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

Whitney Wolfe Herd is the founder of Bumble and the first self-made female billionaire on the planet. In this episode, she reveals after leaving Tinder in explosive circumstances, the injustices she faced drove her on to build a better kind of dating app. A firm believer that the way to connect with people is by being authentic and being vulnerable, Whitney reveals she routinely shares with her staff her struggles with anxiety and when she’s not feeling on top of things. The only path to human connection lies through honesty, and Whitney breaks the mould to be as transparent with her employees as she can. In one of our rawest and most emotional conversations with CEOs yet, Whitney reveals that she wanted to be the boss not because she wanted to, but because she thought the nature of her character meant she couldn’t work for anybody else. Whitney: Instagram: http://bit.ly/3UUZR0P Twitter: http://bit.ly/3UWNstj Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I'm legally really not meant to comment on the Tinder Times. I don't even know if I've told this story. But.

• 0:09Speaker 00

  Whitney Wolfe, 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.

• 0:28Steven Bartlett?

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

• 0:32Speaker 00

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

• 0:52Steven Bartlett?

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

• 0:55Speaker 00

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

• 0:59Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:03Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:22Steven Bartlett?

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

• 1:25Speaker 00

  I don't know.

• 1:26Steven Bartlett?

  We did ask them.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 1:28Steven Bartlett?

  So.

• 1:39Steven Bartlett?

  Whitney,

• 1:41Steven Bartlett?

  what is the early context

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  that I would have to understand about you and your life to understand you?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  I think

• 1:53Speaker 00

  probably broken gender dynamics.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Growing up, I so I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. I don't know if you know much about.

• 2:01Steven Bartlett?

  I know.

• 2:02Speaker 00

  Salt Lake City, Utah. Yep, so it's a very LDS is kind of 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.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  So growing up back in the 90s, it was very much a man's world. Where the man is, the, you know, 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

• 3:13Speaker 00

  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 these undertones of my entire life that would then set the stage for my entire career.

• 3:39Steven Bartlett?

  Using that first relationship, that first sort of toxic relationship as an example of how your belief system at that point was causing problems. Could you give me some color to what you mean there?

• 3:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a, it was, you know, it was a new experience for me. I was a young, 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, his, his.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  You know, 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 relationships. 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 squawk that and eyes were rolled and people couldn't understand why we would do such a thing because women aren't supposed to talk first.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:14Steven Bartlett?

  Were you rebelling at all against that environment or that belief system?

• 5:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  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, on this topic in every.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  Every situation I've been in and that's, that's part of navigating it.

• 6:19Steven Bartlett?

  How do we navigate that duality? Cause we all, we all experience those sort of conflicting needs at the same time. Often one of them is like an external one can fly, can colliding with an internal need that's going unmet. And it feels sometimes like we have to choose, as you said, like the external comfort of fitting in or validation versus like, this doesn't feel good to me.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:40Steven Bartlett?

  Inside.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  I think for me at least,

• 6:47Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:22Steven Bartlett?

  Sometimes in the short term, when we, especially if we've had a prolonged period of being inauthentic, what we've done accidentally and inadvertently is created an environment and a community and a job and a, and an environment where that's built on that inauthenticity. So to make the change to, to one day be like, do you know what? Today I'm going to be authentic requires, it seems like quite a lot of short-term loss, especially disapproval, people going, stay, stay, stay, stay in line, stay who we thought you were, you know, be the person that we resonated with, even if that was your inauthentic self. So that like, I think, I see so many people kind of contend with that. They want, they kind of might know who they are, that voice inside. But the apparent cost of pursuing it seems circa

• 8:05Steven Bartlett?

  his mom and dad and my boyfriend and I have to leave the city and my job and my friendship, you know?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Of course. You have to leave the tribe.

• 8:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. It's terrifying.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Terrifying. It's almost unimaginable for people and.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  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, 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?

• 9:04Speaker 00

  No one likes me? And what if everyone judges me? These are real things. But at the end of the day, nothing can 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 ourself 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?

• 9:44Speaker 00

  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

• 10:26Speaker 00

  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. You know, like that, the truth is, the truth does prevail.

• 10:40Steven Bartlett?

  When you were, when you were eighteen, what was acceptance or success to you? If I asked you at eighteen years old, what you want to be post uni, when you grow up? What would the answer have been at that point?

• 10:52Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  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. Like, 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? Why can we not text? Who wrote these rules? What are these rules? These rules are ridiculous.

• 12:16Speaker 00

  So this, 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've felt that. Everybody has felt that. It's just who chooses to go and actually act on it is the difference.

• 12:34Steven Bartlett?

  Do you, I was, I was thinking then, when you, when you talked about being eighteen and having this kind of sort of social expectation of what success would look like, and then having a family was the orientation of a lot of young women at that point. Do you think there are any gender differences that are innate to us, that have a bearing on the path or the way that we show up, that are innate? I mean, not social constructs, but do you think there's anything in us as, as men and women that makes us want different things from birth innately?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  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

• 13:37Speaker 00

  there may be something, and I see this in men too,

• 13:43Speaker 00

  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 with, I don't think it's 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, 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

• 14:20Speaker 00

  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 pig mom was in the, it's like the pig family. 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. These are the books they're reading and it says, where's daddy and where's mommy? So we have to imagine that we, we do some of this to the, to the kids around us.

• 15:00Steven Bartlett?

  Did you burn the book?

• 15:01Speaker 00

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

• 15:10Steven Bartlett?

  What was your, what was your formal education per se? What was your, in terms of university or anything like that? What did you study?

• 15:16Speaker 00

  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 have 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, mm, this is probably not for me. But anyway, I did not get it accepted. So I studied international studies and that was just this huge mix of big people problems.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 16:42Steven Bartlett?

  And as you leave that, that degree, that gap between like the working world and leaving university, college, what was that gap? And how, what were you thinking in that moment? Where were you heading? What were you applying for? Where were you seeking the next chapter of your life?

• 16:58Speaker 00

  So I really wanted to be a travel photographer, like a photojournalist. And I 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.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  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? Like, what does their day look like? And I thought, why is there not an app that does this?

• 18:09Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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.

• 18:36Steven Bartlett?

  By chance, you ended up in this weird world of connecting people? What was that chance?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  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 even, two year old woman that needed a job. I needed to make money. I needed to find my way in the world.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  And I had just been kind of adventuring and, you know, seeing the world and exploring and taking this very, you know.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  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 is the way it was described to me at that dinner. People think, oh, well, she got so lucky. She, you

• 20:18Speaker 00

  know, she met the so and so of so and so. That's not what it was like. This, that 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.

