bumble is, they're communicating how you should feel about Bumble.

And I think there was a lot of people that thought it was ridiculous early on. They're like, 'Why are you doing a campaign that has nothing to do with dating?' You know, we did this huge campaign where our team put together this huge push on 'Be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry' and then in parenthesis it said, 'And then find someone you actually like or want to date.' And I remember a lot of people being like, 'We're not going to do this. There's no ROI here. What's the ROI? There's no call to action. There's no download in the app store.' And what was fascinating was it built this wild following of our brand. So people that would never have downloaded a dating app are now wearing our hat. Now their mother is carrying around a Bumble tote because they're proud of the brand and they are, you know, it created this intangible feeling, right? This magic. And there was a sentiment that was more powerful than any ROI campaign you could do on any other channel. And so I feel like for me, I always wanted Bumble to be more than just an app in your pocket. I wanted it to be something that gave you a feeling and a good feeling, not a bad one. Because so many of these products give us bad feelings and they make us feel uninspired and they make us feel lonely. They make us feel broken. They make us feel exhausted. And I wanted us to do something different and our team wanted us to do something different. We had such a passionate team. We still have an incredibly passionate team. But that early community of our team is really what made this company so magical, right? It was that genuine purpose and buy-in and candidly naive. Our team was young. Our team was separated from a lot of our infrastructure, meaning like a lot of the more technical stuff was isolated from the marketing stuff. And I've been criticized over the years by the tech publications and the tech this and the tech that and whatever. I don't really care. The point is, it's been like, well, this isn't how Silicon Valley does it. Where are the engineers and why are this and why aren't you sitting with the engineers and why are you... and there was a method to the madness. It was let's let this team go out and paint the town yellow and do it with no interruption, no distraction. And then let's let our fantastic infrastructure team really solve big problems through tech while these two heart and brain can operate together, right? And it had never really been done before in this traditional Silicon Valley world.

Well, you know, I think it was so new to everyone involved. No one really understood what the next day held. This was such a different time also, you know, Instagram had just had its big sale. Now, in retrospect, not such a big sale, but at the time, remarkable, right? Still remarkable regardless. And it was just such a new environment. Tech was still relatively niche. Mobile was very niche, right? It was not super mainstream. Apps were kind of hitting the scene, but not like where we are today. There's an app for this or app for that. And we were this tight tribe of people that really probably had not much to do with each other outside of this. But it became this 24/7 unit and we were just fighting every day to keep it going. I mean, our blood, sweat, and tears went into this business, right? So when I left, it was completely devastating because I wasn't just leaving this rocket ship of a business. That's one thing. But I've just been essentially, one day in a 24/7 environment with the same people for more than 2 years to the next day never seeing any of them ever again. And in the middle of that ending up on the front page of all sorts of magazines and newspapers because of the narrative of the ending, right? And it was extremely traumatic, extremely. I was stuck in fight or flight mode for years because that was all I knew for years and it had been such a 0 to 100 experience as you know when you're in these startups, they're almost their own, I'm definitely not accusing the company of being this, but they become their own little cult. And it's really hard to go from that one day to not that the next day and then to go end up launching a woman version to some degree within 6 months of leaving. So, if you can just try to imagine what every day looked like to both mourn and grieve my exit from Tinder and deal with all the logistical pieces of it and the media pieces of it which were coming at me, I had reporters trying to go through my window at my little apartment in Beverly Hills from some rag magazine. I mean, this is just crazy for me. I was a nobody. I mean, I'm still technically a nobody, but it's not like I was on some reality show and I became popular overnight. Like, this was traumatizing to me. And, you know, it's funny like the land of everyone trying to be famous. I was probably maybe one of the only people not at that point, right? So it was very crazy to just all of a sudden in a very scandalous way by the way I was described in the media. I was literally painted as this scandalous gone girl of the tech world. And it was soul crushing because it's not who I was. It's not who I am. So I was watching this narrative unfold about me and I was in these Twitter discussions with all the most important people in the tech world and it was just...

Crazy. I was just watching this narrative unfold about this person that wasn't me and then I'm turning around in the same breath meeting up with Andre and then I'm, you know, even before that trying to start Mercy, this compliments-oriented, kinder social network, which then I meet up with Andre and one thing leads to another and now Bumble is my new path and now we're starting Bumble and this is all going on. It was a whirlwind. A whirlwind.

It's, I mean, it's crazy. I mean, like the way people speak about what you're going to do. I mean there's such big ideas and they're such like passionate ideas and then you go from...

To this like super high energy, you know, there's, you know, going to be a disaster if we don't do this in the next 5 minutes. This is crashing, that's crashing, this metric's up, this metric's off. One day you're booming, the next day you're crashing. I mean the adrenaline, you know what I'm talking about, the ups and the downs and...

Everything feels potentially fatal as well at that point, doesn't it?

I'll just avoid them. That's a waste of time.