Fighting Sexism & Winning: The Founder Behind The $1Billion Dollar Tech Company Bumble

I'm legally really not meant to comment on the Tinder times. And I don't even know if I've told this story. But ... (music)

Whitney Wolfe Herd, the CEO and founder of Bumble.

Whitney became one of the few women who can add billionaire to her title. The dating app that puts women in charge of making the first move. Making the first move can change your life. But you have to do it. No one can do it for you. Which would then become Bumble's entire mantra.

I've seen all the things that Bumble have done over the years, and it always seems to be original in its nature.

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. At 31 years old, you're the youngest woman to take a company public.

What's the personal toll on you in those moments?

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

Your departure from Tinder read to me like it was horrific and sexist.

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.

If I asked your team, "What's Whitney like as a leader?" What would they say to me?

I don't know.

We did ask them.

Oh.

So ... (sighs) Whitney, what is the early context that I would have to understand about you and your life to understand you?

I think probably broken gender dynamics. Growing up, I sorta grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. I don't know if you know much about-

I know it from Mormonism.

... Salt Lake City, Utah. Yeah. So, it's a very LDS, is kind of the formal religious term, um, or better known as Mormon place. And my dad is Jewish and my mother is Catholic, so I'm already a total, um, 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, um, a man's world, where the man is, um, the, you know, the breadwinner, the man is out, Mom is at home in an apron, and everyone follows rules, lots of rules. Uh, 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, you know, real boyfriend that I ever had, it was quite toxic, and these were kind of, um, these undertones of my entire life that would then set the stage for my entire career.