• 21:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's so, it's so true. It's, you know, that moment there, there's so many other outcomes that could have happened from a dinner. Namely, one of them is you just don't call the person back. I mean, the amount of times in my life, someone's given me their number and said, call me. And I just haven't called back most of the time.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Ninety nine percent. It's like all of us do that.

• 21:16Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. But there's a philosophy of like leaning into stuff, especially when you're young, just like leaning in regardless of certainties, you've described it.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  Take a chance.

• 21:23Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And people have, I see this in people, I'm sure you have as well, where 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 matter. 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.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  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 people, 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.

• 22:08Steven Bartlett?

  It's the uncertainty though, isn't it? How good are you at dealing with uncertainty? With how guaranteed you need the outcome to be before you take a step?

• 22:16Speaker 00

  Right. And for me, not very guaranteed personally because it's like, what do you have to lose? Right? 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,

• 23:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  And you can get bogged down in that, you know, it's really, it's easy to drown in that noise.

• 23:21Steven Bartlett?

  In those, in those early years of Tinder, I remember being told the story, maybe 10 years ago in San Francisco, when I was working there with a guy called Michael Birch, who was the old Bebo founder. You'll know Bebo. Bebo, the old social net. Oh, no, it didn't go to the US. It was just predominantly in the UK.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  I'm not sure I remember that.

• 23:36Steven Bartlett?

  It was like Facebook here before, before Facebook.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Okay, cool.

• 23:39Steven Bartlett?

  And he, in his little sort of incubator that I was in when I was 20, they were telling me the Tinder story of how you went to a fraternity. For people that don't know what a fraternity is, what's a fraternity?

• 23:53Speaker 00

  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 there's sororities and fraternities and sororities 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 preff. They put in the name of the one they would really love to be a part of and then they see who accepted them

• 24:35Speaker 00

  back. It's been criticized up and down and there's a lot of things that are not, you know, 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'd 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. But so you heard about this way back when?

• 25:20Steven Bartlett?

  I heard about this 10 years ago because we were building community centric apps. We're building something called Blab, which resembles what Clubhouse is now. And when we were talking about the marketing strategy, Tinder kept coming up and Sean Peery, who's now, the company got acquired by Amazon in the end, Twitch, who owned Amazon, other way around, Amazon owned Twitch. But yeah, that was the thesis. It was like, should we go to fraternities and go get, you know, and to try and build that sort of isolated tight community to try and get product market fit?

• 25:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:52Steven Bartlett?

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

• 25:55Speaker 00

  The most important. That's why there's only a handful of dating apps that have ever survived. I mean, at least during my time doing this, which is almost a decade now. But what's interesting is there's such a, not to, 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 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, you can't do that. So I felt like I had this insider hook, right? Because I was technically

• 26:35Speaker 00

  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 mega crush on on him. And then I took the photo of my best friend Danielle, who was very well liked on campus. And I went into Dani'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.

• 27:18Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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, um, yeah, basically, that was,

• 27:59Speaker 00

  that was just one of the tactics I 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, you know, 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, you know, I was reading some manual to marketing. It was just what felt around me. It was it was just bringing the real life dating experience to life through through an app, um, marketing.

• 28:43Steven Bartlett?

  There's like so many important messages of of marketing there. I mean, the first one that you said was was that you were the customer. You were so close to the customer that you understood them. I mean, even you said about how if another startup had come and knocked on the sorority, well, they wouldn't have even known which door to knock on for a start.

• 28:56Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 28:57Steven Bartlett?

  They would have knocked on the wrong door, got the wrong people. And they wouldn't have understood those people, their motivation. So like, really, you being the customer, I think, is such a key thing. And then the second thing you said about like, if I'd read a marketing book, and you were kind of just doing it based on intuition.

• 29:12Steven Bartlett?

  I've I've seen over and over again, from speaking to really successful CEOs and founders, how important naivety was, like not knowing.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  So important, just following your gut.

• 29:20Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, because then you that's like first that's creating something from first principles as opposed to convention. That's real innovation, right? Like, 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 the challenge of solving.

• 29:33Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:34Steven Bartlett?

  On that date ever.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 29:36Steven Bartlett?

  But naivety, you know, this is this is sometimes why I think some of the best founders don't come from like business school or from marketing school. The best marketers aren't marketing graduates because naivety is such a superpower.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  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

• 30:28Speaker 00

  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's Bumble? And so we were essentially seeding this psychological

• 30:44Steven Bartlett?

  curiosity.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  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 and 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, you know, Instagram ads and I'll just be successful. But if people only knew the fraction.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Of the insane, everyday little hacks that, you know, 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?

• 31:42Steven Bartlett?

  Well, we ran about a hundred million followers on meme accounts.

• 31:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you know all about this. But like, we were way back, years and years ago, I remember reaching out to, I can't remember what it was, one of these meme accounts. And they're like, wait, you want to pay us to, I'm confused, how does that work? And we're like, okay, here's the deal, we'll give you a hundred bucks, or whatever it was. We turn around a year later, that same account is charging a hundred thousand dollars a post. So we, 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, this drum of, we need to advocate for women, beating this drum of, let's put women first, let's,

• 32:30Speaker 00

  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 of years later. So I think we've, 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. 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.

• 33:09Steven Bartlett?

  Conviction.

• 33:10Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 33:11Steven Bartlett?

  Inspiration.

• 33:12Speaker 00

  To go first. And so that's been maybe a superpower of ours over the years.

• 33:18Steven Bartlett?

  Because you're making those decisions, it's so clear to me, you're making those decisions from original thought. And from like, what I think Elon calls like first principles, as in, what do we know is true, and create a solution from that, versus, how is it done? How's it been done before? And that like, and even you being early to the meme account things, just for context.

• 33:40Steven Bartlett?

  We were probably like, probably, probably maybe one of the first companies in the world, I'd say, to do the meme thing. That's really like how my business began. We had like a hundred million followers on these meme accounts. That became this big social media business, this big media company and it cons- e-comm and then it went public. But it started with meme accounts.

• 33:57Speaker 00

  That's amazing.

• 33:57Steven Bartlett?

  And this is how I met, I think, your original investors, how I met Badoo. So I remember speaking to, having these long conversations with them in London about, we'll make you trend number one on Twitter, we'll do a thunderclap, all the accounts say at the same, like, but for you to have been one of the brands that was leaning into that.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  You know what other brands had? No, and to your point, yes, the meme accounts were there. You were pioneering all of that. But I don't know if you experienced this, brands did not see their place there. And the brands that did, that I had seen, had been like, buy my bracelet, or buy my fashion company, you know, it was something very consumer centric, which made sense. But it wasn't the, download my app.

