Inside Dating-App Bumble’s Bid For Global Domination
Whitney Wolfe Herd opens the double doors of her suite at the Oberoi Hotel in New Delhi in a hotel bathrobe, her face hidden beneath a sea foam–green beauty mask. “Do you use any dating apps?” she asks the trio of room-service waiters as they roll a large trolley table into the room. Indeed they do. “Bumble has changed my life,” says a handsome 23-year-old named Shlok, who could be a spokesperson for the four-year-old dating-and-networking company. “We don’t have time to meet people.”
Wolfe Herd’s eyes widen, delighted. And though it’s 1:30 a.m. on a December night, and she has just changed out of the floor-length beaded Indian gown that she wore to Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas’s Delhi wedding reception (the last of five days of Chopra-Jonas festivities), the Bumble CEO and founder doesn’t seem remotely tired. It is mid-morning in Austin, Texas, where the company has its headquarters, and there’s work to be done. Wolfe Herd, 29, is joined by three female Bumble staffers in sweatpants and company T-shirts, MacBooks clutched under their arms. She serves everyone red wine and Margherita pizza. The mood is buzzing, on-brand—business meeting meets pajama party.
A company by women for women: Bumble was founded on this idea before it became fashionable, in what could be called the PreToo era, in the days before power woman T-shirts were sold at J.Crew. It began as a dating app with a simple concept: Give women the agency to dictate their own relationships and overturn the dynamics of online courtship by letting them make the first move. Now, Bumble wants to be nothing less than a purveyor of female empowerment worldwide, a social and professional network as much as a romantic one. The app, which now includes BumbleBFF and BumbleBizz, claims more than 50 million users, and adds half a million more every week. Wolfe Herd tells me Bumble is profitable, in the range of $200 million in revenue last year. “No one has those numbers,” she says. “No tech company at our age is ever profitable.”
Bumble is active in 150 countries, but the company has been especially focused of late on India—on track to have more than 700 million people on the internet by 2020. In October 2017 she enlisted Priyanka Chopra as the company’s partner, or rather, Chopra enlisted Bumble, grabbing the CEO’s arm at the New York launch of BumbleBizz and saying, “We have to bring this to India.”
A year later, here we are, with a rebuilt, India-friendly version of the app (incorporating languages, identity protection for women, and culturally specific marketing). The first of three parties to mark the occasion is held at Bikaner House, a high-ceilinged colonial mansion in the heart of New Delhi, and a who’s who of Delhi’s media, fashion, and business worlds have arrived to sip chili-infused vodka cocktails called Cupid’s Love. The crowd hushes and parts when Chopra and Jonas enter, around 9:00 p.m., Wolfe Herd following behind them.
At dinner Bumble’s founder stands to introduce herself. “I was 22 years old when we started Tinder, and it took off like a rocket ship,” she says, the emerald beads on her long Naeem Khan skirt shimmying as she turns to face different pockets of guests. She’s confident and poised, her shoulders not just straight but arched back, her arms bent in front of her, the pose millennial women tend to take when explaining something. She speaks crisply but at a clip. “I ended up leaving while it was gaining two to four hundred thousand new users a day and had to take action against the company at a moment when no one wanted to be involved in a lawsuit as a young woman.” She is disarmingly earnest, almost unpolished—delivering a welcome speech to 100 strangers as if she’s talking to a close friend. (Or it could be the double dose of Benadryl she took before dinner after an unexpected brush with a cashew; she is deathly allergic to nuts.) “I went into this deep depression to a point where I didn’t think I’d ever leave the house. I was considering getting a lot of cats.” The crowd titters.
What she’s referring to is one of the most talked-about scandals in recent Silicon Valley history. Before she started Bumble, back in 2012, Wolfe Herd helped a group of young tech entrepreneurs launch the dating app Tinder. When she was pushed out two years later, after the dissolution of a romantic relationship with one of her cofounders, she sued Tinder for discrimination and sexual harassment. This was before a wave of such high-profile lawsuits rocked the tech world, at places like Uber and Google; before the Harvey Weinstein allegations and Time’s Up movement. Wolfe Herd says she did not feel supporters rally to her side. “The internet just attacked me,” she tells me, “like ‘Shut up, don’t mess with men’ but very dirty and nasty.” Women, she adds, were some of the worst culprits in this. “I was traumatized by the media and the abuse online,” she says. “It was PTSD 100 percent.” She settled the case, retreated to Texas, which felt like home after her undergraduate years at Southern Methodist University, and became something of a hermit. “I was wearing sweatpants tucked into Uggs, and I was drinking a lot,” she admits. “I would open a bottle of wine at three in the afternoon. It was the only thing that made me feel better.” She couldn’t imagine returning to tech. She considered opening a juice bar.
