Founder: Whitney Wolfe Herd
Before founding Bumble, Whitney was the Co-Founder and VP of Marketing at Tinder, where she came up with the name and led the company's growth on college campuses. Whitney was forced to leave Tinder when her Co-Founder and ex-boyfriend became "verbally controlling and abusive". She filed a sexual harassment lawsuit and ended up settling for more than $1 million. The experience made her think about the power dynamic in dating, where men are expected to make the first move but risk rejection "that can fuel all the ugly stuff, like aggression and abuse". With this in mind, she decided to launch the Bumble dating app, where women make the first move, changing the current gender dynamic. Her main goal was to create a comfortable and empowering space for women.
Bumble is a dating app where women are required to initiate the conversation once a match has been made. It has since expanded to include friendship matching and professional networking. Bumble IPO'd this morning at a value of over $8 billion. At 31, Whitney is the youngest woman to take a large company public in the US as CEO.
"No successful entrepreneur ever woke up and was like, 'I want to be an entrepreneur...' Almost every successful entrepreneur woke up and experienced or identified a problem that they passionately and vigorously wanted to solve..." - Whitney
Sources: Rolling Stone, Business Insider, Financial Times, Bloomberg, Thought Economics, Bumble website