• 34:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Speaker 00

  And that was such a different way of promoting something, even for the app world. It was, it was so out of bounds for the app space, because the app space used traditional app space.

• 34:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 00

  Acquisition strategies.

• 34:51Steven Bartlett?

  You're right. It wasn't, it wasn't sa- and the reason why we managed to get so many followers was because people didn't value those accounts. So I remember buying Be Fit Motivation, which had about 10 million, I'll say, followers, Love Food, which had about seven million followers, and Be Fit Motivation on Twitter, which had 2 million followers on Twitter. Just those, just that 20 million followers cost me about 10 grand.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Oh my god. 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.

• 35:22Steven Bartlett?

  And then all the other accounts were free.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  Unbelievable.

• 35:25Steven Bartlett?

  Because I, I offered the people jobs that ran them. It's like, you'll have a proper job, you get paid loads. I know your mum doesn't think it's a job, I think it's a job.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  I see you, I validate you.

• 35:33Steven Bartlett?

  People are like, oh, you're exploiting. Well, no, nobody valued it back then. And 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, it was attention, it was eyeballs. And from a first principles perspective, you go, well, we want attention and eyeballs. They are here. I don't care if it's safe, cool, or the done thing. That's where we're gonna go. I saw Bumble doing that. And, and I've seen all the things that Bumble have done over the years, and it's always seems to be original in its nature. It feels that way. It 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 that they're communicating how you should feel about Bumble.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  That was always the goal.

• 36:15Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  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, you know, huge push on be the CEO, your parents always wanted you to marry. And then in parentheses, 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. 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.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  Now their mother is carrying around a Bumble tote because they're proud of the brand and they are, you know, it created this untangible feeling, right? This magic. And there was a sentiment that was more powerful than any, you know, 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.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  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 naivete. 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, you know, 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,

• 38:31Speaker 00

  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 da, da, da, da? 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 like traditional Silicon Valley world.

• 39:08Steven Bartlett?

  My first startup experience is not like my second startup experience. You learn all the lessons. You learn, well, hopefully you learn the lessons. I think I've learned, hopefully learned some of them. But your first startup experience at Tinder, this is when, you know, because especially when it's moving at the speed of light.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Light.

• 39:25Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I mean, my startup didn't move at the speed of light quite like Tinder did, but still absolutely the speed of light Tinder moved at. And there's that culture out in San Francisco about, you know, move fast and break things, which is, I think, Facebook popularized. I think that was their slogan, but everyone kind of has adopted that mindset of just go fucking lightning fast and figure it out later. Fix it while it's, fix it while we're falling kind of thing. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about the, the cost of that, what it taught you and really give me a picture of what it was like in those early rocket ship days.

• 40:01Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I think.

• 40:05Speaker 00

  It was so new to everyone involved. No one,

• 40:11Speaker 00

  no one really understood what the next day held. Um, 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? Um, 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 for that. And

• 40:50Speaker 00

  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, you know,

• 41:28Speaker 00

  one day in a 24/7 environment with the same people for more than two years, to the next day, never seeing any of them ever again.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  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, it was extremely traumatic, extremely. I was, I think I was stuck in fight or flight mode for years. Um, because, you know, that was all I knew for years. And it had been such a zero to 100 experience, as you know, when you're in these startups. It's, they're almost their own, I'm definitely not accusing the company of being this, but they become their own little cults. And it's really hard to.

• 42:22Speaker 00

  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 six 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.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Like this was traumatizing to me. And

• 43:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:30Speaker 00

  I was literally painted as this like 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,

• 43:58Speaker 00

  meeting up with Andre and then I'm, you know, even before that, trying to start Marcy, 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.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  A whirlwind.

• 44:22Steven Bartlett?

  What is, what is the, the context you're able to share about why they were writing those headlines about you and why you are ostracized from your, as you've described, it's something that felt a little bit like a cult, which is actually a good description of how all my companies are pretty much started. It feels like a 24 seven.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Doesn't it feel that way?

• 44:40Steven Bartlett?

  Come on, we're going to take over the world. It's that kind of.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  It's, I mean, it's crazy.

• 44:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  I mean, like the way people speak about what you're going to do. I mean, they're such big ideas and they're such like passionate ideas. And then you go from real world, which is so mundane, right? It's quite boring out there in the real world to this like super like high energy, you know, the, there's, you know, going to be a disaster if we don't do this in the next five 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, I mean, the adrenaline, you know what I'm talking about? The ups and the downs and the hard work that goes into it and the skipping meals and the no sleep and.

• 45:20Steven Bartlett?

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

• 45:23Speaker 00

  Fatal. And the other thing that is interesting is you can't connect with everybody else the way you used to because they're, they can't quote unquote, get it. They don't get it, you know? So it's like trying to like have a Sunday afternoon meal with your family or your friends during that. You're like, I can't like, we don't even speak the same language anymore. So.

• 45:44Steven Bartlett?

  I'll just avoid them.

• 45:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. You have no idea what's going on. So, which in hindsight, I think I lived in that mindset for years between Tinder and Bumble. I mean, kind of coming up for air now and having time to breathe and think like, that's a, I'm sure a lot of people that have built companies feel this way though. I'm sure you feel this way where you're like, whoa, I isolated myself from a lot of important relationships that there's regret to that at some point. Do you ever feel that way?

• 46:15Steven Bartlett?

  A hundred percent. I was incredibly lonely. I didn't speak to my family, didn't really see them for many, many years. And I thought that.

• 46:24Steven Bartlett?

  I thought that something mattered much more. And eventually, even if I used to think I was immune, but eventually your body will remind you that you are a human too. And you have needs and your needs are being unmet. And the signal will come in many ways. I hear the signal sometimes come for people that have panic attacks. They'll feel a growing sense of loneliness, their health will give out. I've had certain examples where the body has just shut down.

• 46:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. I've gone through that.

• 46:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. I read that your departure from Tinder was ominous, to say the least. In fact, that's actually the word that's written in my notes in two thousand and fourteen. And in the early days of the foundation, the founding of Tinder, you'd had a relationship with somebody that relationship had ended. You were then treated in a pretty horrendous way from everything that I read online. Threatened multiple times, people saying that they would, they would fire you for things that they didn't have a justification to fire you for. Sort of patronizing, condescending behavior to the fact that you were a young female co-founder. And how they would take that co-founder title from you.

