Bumble CEO's Advice: "Find What Breaks Your Heart" (Then Build a Company Around It)

I actually had co-founded Tinder and wanted nothing to do with dating apps, but this is life. In this moment where AI is quite literally automating everything, I firmly believe the one thing that will be left is relationships and connection with each other.

Hey, what's up guys? I'm Whitney Wolf Herd. I am the founder and CEO of Bumble. I am coming in from Texas and we are in Gloria Central Park for a nice walk because I'm not much of a runner. Whitney and I are currently walking in Central Park. I literally crave this walk. I think this is one of the most glorious walks on planet Earth. You've got, you know, kids over here on skateboards and then you've got people sitting on park benches writing novels. It's just such a special place.

So, the funny thing is, is like I never woke up dreaming of being a dating app founder as a child obviously, but I did always love to connect people and I never knew how that would manifest into the world. But my true passion and just who I am as a person since I was little was just fostering and cultivating relationships and then bringing great people that I had met together. So for example, you know, most of my friends that I spend time with, these are people that have like all met through each other. And so I love this notion of people connecting with other great people and forming community. This is so important to me. And so I think that's just like been my essence. And what's so phenomenal about technology is you can take the things that are just innately special to you or these things that you embody as a person and kind of dream up ways for it to come into a product form or a business form. And so kind of that part of me I think has been just kind of the throughline of my career. It's just so innately what I care about. And so that's kind of like who I am as a person. I just love the idea of community connection. I don't think there's anything better than the relationships we have in our life. And so for me to now be leading a relationship platform where you can find love, you can find obviously romantic connections, but also we foster so much more than just that because we have BFF where you can come together around any shared joy, any common interest and also a lot of pain points. We have over 10,000 monthly active groups on BFF and they're growing and some of these groups are phenomenal. So the groups range from, you know, people going through shared struggles. So maybe someone, you know, has a new diagnosis of something very confusing and makes them feel isolated and lonely. They're finding community with other people going through that on BFF or new moms that are trying to integrate into their community as their life changes dramatically. We are seeing people navigate being new to a city like these young women that move to New York for example and know nobody, now they're forming huge community through this. So I feel like who I was before all of this is quite literally now just manifested into these products. And so I think that's pretty fun and cool to be able to live your purpose and passion and have that be your work as well.

Yeah, I think that is what we were meant to do. Like we are meant to do what we love. And you know, there's these sayings that you know we've all heard since we were young which is like do what you love and find what you love. And people struggle with that. They don't really understand what that means. They don't know how to identify that. And so the way I would look at it and what I believe I have done in my career is I actually say like find what breaks your heart. Like find what feels missing in the world or unfair in the world or something that you just don't understand why it has to be that way where you wish something could be improved or better. And if you actually think about some of the greatest innovations, frankly all of them, it stems from a place of wanting to improve something. And so when you look at Bumble, yes, that undercurrent of connection is absolutely there and that's the through line, that's the foundation, but when you look at how I started Bumble, I started Bumble with this idea of really building a platform and a brand and a company that put women first and improved how women were treated in relationships, how they felt about themselves in relationships because in my mind everything was kind of about, you know, women having equal this or equal that. But no one ever talked about us feeling or being equal in our relationships. It was still very much a topic. Yeah. It was so one-sided. And when I was starting Bumble, I really wanted to find a way to formalize this pain point of women not feeling like an equal in their relationship into a product that could scale across the globe. And that was why, you know, I took that founding wish and vision and mission of trying to improve things for women and the way it manifested originally in the product, our first iteration of this was women making the first move and always sending the first message. And we've now evolved beyond that because the ethos, the spirit, the philosophy, and like the mindset is so much bigger than one feature. Mhm. And so now we've started kind of finding ways to build that beyond just that one founding principle or product feature. I really do believe that like the greatest entrepreneurs, which could be literally any of you watching right now, maybe you haven't even seen yourself as a potential entrepreneur, they're just essentially passionate problem solvers at the core. That's really what it's about.

Oh my goodness. I am all about being together in the real world, looking each other in the eyes because we belong together. We're better together. And technology has isolated us. It has pulled us apart. And I think people get confused about what Bumble is trying to do in the world because they're like, 'Yeah, but you run an app and you guys use AI.' And I'm like, 'No, no, no, no. It is all in service of getting you off your phone as quickly as possible into real community, into real life with friends, with dates, with people, people to laugh with, people to walk with, people to cry with, people to potentially marry and have children with, which has happened to millions of people because of our brand.' And I just, everything's about the real world. And I think in this moment where AI is quite literally automating everything, I firmly believe the one thing that will be left is relationships and connection with each other. And so I feel proud that we get to be in service of that.

