Whitney Wolfe Herd went from growing up in a conservative, patriarchal community to establishing the women-centric dating app Bumble. After taking Bumble public, she became a billionaire—the youngest woman to do so at the time. Wolfe Herd is also a cofounder of Tinder and led that dating app’s early marketing efforts.
Early Life
Whitney Wolfe Herd was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1989. Her father worked in sporting goods and was also a property developer. Her mother, who had held jobs in art museums, stayed at home to raise Wolfe Herd and her sister.
According to Wolfe Herd’s childhood friend, the Salt Lake City community of their youth was repressive to women in terms of dating and relationships. Women not only had to wait to be pursued by men but were expected to obey them. Wolfe Herd bristled against this dynamic and describes herself as being a feminist from an early age.
Wolfe Herd personally experienced the unjust power dynamic of relationships during high school when she was subjected to “severe emotional abuse” by an on-again/off-again boyfriend. The relationship also allegedly involved physical violence; Wolfe Herd’s mother asserts she heard the boyfriend threatening her daughter with a gun.
College and Early Entrepreneurialism
At the urging of friends and family, Wolfe Herd escaped the toxic relationship by leaving Salt Lake City to attend college at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Texas. This was where she made her first foray into entrepreneurialism.
In 2010, Wolfe Herd collaborated with a celebrity stylist on a project to raise funds for cleanup efforts following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The campaign gained a national profile when celebrities such as Nicole Richie were seen sporting the tote bags designed to raise awareness for the project.
Cofounding Tinder
After graduating from SMU, Wolfe Herd moved to Southeast Asia. There, she continued her charitable pursuits by volunteering at orphanages.
When she returned to the United States, she took a job with a Los Angeles startup incubator Hatch Labs. Her duties there centered on working on one of the company’s apps. Known as Cardify, the app allowed users to browse loyalty cards from various retailers.
Users navigated through the loyalty cards by swiping within the app, and Wolfe Herd and other Cardify employees realized the swiping feature could be used on a dating app. In their time off the clock, they began creating one.
Out of these after-hours sessions came Tinder. Wolfe Herd was credited as a cofounder of the dating app and even thought of its name. As the vice president of marketing, Wolfe Herd helped to spearhead Tinder’s growth over its first two years.
Her time with Tinder also saw her enter into a romantic relationship with one of her fellow cofounders. While she and the cofounder, Justin Mateen, were both responsible for creating the app, he held a more senior position at the company. When their relationship dissolved, Tinder’s leadership reportedly turned against Wolfe Herd, demeaning her and subjecting her to inappropriate and misogynistic behavior.
Wolfe Herd left Tinder and filed a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment. She later reportedly settled with the dating app for $1 million and company stock.
Launching Bumble
After her exit from Tinder, Wolfe Herd faced online abuse stemming from her lawsuit. The experience left her dejected and worried that her career was over. Still, only 24, she eventually rallied and turned her attention to building a new app. That app would become Bumble.
Wolfe Herd initially envisioned Bumble as a social network where women could compliment one another. Before its launch, however, she was approached by Russian billionaire Andrey Andreev, who convinced her to build a dating app instead.
Andreev took a 79 percent ownership stake in Bumble through his dating app, the Europe-based Badoo. Wolfe Herd took the remaining 21 percent, and drawing on the marketing skills she displayed at Tinder, she launched Bumble in 2014.
Designed with women in mind, Bumble, which utilizes the same swiping feature as Tinder, requires women to start a conversation with men. This departure from traditional gender norms was inspired by Sadie Hawkins school dances, where women are expected to ask men to be their dates. According to those close to Wolfe Herd, the trauma of her earlier relationships also drove her to create an app friendly to women.
Bumble Grows
Bumble caught on quickly. It was downloaded 100,000 times in the first month, more than Tinder was in the same period. Unlike other dating apps, which are often overwhelmingly male, Bumble’s user base attracted a greater percentage of women, with Wolfe saying in 2015 that the male-female ratio was approximately 1:1.
From Bumble’s earliest days, Wolfe Herd wanted the app to be a place for people to make all sorts of connections beyond romance. With this goal in mind, she guided Bumble in launching Bumble BFF, a service for making platonic friends, in 2016. She followed that by adding the professional-networking service Bumble Bizz in 2017.
In 2019, after a Forbes article exposed alleged racism and misogyny at Badoo, Andreev stepped down from his position at Bumble’s parent company and sold his ownership stake to a private equity firm. Two years later, with growth continuing at her dating app, Wolfe Herd took Bumble public, becoming, at 31, the youngest woman ever to do so at a US company.
The public offering made Wolfe Herd a billionaire. Bumble itself was valued at $14 billion a month later. Today, Bumble reports that 94,000 new people join the app each day, and the app facilitates 23 million matches a week.
Activism
As part of creating a women-friendly space, Wolfe Herd has embraced the responsibility of keeping that space safe. Under her direction, Bumble has incorporated the enforcement of harassment and other inappropriate behaviors into its business model, a novel move for a major social-networking app.
Wolfe Herd has also worked to make the internet a safer place beyond her app. In 2019, she and Bumble lobbied the Texas state legislature to make sending unsolicited nude images a crime. The bill passed unanimously, and over the next few years, Virginia and California passed similar laws.