• 47:26Steven Bartlett?

  It's actually really hard for me to read, actually, just from, it kind of makes me a bit, feel a sense of injustice in my core.

• 47:33Steven Bartlett?

  You were called annoying and dramatic at certain times when you raised certain concerns. And as a result, you, you know, you were, you ended up leaving the company. You were fired, I read, you were fired from the company, which is even worse, when you raised certain concerns. You then filed a lawsuit, which went on. And there was certain actions taken and there was a reported settlement reached at one point. But overall, your treatment while you were at Tinder, specifically from men, read to me like it was allegedly horrific and unfair and sexist.

• 48:17Steven Bartlett?

  And then upon leaving Tinder, there's this huge wave of press who are mischaracterizing you, what happened. And you fall into this situation where you've been in this cult, we'll call it a cult, because that's how it often feels to both of us for so long. You come out of that and you're greeted with this wall of like mischaracterization, attacks from all sides. And you're kind of out on your own then. That's the moment where you're ostracized from the tribe and you're dealing with this wave of negativity.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, legally, really not meant to comment on the Tinder times. But what I will say is I was literally broken during that chapter where I was waking up to headlines about myself. Like you said, I was being described in all sorts of ways. And people were calling my, you know, my uncle and my ex boyfriend. I mean, it was this digging weird investigation into my life. And all I wanted was to just do my job.

• 49:30Speaker 00

  Right? And so it was a very dark, toxic moment. And I felt so alone. And I felt so unsupported because this was before Me Too. This is before Time's Up. Any woman that said anything out of line was called names. And this was still during a chapter, even in modern land, that was not really pro women. And so no matter what I said or did, I wasn't going to be able to get through. There was judgment. I had friends from college didn't want to talk to me anymore.

• 50:13Speaker 00

  They're like, oh, this, this feels, this feels icky. I don't, hmm, this is not cool. You know, like all the, I was ostracized. I was just, I had a scarlet letter. And that was such a devastating feeling because let's just remember, I was just a young professional. I was 24 years old and I'd been working my tail off for two plus years. I had, obviously teamwork makes the dream work. I still fundamentally believe that. But I had played my role and an important one, right? To get the company to where it was. So to be called all of these names and to be basically just written off by Twitter and the random media and the random everyone.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  And I have big respect for media and I'm not criticizing them. I'm just saying this was the narrative at the time. So it was really hard. I was super depressed. I was paranoid. I was, I actually don't think I left the house for like a three weeks at one point. I'll never forget, actually, I don't even know if I've told this story. Maybe I have. But when I was launching Bumble again, because you have to remember, Bumble launched within six months of my departure. So not the departure itself, but six months from kind of when the legal pieces were put to bed. That was August. I want to say August 3rd. December 1st, Bumble was live in the App Store.

• 51:41Speaker 00

  You know how much work goes into launching something? It's a 24 hour job. I had another 24 hour job of grieving and being in fight or flight defense mode of whatever Twitter was coming after me with. And it was really hard. So I think there was a chapter where I didn't leave the house for several weeks. And when I was launching Bumble, I think it was Business Insider, I can't remember who, they were doing a piece on Bumble and they needed a picture of me. And I was like, well, I'm not taking any pictures. There's no way. I'm in sweatpants and Uggs. I'm not leaving this house. So I went outside in my front yard in sweatpants and Uggs with a sweater on and did like a half fake smile and had someone take a picture on some camera I had at home that I had, you

• 52:22Speaker 00

  know, used way back when, when I wanted to be a travel journalist and use that. And I just had to peel myself back up. I just had to peel myself off the ground. And I was lucky to have a couple really strong people in my life that had my back, like my now husband, like Andre. There were a couple of people that were like, I don't care what people say about you. I don't care. We believe in you. We know that you're capable. We know you're smart. We know that you can do this again. So you need to go chase your dreams. You're not done. And, you know, very soon after leaving Tinder, in this moment of despair and drinking too much, not like socially, like at

• 53:06Speaker 00

  home, like very depressed, trying to numb myself in any way I could, I had this moment where I was like, I have to solve this. Part of my psyche is find a problem and solve it. It could be anything, micro, anything. It's, it's just part of the way my brain works. And the being attacked on the internet felt like such a big problem to me. And I felt like this was something so many people were going through. So many young girls in particular were going through, being bullied. And I thought to myself, I'm an adult. Like, I can get in a car and I can drive to a grocery store and I can do all these things. These young women are trapped at home after school, often in bad circumstances at home, and they're being abused by people they actually know. How

• 53:48Speaker 00

  horrible would that be? I'm getting attacked by strangers. They're getting attacked by friends at school and strangers not really in the sense of stranger to us, like proxy strangers, right? Friends of friends. And I was like, I have to fix this. I have to fix this. It's my duty on earth to fix this. So I started quite literally with a pencil and a pen. I still have the early drawings, sketching out a new social network. It was called Marcy. And the only currency and the only way to communicate was compliments. So instead of saying, you know, you're stupid, or you don't look good, or you're this, or body shaming, or that, or even, hey, you're so skinny, something that is negative, even though it feels positive. I wanted it just to be compliments.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  And so it was essentially supposed to be the girls' dressing room, the girls' bathroom. And when young women go out to nightclubs, there's this saying that young women are so nice to each other in the bathroom at a nightclub. And I wanted to bring that to life. So I started sketching that out to basically rebuild myself. And long story short, eventually Bumble would become what it was. You know, I met Andre and then, I mean, I had known him, but I reconnected with Andre. One thing led to the next, and Bumble was born. So I think what people don't realize, they've, I've had a lot of people that maybe I went to college with, they're like, oh, my God, you've had such a good career. You're so lucky. You're so successful. I'm like, hmm, it's been pretty dark. It's been pretty heavy.

• 55:15Steven Bartlett?

  Dark.

• 55:18Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a, because I reflect on my darkest times and I can typically remember a worse day. A day when, you know, I just couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. What was your darkest day throughout that period?

• 55:32Speaker 00

  I've several that are pretty visceral and memorable. But one that I think maybe is something people can actually tangibly like put themselves into this moment. I mean, you can imagine there's lots of tough moments along the way. But one was, we had worked so hard to build Bumble in stealth mode, starting from about August through, call it November. So head down four or five months of just like 24 hours a day back into the, you know, the grind. And it was really important to me not to attach my name to it. I was so scared of putting my name on it.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  I didn't want to muddy it. I was like, you know, I'm in the media as this like scandalous person right now and I don't, I don't want to be known for, I don't want, I don't want this to be about me. I want this to be about what the product is and what the mission is. I want women to go first in their relationships. I want women to be empowered. And I remember we'd worked so hard to keep my name out of it. I had like a pseudo email that I was using to reach out to certain people that I thought could, you know, maybe leak that this was happening. And we were going to launch in mid-December. They'd gone on this investigative adventure of sorts of following all my early employees and ambassadors.

