Bumble ft. Whitney Wolfe Herd

7 principles from the founder who turned a painful exit into a billion-dollar company — how Whitney Wolfe Herd built Bumble after leaving Tinder.

With Whitney Wolfe Herd

"I didn't want to build another dating app. I wanted to build a network where women were in control. The app was just the wedge. Everything else came from that one question: what would change if women made the first move?"

Whitney Wolfe Herd, on the episode

Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded Tinder in 2012 and was instrumental in its early success. In 2014 she left under painful circumstances, filing a sexual harassment lawsuit that was settled out of court. She wasn't planning to start another company. She was planning to disappear. Then Andrey Andreev, the founder of Badoo, convinced her to build a women-focused social network. She insisted on one non-negotiable: women make the first move. Bumble launched in December 2014. Seven years later, Wolfe Herd rang the IPO bell at 31 holding her 18-month-old son — becoming the youngest woman to take a company public. This is the story of how she did it, and the specific principles that made the model impossible to copy.