During that time Andrey Andreev, the press-shy Russian tech wunderkind credited with creating the first dating app, Badoo, contacted her from London. She was reluctant, agreeing to meet, she says, only because she wanted to visit her sister at cooking school in Paris. (They were raised in Salt Lake City in a close-knit family.) When Andreev asked if she would consider starting a dating app with him, the answer was no until she had “this aha moment,” realizing internet dating could be rethought. Tinder, she knew, was plagued with male users harassing women who had spurned them. A new venture could avoid that problem. She would be founder and CEO and retain 20 percent; Andreev would take 79 percent of the company and provide the engineering support through Badoo. She flew to Mykonos with him and a small group of early advisers to brainstorm, and over ouzo and halloumi Wolfe Herd remembered what made her cry over boys in college: a lack of power. “Every time I texted a guy first, I lived in sheer panic,” she says. “Did I say too much? Did I use too many ys on that heyyy?” If an app made women equal partners, she thought, it could be “the perfect solution to our dating woes as a culture.”
The morning after the dinner in Delhi, Wolfe Herd is up early for a 7:00 a.m. conference call with Serena Williams’s team. The tennis champion is Bumble’s brand ambassador and starred in the company’s Super Bowl ad. (Tagline: “The ball is in her court.”) By 10:00 a.m. she is boarding a private plane to Jaipur, where the young maharaja is opening up the palace for a celebration. The CEO settles into the plane’s beige leather seat, a blue-and-white Hermès scarf draped over her shoulders and knotted at her sternum, her aviators nested in her blonde hair, still strict with hairspray from the night before. Her periwinkle Hermès Kelly bag is itty-bitty; her engagement ring is not. The knuckle-size pear-cut diamond was bequeathed to her husband, the Texas energy scion Michael Herd, by his grandmother on the condition his bride never take it off. She hasn’t. Her rose gold Rolex has similar sentimental provenance. It was her first expensive purchase, one Michael encouraged. “I could buy this for you, but you should buy it for yourself,” he said. “You’re on your own time now.”
There’s no denying that. Wolfe Herd has spent the last few months in near-constant motion, visiting new and prospective markets like Australia and China, speaking at eight different conferences, and from Mumbai will fly home to Texas for only 36 hours, in order to celebrate her grandfather-in-law’s ninetieth birthday, before zipping to London for a Badoo board meeting. “I can’t keep doing this at full speed,” she concedes. She wants to start having children. (“Wouldn’t Bee Herd be the most incredible name for our daughter?”) “It’s made me prioritize things and run fast.”
Her iPhone home screen is a photo from her 2017 wedding: Whitney staring into Michael’s eyes at Positano’s clifftop Villa Treville, the blue of the Tyrrhenian Sea bright behind them. The couple met in Aspen five years ago, as the Tinder storm was starting to roil. Michael strolled into the Little Nell with his Labrador, wearing cowboy boots and ski clothes, and sat down next to her by the fire. His opening? “I hear you got a dot-com?” Wolfe Herd still seems equally delighted and horrified by this story. She asked if his boots were slippery on the snow, and he told her he was a cowboy and could handle it. She shakes her head quickly when I ask if meeting her husband IRL is bad for branding. “No, because Bumble is Michael,” she insists. “It is someone who appreciates a woman who can hold her own. He helped rebuild me; then he helped me build Bumble.”
It turned out Michael’s mother had been Wolfe Herd’s favorite film professor at SMU, an openly gay woman in power who demanded her student face a fear of public speaking. The match with Michael felt to her like fate, and Michael was quick to embrace Bumble’s mission. “I’m a heterosexual Texas oilman with two moms, so I look at things a little differently than most,” says Michael. “I’ve had the benefit from a young age of seeing that women run the world.”
Jaipur’s City Palace, the setting for the Bumble party, is a tawny shade of coral that gives the Rajasthani capital its nickname the Pink City. Women in bright saris perched atop the gates throw handfuls of marigolds onto the heads of guests. Wolfe Herd holds her palms up to catch the petals; they match her sunny lace Costarellos dress, which she has paired with tasseled Aquazzura stilettos and a velvet Chanel bag. The only thing that’s not yellow (Bumble’s trademark hue) are the 180 carats of emeralds and diamonds she borrowed that afternoon from famed Jaipur jeweler The Gem Palace. Inside the gates, royal elephants are dressed for the occasion, embroidered howdah skirts reaching down to their knees, Bumble logos painted between their eyes. Wolfe Herd coos in awe but knows better than to pose for a photo with them. Later in the evening, the mother of the young royal who planned the party approaches her to say that she was introduced to her husband in this very place 30 years ago and had no choice in the matter. Tears in her eyes, she explains how grateful she is that her daughter has the opportunity to make her own choices, thanks to India’s shifting social mores.
“We’re at the precipice of change,” Chopra will tell me the next day in Mumbai. “Indian women are at that place right now where they want to be empowered but they need something to help them do it.” Ravi Agrawal, author of India Connected: How the Smartphone Is Transforming the World’s Largest Democracy, notes that Bumble’s arrival comes two months after India’s own #MeToo movement began dominating the cultural conversation. “They couldn’t have planned this better,” he says.