• 56:58Speaker 00

  And they were going through all the images and piecing together this story about this new product that was launching. And the headline said, something along the lines, maybe not verbatim, but it was really hurtful. It was like, basically, I'm summarizing how I internalized it. Surprise, surprise, like the scorned woman from Tinder launches her own dating app, but women go first. And, oh, I hear she really likes bees. She's called a bumble. Like, it was so hurtful. And I just sobbed and I sobbed because there had been so much work that went into coming back, rising from the ashes and pulling myself back up. And to keep it in this kind of stealth position away from me and not make it about that, not

• 57:43Speaker 00

  make it about that, you know, I, women have a- And everyone, every gender, we all have an opportunity and I believe a human right to start over. We all have the right to start over. None of us should be held hostage to a certain chapter in our lives or a certain thing in our lives. Like, we should all be able to get back up, right? If we're still breathing, you have that right. And that felt like my right to starting over on my own terms was taken from me. And it was really violating. So in my typical fashion, I cried about it for a while. And then I pivoted. So I called my early team. I said, we have a, we have a problem. Whoever it was, has

• 58:26Speaker 00

  basically leaked this information, which is their job. I, you know, I don't hold them again. It's not their fault. But they basically have, have told everybody that we're doing this app and that it's coming out and that I'm behind it. But they're kind of missing the point of what the product really is. I think they're misunderstanding why we're starting this. I think for them, it read more of like in a revenge novel, right? Which was not the case. It was about mercy then evolving into a positive dating space. So I said, okay, you're all jumping out of an airplane tomorrow. And they're like, what do you mean, jumping out of an airplane tomorrow? And I said, you have to explain that it's

• 59:10Speaker 00

  just not that scary to talk first on an app as a woman. Like, if, if women can jump out of an airplane, they can certainly send the first message. And so we just pivoted. And we went and filmed this little launch video of literally my first three employees jumping out of an airplane. And the whole tagline was, it was something along the lines of like, if we can jump out of an airplane, you can send the first text. And that was kind of how we reframed the discussion and took, you know, took control of the narrative.

• 59:38Steven Bartlett?

  That point about your right to kind of reinvent yourself and not be defined by a previous chapter, I think is so important. It's also why, you know, I've got to be honest, like, I don't, I don't love talking about it, like the Tinder stuff, because it, it's, it's a, it's a step in your journey. It's an important contextual step.

• 59:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course.

• 59:56Steven Bartlett?

  You know, it's, it's inspired you in, in many ways, in terms of your mission and your vision and your, and all of those things. But I'm glad we could, we could fill that context. I, when I asked the, the question about your, your hardest, your hardest moment in the darkest times. I was reflecting on some of the quotes I'd read about when you were in that moment, feeling like maybe life wasn't worth living anymore.

• 1:00:18Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Steven Bartlett?

  And that kind of thing. And it's hard, it's hard to, I think, for a lot of people, I hope it's hard for them to understand that mindset, like getting to that place. I hope it's hard for them to understand. I hope they've never had to experience it. But for someone that has, what is that like? Are those, are those words real? That, that, that prospect of like, maybe, maybe life would be better without me in it?

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  I most certainly felt that way at times, for sure. Leaving, when I was going through that chapter, I most certainly had moments where I thought, well, this is it. I mean, what, what now? I, 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'm going to be suffocated by a definition a group of strangers have assigned to me. And my tribe is gone. I'm gone. Everything

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  I can identify with this, you know, this startup world can feel like a cult at times, right? And so that all felt gone. And I told you earlier, you disassociate from a lot of the life you once had, friends, family, you lose connection with them when you're trying to build something, right? And so when you leave that thing you're building, it's not like, okay, let me just go home to grandma's house. That doesn't feel like an option. You don't feel like you can relate to anyone anymore. And I just did not understand what the point was anymore. But it was right in that moment, literally. I want to say like,

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  that was the same, same piece of the same storm.

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  Of feeling such a deep pain in such a deep problem, which the problem to me was toxic internet and how toxic it could be and how detrimental it could be for your mental health, that a solution came. And so I really channeled that dark, dark, dark loathing and pain. And instead of drowning in it, I kind of started swimming as fast as I could for, for air. And my air was go rebuild yourself. Right? And so I think

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  that, that, that's ultimately the way I was able to reframe that. And I think the internet can make you feel very alone and very isolated and very lonely. And we start believing it as our reality. Right? What the internet says is not really what's in the park across the street. And I think that's important for people to hear is that whatever you're feeling based on what people are saying on the internet, or whatever you've read, turn off the phone for a little bit and go outside. Right? Because I didn't do that in that moment. And I think we have to realize that it's not always our reality.

• 1:03:25Steven Bartlett?

  Very powerful. This leads to Bumble, which is, which was a game changer in its industry. It was the first of its kind. It was the first of its kind in many respects, including just the look and feel and messaging. That's really, you know, as a marketer, that's the thing I, I always respected. I mean, I really respected the, the point of women getting to go first because I'd never seen that before. I'd never seen that done in the way that it's done on Bumble. But from a marketing marketer's mindset, I really respected how bold, how clear, how much Bumble were willing to position themselves as the antithesis, the, the opposite of everything else that existed. It was really willing to take to bring a new concept and a new idea to the market. When you look back

• 1:04:07Steven Bartlett?

  at the earliest days of Bumble, like the first year, two years of Bumble, now with the hindsight of knowing how things will, how the dots connected, why did you win?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  I'm not sure, did we win? So I feel like we're so.

• 1:04:22Steven Bartlett?

  Listen, how many customers did you have over the years?

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  We have a lot.

• 1:04:25Steven Bartlett?

  A lot.

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  We.

• 1:04:27Steven Bartlett?

  And that's an interesting point that it doesn't feel like you've won.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Oh, no. Okay, so this is crazy. I, in my head, still feel like we're

• 1:04:38Speaker 00

  tiny, genuinely. I'm not even just saying that to you. Like, the concept of going public and all of these things, in my mind, I go to the office every day and I'm like, okay, how are we going to get off the ground? Like, literally, I don't think you understand. I'm genuinely locked in a place of, we have so much more to do, and we have so much more growth to be had, that I feel like it's a reset every day. So I will say.

