It is very common to hear the phrase ‘It’s time for the women to take the lead’ nowadays, but there is one woman who turned this saying into reality and she is none other than the Founder and CEO of popular dating app, Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd.
Wolfe was born in Utah, US and completed her studies in France and the States. She started her entrepreneurial journey in college at the age of 20, when she started selling bamboo tote bags to help the people affected from BP oil spill. Next, she introduced a clothing line “Tender Heart”, which was focused on raising awareness about human trafficking and fair trade.
Wolfe started working in Hatch labs and was also in the development team of another popular dating app, Tinder, but she resigned due to growing tension with other executives and filed a lawsuit against the company for sexual harassment which was later settled. But this put Wolfe in the radar of haters and she received lot of online hate and abuse. This motivated her to develop a space for women all around the world where they can feel confident about themselves. Initially, the idea was to limit the app to women where they can send each other compliments but after an advice from Russian Tech Billionaire Andery Andreev, founder of dating app Badoo, she settled on match-making and founded Bumble.
Bumble takes up on Wolfe’s vision of putting women in control. It caters the popular taglines such as “By women, for women”, “Be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry” and became the second most popular dating application in US.
Whitney speaks boldly on the issues such as the ‘abusive relationship’ she was in during her teenage years which damaged her but also taught her of the wrongs in gender dynamics, banning the pictures of guns on Bumble and less funding available to women led ideas and ventures.
With investors such as Priyanka Chopra and Serena Williams, Bumble went through IPO on February 10, which in turn made its founder Whitney Wolfe Herd a rare female billionaire at the age of 31. Featured in Forbes under 30 in 2017 and 2018 and named in Times 100, Whitney, referring to the women led management of Bumble, hopes that this won’t be rare a headline anymore.
Now, with 20 more female founders wanting to take their companies public, it seems like Whitney Wolfe Herd has lit the baton of women taking the lead in the field of startups and businesses. In the era of Kylie Jenner, she is an inspiration for all the women tech founders who are changing the world for women in their own unique way.
Everyone in the dating business wants to know what women want - it's the billion-dollar question. But it's simple: put one in charge, and you find out.
- Whitney Wolfe Herd
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