Oh, yes. I was told I was breaking the rules by everybody. And that was the point because it is absolutely okay to want someone to make the first move. That is your choice. That is absolutely an amazing choice if that's how you feel. I don't disagree with it. I don't contest it. I was never trying to take away this like, 'Well, I want to be courted or I want to feel like they're making effort.' What I was trying to do was solve the pain point of then. And the pain point that I realized existed at that time in 2014 was women were frankly getting inundated by people they didn't want to be inundated by. So, I completely agree with you. Like, if you're interested in someone or potentially interested, them expressing interest first is awesome. That's fine. But what's not okay is a woman feeling inundated with unwanted attention and unwanted behavior. And in 2014, women were just getting bombarded every day on the internet from apps, you know, social media, and also just like in the streets, frankly. And it was just causing women so much discomfort, harm. And so I said, you know what? Why can't a woman be in control? Why can't a woman have barriers to access like who can access her? And then frankly, on the flip side of that, what you just said, absolutely respect it and don't disagree with it. There's a contrary approach there that I struggled with, which was if I did think someone was cute, like why am I not allowed to just walk over and say hi without feeling bad about myself? Like, why has society created shame around that, right? And so I really just wanted to normalize a woman not feeling like she had to wait to be chosen, like she should choose who she's interested in and not feel like it's just one-sided.

I actually had co-founded Tinder and wanted nothing to do with dating apps. When I left Tinder, I was like, that is the end of that. I will never work in any field that involves dating, but this is life. You think you know what's going to happen and you have no idea what comes next. I originally just wanted to build female first technology and products that would solve pain points for women. And originally that kind of founding principle was going to come to life in a woman-to-woman social networking app where they could find friendships and connect and have like an open safe space, and which is funny now BFF is a big product and so I love that this original vision did in fact come to fruition and it's, you know, it's definitely part of that like original essence of Bumble. But it was actually my former business partner and original investor and kind of early, you know, kind of partner that we launched this, you know, together in 2014. He had a dating app in Europe at the time that was very, very, very popular around the world, just not super well known in the States. And he basically was like, 'Absolutely, we need to do this, but it must be in dating.' And I was like, 'You're crazy. Lose my number.' And he was persistent that it should be in dating. And then when I really went back and reflected on it, it's like, I think the guy has a point. Like maybe there is white space in dating. And he wasn't as interested in like the female first stuff. He was just kind of like, I want to run another date. I just want another dating app. He was so enamored with our growth at Tinder that he was like, just do that again.

I look back on the last decade plus and think how lucky I was to be somewhat young and naive because when you look at it in hindsight, it's so big. It's so daunting. It feels so impossible. Like the fact that I just went for it and went after this founding principle of improve women's lives with technology and fixed this big problem in society where women just don't feel safe in dating. They don't feel seen and connecting like they struggle. And the fact that I actually went and did it, I'm like, 'Oh, that was kind of badass.' Like I can't believe I did it because it is a daunting like big thing. And the fact that, you know, we started with zero downloads. We started with nothing. We started with just an idea and a lot of passion and a lot of fear, which I think everyone should know is like fear is not absent for entrepreneurs. Being a great entrepreneur is just like waking up every day and being scared out of your mind, but doing it anyway. So, you know, it's fascinating. And now I look back on it, I was like, 'Has anyone ever gone skiing?' Or like you conquer some crazy hike and you look down and you're like, 'Whoa.' Or you look up and you're like, 'That was steep. That was brave. That was scary.' Like that's kind of how this journey feels and it's not over yet. So it's kind of it's all part of it.

So, you have to be slightly delusional for it to even become possible because the world will tell you it's impossible. The world doesn't understand things that haven't been done yet, right? That's the reality. Like vision requires being able to see things that others cannot see. And you know, if you were navigating a road and only you could see it, but everyone in the back of the car was screaming, saying, 'You're going the wrong way.' It's very disorienting. There's a part of you that wants to listen to the naysayers and say, 'Maybe I am going the wrong way.' But it requires you to tap into that internal GPS and say, 'I know I'm going the right way. I know it. I feel it. And I'm going to just keep driving no matter what anybody says.' It's like that is ultimately what is required to change anything in the world, to break through, to be the best at anything. People have to trust their instinct and their vision and they just can't get distracted.