• 1:05:03Steven Bartlett?

  How is it possible to be happy when you're you're never there?

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  But it's not that I'm never there in a personal sense. It's not like I'm like, oh, I don't feel like validate. It's, it's not that anymore. It's that there are still billions of people around the world that have never heard about Bumble. And there are still millions and millions and millions of women around the world right now in bad relationships, toxic relationships, where they don't understand that they should, can, and eventually will go first in their life. They can leave a bad relationship. They can go into a good relationship. There are women, as we speak, you know very well, we're all watching this unfold. It's absolutely heartbreaking, just advocating to be able to have simple freedoms.

• 1:05:55Speaker 00

  Just wanting to have the freedom to exist in their society as an equal. So when I go to the office every day and saying, okay, how are we going to launch? We're 132 years away from gender parity. Maybe 136, okay? Either way, it's not great.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  And so that's where I feel like I don't have enough time in this lifetime to achieve what I want to achieve. Forget the personal accolades. I don't care about that stuff. I am, I am personally on a personal level now. Thank God. It's required a lot of, you know, self-care, therapy, wonderful husband, beautiful to healthy children. Thank you, God. I am happy now, but I'm not happy about where women are globally. And that I feel unfulfilled because until we really look around us and say, women are not in these toxic, terrible relationships and living in an unequal playing field, I have got to go to work. I gotta like, get back to the office. And that's how I feel.

• 1:06:59Steven Bartlett?

  Pursuing that goal comes somewhat at the expense of yourself in some, in some degree, right? Whether that's your, you know, because life could be easier if you just decided not to pursue that goal. It could be easier.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I could probably be drinking pina coladas on the beach somewhere.

• 1:07:13Steven Bartlett?

  So I always, I always think about this, you know, the, the pursuit of this, of a goal versus like, you know, self-preservation and, and taking care of yourself. And you seem like someone that is somewhat willing to sacrifice themselves to a degree, sacrifice something to fulfill a goal that might even hurt yourself in your own life in, in a sense of like psychological harm or balance or, you know, definitely sleep.

• 1:07:41Speaker 00

  Yeah. No, this is, this is probably the biggest, uh, this is the, this is the balancing act we all talk about, right? But you can't do it all every single day.

• 1:07:54Steven Bartlett?

  Why not go to the beach? You know, why not go and have a pina colada?

• 1:07:57Speaker 00

  You want to go have a pina colada on the beach?

• 1:08:00Speaker 00

  Let me ask you the same thing, okay?

• 1:08:04Speaker 00

  There's got to be like a, a group therapy for like, why, why, why won't you go have a pina colada on the beach?

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  I don't know, I just, I feel very passionate about what I'm doing. And when I stop feeling passionate, I'll go have a pina colada and then I'll go do something different. But this is, it feels like my life's work. And I, I try to be a good mom and I try to be a good wife and I try to be a good to myself and take those times. And I think anyone that sits around and tells you like, oh, it's all about balance. And I mean, maybe they're right. Maybe they've got some secret that I don't know about. But my God, I don't, I don't, I don't think any day is fully balanced, right? I don't think any of us go to sleep every night feeling like, wow, I just got a 10 out of 10 on every single category today. I think

• 1:08:56Speaker 00

  you just do your best. And for me, I get joy out of pushing this brand forward. I get joy out of the women that come up to me and tell me that they were in an abusive marriage for 20 years and read a story about Bumble and left their spouse and got on Bumble and are happy and healthy relationships. Like, that's what this is all about for me.

• 1:09:23Steven Bartlett?

  It looked like that question made you a bit emotional.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, I am emotional about it because I'm kind of doing this for my 17 year old self also, right? I don't want another generation of me at 17. I don't want another generation of that. I don't want another generation of young women that felt unworthy and felt lesser than and felt like they needed a man to tell them what to do. And I just don't, I don't want to see that as this next wave of 17 year olds. So I also don't want to see all these women suffering from domestic and emotional abuse across the world. So, you know, there's lots of ways and a lot of people around the world that are doing a lot to fix this. But

• 1:10:11Speaker 00

  I don't have those skill sets. I don't have, you know, maybe I don't know how to do what they know how to do, and I know how to do this. So I feel like I better just lean in while I can. And plus, I'm definitely old for the Gen Z people out there, but I'm 33. So I feel like, you know, I might have a little bit more in me somewhere.

• 1:10:31Steven Bartlett?

  If you're old, I'm old. So I thought we're

• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  How old are you?

• 1:10:34Steven Bartlett?

  I just turned thirty. So

• 1:10:36Speaker 00

  Wait, you're three years younger than me. That's like

• 1:10:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I just turned thirty.

• 1:10:38Speaker 00

  It's like five decades younger than me.

• 1:10:40Steven Bartlett?

  No, it's not. We're in the same, we're in the same school.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  Well, happy birthday, whenever it was.

• 1:10:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it was about a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:10:46Speaker 00

  Well, happy birthday.

• 1:10:46Steven Bartlett?

  Do you want a tissue?

• 1:10:47Speaker 00

  No, I'm okay.

• 1:10:47Steven Bartlett?

  You sure?

• 1:10:48Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Steven Bartlett?

  That for me, that answer really answers a lot of questions because it shows where the drive is coming from. And that's the reason why the pina coladas seem like a lower priority than the mission. Going back to the question, which I kind of took us off on a tangent away from about why you think Bumble won?

• 1:11:10Steven Bartlett?

  Or was successful, was able to break through into that very small category of dating apps or your dating sites? Where there's really only like a handful of real players. Why? Why? Because I know, you know, I have to say something. I know that the other dating apps, because I was sometimes in the room, tried to launch a dating apps for themselves. So they, they took their existing network, they tried to launch a new dating app into it and it didn't work.

• 1:11:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Steven Bartlett?

  I've seen it happen over and over again. I know Michelle.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's great.

• 1:11:40Steven Bartlett?

  She's one of the people I used to work with when we were doing the marketing at Purdue.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 1:11:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, she's, I, I think what she's done is awesome.

• 1:11:46Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I love Peanut. It's, it's great. But, but I, but I know it's not easy and I know it's not chance. And I know it's not luck because I've seen, I can't tell you at Social Chain, how many times we had dating apps come to us and say, can you do our marketing? Maybe 200 times?

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

  There's 5,000 dating apps in the App Store?

• 1:12:04Steven Bartlett?

  It's impossible. It's impossible. It's almost impossible to start a new one because of the network effects and all of those things.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  It's impossible.