But a conservative culture and patriarchal society with one of the strongest traditions of familial matchmaking presents unique challenges. Ninety-four percent of marriages in India are still arranged, says Agrawal, suggesting the audience for Indian dating apps remains small. “The dating concept here doesn’t really exist,” says Ira Trivedi, author of 2014’s India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century. “No one knows how to do it. Our parents never dated; who do you learn dating from?” Every Indian I speak to says stalking is a major issue on—and off—social platforms and that protecting female users is a priority. TrulyMadly, a leading Indian dating app, lists names as “XXXX” until a match is made, and women on Bumble India will have only the first letter of their first name revealed.
Generally, Trivedi is supportive of Bumble’s women-first approach—if unconvinced that it will catch on. “If you look at Bollywood, the guy pursues, pursues, pursues almost in a manic way, and then he gets the girl. That’s a pretty typical story line. It’s not really changing.” Indian men on Bumble, predicts Agrawal, will be a self-selecting group, and possibly not a big one. “It’s like the Western equivalent of a man going to a Pilates class.”
I matched with two of them in Delhi (having recently signed up for Bumble myself), Pranav and Ravi, and one woman on BumbleBFF, revealed only as “S.” Pranav, a Jain who likes to work out and was looking for “something casual” and “cuddles,” replied when I said. “Hello, I’m visiting Delhi!” but went quiet when I disclosed I was married and researching an article. Back in New York I didn’t fare much better. There was the adrenaline rush of making a match—no matter which mode I was in—and the feeling of rejection when someone didn’t respond. “I think women are still not used to this role,” says the anthropologist and Match.com consultant Helen Fisher. “They’re not used to the rejection men experience all the time.”
Online dating is a crowded marketplace, with users typically on multiple apps and often seeing the same people. “Faddishness is what [Wolfe Herd] has to battle,” says tech journalist Kara Swisher. “It’s a constant marketing game.” But Bumble is not shy about marketing—just consider the expense of that Super Bowl commercial. “It’s not to be lavish,” Wolfe Herd says of the company’s marketing budget. “It’s to show people we’re serious.”
Others have scratched their heads at the appointment of Erin and Sara Foster, the comedians who embody a brand of irreverent, blonde privilege, as Bumble’s creative directors. But Wolfe Herd bristles at any criticism of their qualifications, says she loves working with them and that they speak to a significant demographic. “Trust me, the college girls in Oklahoma matter,” she says, “and if they like the Foster sisters, great.”
She sighs then, frustrated: “If we’re going to be a part of making men treat women better, why don’t we start treating each other better?” It’s clear that Wolfe Herd feels that she has been let down by her own gender in the past. Asked to name her female mentors, she becomes quiet and says there haven’t been many. Of course, Wolfe Herd herself is becoming a mentor to the women who work for her (Bumble has 140 employees, 85 percent of whom are women), and she is quick to celebrate and support her female peers. When her friend the Glossier founder, Emily Weiss, made the cover of Entrepreneur, Wolfe Herd had cookies made of the cover image and sent to her office.
It could be that Wolfe Herd started Bumble to create the supportive female community she never felt she had. “I was painfully insecure,” she says, when she started Bumble, “and I think every great company has a paralyzingly insecure founder at the helm because there has to be a deep-rooted desire for validation.” She leans forward, fingers laced. “What I went through in 2014 made me immune. It was like getting a huge vaccination. I just don’t care what people think about me. If I want to spray champagne, I’ll spray champagne; if I want to volunteer, I’ll volunteer. I will do what I want to do, and as long as I’m not hurting you, what does it matter?” (She later politely follows up that she’s never sprayed champagne; she’s maybe been sprayed once or twice.)
Bumble has plans to open physical meet-up spaces, start producing Netflix-style content, even introduce a beauty line—all of this while weighing a public offering (an IPO would make Wolfe Herd the youngest female CEO of a publicly traded company). In late 2017 its rival Match Group, owner of Tinder, reportedly tried to buy the company for more than $1 billion. Asked why they walked away, Wolfe Herd will only coyly reply, “It wasn’t a match.” At the time Bumble posted on its website, “Dear Match Group, We’ll never be yours. No matter the price tag, we’ll never compromise our values.”
“Being underestimated is my superpower,” says Wolfe Herd. “It’s like Princess Peach is driving in invisible mode.” It takes me a minute, but she’s referring to the Nintendo video game Mario Kart. “There’s Bowser and Luigi and you could call one Facebook, the other . . .” she seems on the edge of saying Tinder but thinks better of it. “Bumble is Princess Peach. No one thinks she’s fast; they all think she’s the token princess. But she’s gonna win the game.”
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Sittings Editor: Chloe Malle.
Produced by Charles Borradaile at Serene Production.
