LOUISE TROEN

VICE - PRESIDENT OF INTERNATIONAL MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS AT BUMBLE

Louise Troen was working in fashion PR when a chance meeting in 2014 with Whitney Wolfe, CEO of dating and networking app Bumble, “changed her life” and led to her joining the “Hive”. “There were six people in the company and I’d sometimes work out of a deckchair in our co-working space when we ran out of desks,” she recalls. Forbes recently valued Bumble at $1 billion.

As you’d expect from the female-focused app, the team is dominated by women. “What we achieve creatively is much more interesting as a result,” says Troen. “Someone comes in and says, ‘I was made to feel rubbish about my body this weekend,’ so we sit down and try to work out how we can inspire body confidence in women. We are identifying real experiences, and we’re busy creating campaigns to try and solve them.”

“Technology needs more diversity, not just more women, because the people developing exciting initiatives like AI, which has the potential to better our lives, need to represent the wider community,” she says. “The #Metoo movement has created a space for women to talk and be listened to, and it’s definitely trickled down. There’s a microscope now on technology and that’s very much needed.”

Although these days she heads up huge campaigns across multiple global time zones, Troen says she’ll never forget one of her very first tasks at a PR agency, “putting biscuits on plates in conference rooms and getting a biscuit thrown at me”. Clearly the perpetrator of biscuit-gate didn’t follow Troen’s best business advice: “Treat everyone like they’re your next boss. You never know who might become conducive to your next step.” Her second-favourite mantra is on Bumble billboards: “Glass ceilings make great dancefloors.”