• 1:12:11Steven Bartlett?

  Impossible. So why you? How you? How?

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Every other dating product until Bumble had been solving for the wrong side of the coin. They've been thinking about men. That's all. They woke up in the morning and thought about how to make a dating app good for guys. And they had it backwards. Why are you solving for men when this is all about what women need and what women want? No one was asking women, you think women want to get abused on the internet? Think again, like, find me a woman that enjoys being harassed on a dating app, not one. But for some reason, that problem didn't strike anyone as a problem. So

• 1:13:00Speaker 00

  It's not that hard to say, wait a second. This is a double sided marketplace. This product can't survive without women, yet we're exploiting and degrading women on a lot of these products, not naming any names. What? And so for me, it was all about taking that original concept of Mercy, a kind space for women, a safe space for women. And to Andre's push, gotta give him, gotta give him some credit for being so interested in dating, right? I was so turned off of dating. I wanted nothing to do with dating. When Andre was like, oh, let's do a dating, you know, come be my CMO. I was like, first of all, I'm not for hire. I'm starting my own company. I must be founder and CEO, whatever I do next. I cannot work for someone.

• 1:13:45Speaker 00

  I just, I have to be my own boss. And, um, you know, I gotta give him a lot of credit because he trusted that. And he said, okay, do whatever you want to do. But it just, my one stipulation is it has to be in dating because I know dating and I want to get behind a dating product. So when I was sitting there, you know, we were, we had kind of agreed to, okay, we're going to do this dating app. What's it gonna be? Well, what about Mercy? I want it to be Mercy. I want it to be about women and I want to be women only. I want it safety and kindness and accountability. There's no internet spaces for women. Nothing's been built for women. We have to do this for women. And then it kind of just all clicked.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  And I sat there and within literally minutes, it all just wrote itself. I said, wait a second. I know the problem. Women don't go first. Men do. Men message as many women as they can. Women are getting inundated. They never respond. The lack of response is causing a rejection and the rejection is triggering an aggression. And that aggression is now translating into. Harassment. And this is why women are being abused on the dating apps. Because if only they would go first, the man wouldn't feel rejected. They'd feel empowered. It would totally calibrate this whole experience. And I said, okay, great. I know what we're gonna do.

• 1:15:10Speaker 00

  Women have to talk first on this product, and they only have 24 hours to do it. I knew nobody else could conceptualize the way I would explain it. So I was like, think Cinderella, the pumpkin and the carriage. And men can send one, extend on time of day to capture their attention if they want to. Now, we have to also call out something. This was back in 2014, in a very heterosexual oriented dating app experience. The landscape has evolved. We have to be inclusive to all. And so of course we are, and of course we are currently, as we speak, spending countless time and putting all of our heart and soul into how to make the experience better for non-binary, for the trans community,

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  for anybody that identifies as a woman as well, right? And so that's a big portion of the future. But that was really how I would say we became successful because of two things. Woman, making sure that we were solving for women's real problems on the internet. Marketing to women. So when I went back to those sororities and fraternities, instead of going in with, you know, whatever we had gone in at Tinder, I went in with things for women. I went in with items women wanted, cute yellow cookies. Like, I understood that we are going to build a cute brand, not a sexy brand. And that's what set us apart.

• 1:16:33Speaker 00

  I wanted it to feel warm and cozy and inviting and soft and feminine and safe. And that's the beginning. And still, the current through line of Bumble.

• 1:16:48Steven Bartlett?

  What do you like as a leader? Because leadership has evolved, you know, over the last 10, 20 years from like the Steve Jobs days where you've got this kind of tyrant that from what I've heard, so, so hard to deal with that they put him in his own building and only people could, could work in that building if they were really resilient. I had all these stories. I spoke to Was, Was didn't tell me that, but Was, Was is the closest I've ever got to Steve, to Steve Jobs. But leadership and the, the concept of what a leader looks like and how they behave and how they treat people in a post internet world where we have the ability to speak up because we can tweet and glass door and all of these things. Leadership, leadership has changed. Our perceptions of it, how they behave in a post pandemic world, leaders

• 1:17:32Steven Bartlett?

  are much more vulnerable because I think a lot of them had to be really vulnerable during the pandemic to, to guide their teams through. What, if I asked your teams, if I said, you know, what, what's what you like as a leader, what would they say to me?

• 1:17:45Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  I feel like I try, I try. And so, you know, I'm sure I could be told otherwise. I try to be empathetic and I try to think about everyone around me, probably to my detriment, honestly. I think it's probably done me more harm than good over the years because I'm trying to solve for every single person in the room that maybe it doesn't solve anything sometimes. But I really, I try to just be the brand we are externally, internally. It's hard, you know, there's so many conflicting needs as a business. You have a marketing and brand team that want to do one thing. You have a technical team that needs to do

• 1:18:32Speaker 00

  another. You have IPO teams that have to do another. And so you end up being this conductor of a very loud orchestra. And I try to create harmony with people, but I don't know. I, I guess I wouldn't say I follow any, I don't read leadership books. I don't like take leadership courses. Maybe that's something I should do. I don't know. But I just lead with my gut. I just do what feels right. I try to do the right thing. I try to listen and hear what people are saying and I try to listen to other people too. So if one person calls me and says, X, Y, or Z, I try to call the other person and say, what's your version of this?

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  Before I jump to a conclusion, um, I really try to have compassion for where everybody's coming from, but it's tough. And then I also have to put my head down and say, okay, no, sometimes this is just how it's gonna go, right? Because I feel like I can see certain things that maybe aren't present to everyone in the dating space because I've been in this thing for a decade now and I feel like I understand the nuances of it very well. So I don't know. I don't know what they would say.

• 1:19:48Steven Bartlett?

  You talked about creating harmony amongst the orchestra, which I feel like is the perfect example of the role of a CEO. But a role of the CEO of a public company becomes even more difficult because then you have even more conflicting, um, expectations. When you're that person that's trying to create a harmony in all of this orchestra, keep everybody happy, meet all the needs. How do you create harmony within yourself?

• 1:20:17Speaker 00

  So I personally have beliefs that, you know, there's something bigger than what we're dealing with every day, right? Like, I try to zoom out, zoom out into something that we can't even see, right? There's obviously influences of the universe that none of us know about. You and I cannot sit here and say that we know every corner of why we exist and what, what's gonna happen tomorrow. And so I try to just trust the process. I try to laugh. Andre was always really good at that. He would just laugh in really stressful situations. And I learned that from him. It's just like, have a laugh, you'll be okay. And also to realize that we are just a blip on the radar. Like, this is going to be, if

• 1:21:01Speaker 00

  we're lucky, like, Bumble will be like a half page in a book one day, the hundreds of years from now. Like, it's just not that big of a deal. The daily dramas and the nuances of everything. And so I try to just zoom out. Like, is this really going to still matter? This one moment in interpersonal dynamics, or this one moment in, um, a failed launch, or whatever it might be, is this really gonna matter in five years? Is this gonna matter in five months? And I really try to do that exercise of like, how big of a deal is this? Before?

• 1:21:34Speaker 00

  I allow it to disrupt my harmony. Does that make sense?

• 1:21:37Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:21:38Speaker 00

  I don't know if that made any sense at all.

• 1:21:40Steven Bartlett?

  It does make sense. It does make sense. Um, I was reading things about your, your sort of sleep work routine and you sounded a lot like me. I am the type of person that has a fairly unhealthy relationship with my phone throughout, through, throughout the early hours of the morning, especially, especially when I was running the company, especially when I was at Social Chain still. I'd wake up in the middle of the night. I was prob, I was worried too, too often when we couldn't make payroll and I knew it was payday in a week. I'd be riddled with little sort of slithers of anxiety. When we spoke to, um, I think it's Robbie.

• 1:22:14Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, he's great.

• 1:22:16Steven Bartlett?

  Robbie in your team. Robbie said, she makes no pretense of being always strong and is openly vulnerable with the team. Where you might walk into the office one day and let them know that you've been struggling with something. Might, you might be anxious or struggling with anxiety that day and encourage your other team members, if they're feeling the same way, to take the time that they need.

• 1:22:37Speaker 00

  Well, that's really nice of him, but yeah, I mean, vulnerability is, it has to be authentic. I've watched so many people the last few years ride this vulnerability trend. And I'm like, that's not real vulnerable. Like vulnerability can't be a scapegoat or an exit or a crutch. For me,

• 1:22:58Speaker 00

  I don't know, I just, I just tell the truth. If I'm having postpartum depression back when, after my first baby, I would just say that to my all hands because that was the truth. And why would I be anything other than truthful? If I want to lead a company that tells the truth and I want to run a business that instills behaviors that are truthful and, and healthy and, and better, like, why would I want to operate in any way that's disingenuous to that? So I just get up and just try to tell the truth.

• 1:23:28Steven Bartlett?

  Convention would say, well, that's not, leaders are strong and then they don't, they don't have any problems and they, they're always tough and they, you know, they, you know, so what if? And this is honestly what I used to worry about. I used to think, well, if I, if I'm truly honest, that, that things affect me too. My team are going to think I'm weak and then I can't lead them. And that's the kind of narrative that ran out in my head.

• 1:23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, but and I get that. But the reality is everyone's everyone's feeling something. And I'm in a connection business. How can I run a connection company if I can't connect? And the only way you can connect is through vulnerability. It's the only way to connect with anyone. I'm being very vulnerable with you right now because we're sitting here connecting, so I might as well, you know, I could sit here and be like, well, it's a business book I read, you know, there's this theory of like, you know, this many hours a day do this and like, that's just not my vibe.

• 1:24:25Steven Bartlett?

  We sit here in 10 years' time and we say that that was a really successful 10 years for Bumble. What would have happened in those 10 years?

• 1:24:33Speaker 00

  We would have built world-class features that were industry-changing for safety and trust on the Internet. We would have become the safest platform for women, not only to date, but to find any trusted contact that they need. A mentor, a mentee, a babysitter, a friend, somebody that has the same illness as them, as rare as it might be, somebody who is struggling with any type of mental health crisis. The platform to find anyone on a trusted, safe wavelength. And we would have also gone and created a suite of laws to actually build real legislature

• 1:25:13Speaker 00

  around the gaps that exist for physical and digital accountability as it pertains to women's well-being. And we would have scaled globally to every corner of the earth where women need us the most. And we would be a trusted product for them to find their innate strength to quite literally make the first move out of something bad and into something good. And we would have built a brand that showed everybody that you can have mission and profit live under the same roof and you can be a kinder, connected company, irrespective of how everybody else has done it before. So that's what I would hope for.

• 1:25:57Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you. Understanding you and understanding what's driving you, I would certainly bet on that becoming a reality. And I think that's the most, that's really, you know, of all the business success, the marketing brilliance and all of the things that you've done and the resilience and the getting back up and all of those things that in and of themselves, you kind of, we described them in a couple of minutes, but I, but any human that struggled and been rejected and had been mischaracterized knows that those aren't small things. So for many people, even one of those things is entirely fatal. But there's clearly this unbelievable resilience in you because you said, well, where does that, you know, I think, I think you said it where, I think you said it on a podcast one time where you said, it doesn't matter if you lose your confidence, you still have your drive. And I really pondered that when you said that, I thought, is that true? Because I

• 1:26:42Steven Bartlett?

  was thinking, lose your confidence, you still have, well, you do, you still have the drive, whether you have the, the, the belief that comes from confidence that you can have it, but you still have that drive. And that's exactly what I've, I've learned from you today, which is that unshakable, bigger than myself, a mission bigger than me drive, which is driving you and your company. And that's why I think you're an unbelievable inspiration. But Bumble is an unbelievable bet on the future, a future which I think is inevitable, a future that is necessary. So thank you for your time today. It's a huge, honestly, when I say it's a huge honour, I mean, it's a huge honour.

• 1:27:14Speaker 00

  I feel the same way about you. So thank you for having me today.

• 1:27:17Steven Bartlett?

  We have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest. They don't know who they're leaving it for. So they just leave it in the diary. I open it and I get to read it now. The question they left for you, not knowing it was you, was what is the last belief you would relinquish? It's an interesting question.

• 1:27:37Speaker 00

  Like, what would I let go of? What belief do I have? Like, what, is there a belief I have that I would let go of?

• 1:27:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. So I, he me, I shouldn't give away who it is. He means like, what's the, it's basically, what's the most important belief to you? What's the last belief that you would give up?

• 1:27:55Speaker 00

  Oh, the last belief that I would give up is that people. Are inherently good, somewhere, deep down, that rejection and insecurity and lack of communication drive cruelty and that I'm not going to give up on a world where we can actually connect good people together, because I think there's a lot of, lot of good people out there that just need a kinder way to connect.

• 1:28:23Steven Bartlett?

  Amen. Thank you, Whitney.

• 1:28:25Speaker 00

  Thank you.