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MEET THE QUEEN BEE OF DIGITAL DATING
When a soured relationship turned into a lawsuit against her Tinder co-founders, online entrepreneur WHITNEY WOLFE created Bumble, the hugely successful dating app where the girls make the first move. She tells Jane Mulkerrins why women shouldn’t be afrai
We catch up with the woman behind Bumble, the efmale-friendly dating app that’s creating a buzz
Romance rarely blossoms between strangers in bars these days. For anyone under 40 who is dating, single and in possession of a smartphone, potential partners are generally now located in the palm of one’s hand.
Five years ago Tinder revolutionised dating; the location-based app delivered a deck of candidates based on proximity straight to a phone screen, with a small selection of snapshots and a brief bio. Then, in late 2014, another dating app launched with a potentially even more revolutionary USP. Bumble works in a similar way to Tinder – prospective dates are offered based on location, users swipe right for yes, left for no thank you – but, crucially, women call the shots. Men cannot initiate a conversation (even if their ‘yes’ swipe leads to a match), and the female party has 24 hours to start a chat before the match expires.
The app – which now boasts 12.5 million users (one million of those, and rapidly rising, in the UK) – is the brainchild of Whitney Wolfe, a 27-year-old entrepreneur. ‘I’m a very confident person, but I felt as if I was always supposed to be more submissive when it came to dating,’ says Whitney, former vice president of marketing at Tinder, where she was a co-founder. ‘I could travel the world, I could start companies, but I was not allowed to strike up a conversation with the cute guy in my class at college?’ she asks. ‘If I make the first move, I’m perceived as a crazy girl, just for going after what I want. That’s not fair.’
It is an unusually wet morning in Austin, Texas, where Bumble is based, when I meet Whitney for breakfast at a boutique hotel. She looks more like a college sorority president than the CEO of a global tech company, and has a fizzy, perky presence. But don’t be fooled. Whitney recently appeared on Forbes’ prestigious 30 Under 30 list, an annual round-up of the most influential young innovators.
‘I think that early on a lot of people thought women making the first move was a gimmick and that we were just some cute girly dating app,’ she reflects. ‘But we’re serious about putting women in the
driver’s seat and chipping away at societal expectations.’
The second strand of Bumble’s mission is to stamp out the aggressive, lewd messaging that has grown rampant in a dating environment in which strangers can hide behind screens. Pleasant exchanges can quickly turn hostile if a woman doesn’t respond in the desired way, or sexually explicit pictures may arrive out of the blue. Behaviour like this on Bumble leads to users being banned. ‘There are no second chances,’ says Whitney. ‘We count anything that offends a user as abusive and we strongly encourage women to report it straight to us.
‘The men who use Bumble appreciate a confident woman, a woman who has a voice,’ she continues. ‘A lot of men suffer from insecurity and fear rejection, too. Bumble removes that fear as they don’t have to make the first move, so it benefits both men and women.’ She believes this reversal of stereotypical gender roles itself encourages better behaviour. ‘When someone feels rejected, they become insecure and can lash out. Remove that rejection and replace it with flattery – a woman has messaged them – and it leads, generally, to better behaviour.’
What if, I venture, by doing all the running, women are emasculating men, robbing them of their innate hunter-gatherer nature? ‘I can guarantee that back in the day, if a woman was left alone and she needed to eat, she would have to hunt,’ says Whitney. ‘It’s not biological imperative that says men have to ask us out, it’s social conditioning. And we can change it.’
Whitney herself has never used Bumble as a punter. ‘I would have, though, if it had existed earlier,’ she says. ‘We have created something I would use.’ Alas, it is too late, as evidenced by the colossal, antique pear-shaped diamond on her ring finger. Whitney met her fiancé, 29-year-old Michael Herd, heir to a Texan oil company, through mutual friends when skiing in Aspen three years ago. ‘His energy is amazing – he lights up a room. He’s the best person in the world,’ she gushes. He is also the son of her former teacher Kelli Herd at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. ‘She was my favourite professor. I never knew she had a son and didn’t meet him until five years later,’ says Whitney. ‘How weird is that? It’s kismet, or something.’ The couple are getting married this September in Positano, Italy.
Whitney (and her younger sister Danielle) grew up in a small town outside Salt Lake City, Utah, where her father Michael is a property developer and mother Kelly was a housewife. When Whitney was 11, her father took a sabbatical and moved the family to Paris. ‘I was enrolled in a very international school, with the children of diplomats and royalty. It was a very different experience,’ she says. ‘It changed my perspective.’
When Whitney returned to school in small-town Utah, she suddenly stood out. ‘I was mocked by the other kids because I was wearing things that were cool at my school in Paris – tennis shoes and jackets – and doing my hair a certain way,’ she says. ‘Three years later, they were wearing the same – that was when I first understood how trends trickle down.’
Whitney’s parents separated almost a decade ago (her mother
is now in California, while her father remains in Utah) while Whitney was studying for a global studies degree. After graduation, she moved to Los Angeles and got a job at a start-up ‘incubator’, an organisation designed to help new businesses succeed.
Although she was working in marketing – a less male-dominated section of the tech industry than most – Whitney still felt at a disadvantage. ‘I couldn’t keep up with the tech-speak and know-how. It wasn’t really my fault; nobody had ever encouraged me to,’ she says. ‘Again, it’s gender conditioning.’
However, while at the incubator Whitney met Sean Rad, a fellow entrepreneur who was working on an app for loyalty cards. Along with several others, Whitney and Sean brainstormed ideas and, inspired in part by Sean’s own experiences of being too worried about rejection to approach groups of women in person, came up with the concept for Tinder.
Whitney began dating Justin Mateen, one of the co-founders. The relationship ended after a year, Whitney has said, and she claims that Justin subsequently became verbally abusive, allegedly calling her a ‘slut’ and a ‘whore’. Sean, his close friend, reportedly threatened to fire her. Whitney resigned and sued Tinder for sexual harassment – they settled out of court for a reported $1 million.
The media reporting of the case was extensive and in the summer of 2014 Whitney was the subject of vicious trolling from strangers of both sexes. ‘Emails, texts, tweets, people showing up at my house – really weird and horrible stuff happened,’ she remembers, shaking her head.
Partly as a result, Whitney had the idea for an app called Merci, which would ‘encourage compliments and good behaviour’. The tag line would be ‘Compliments are contagious’. Andrey Andreev, the founder of social networking site and app Badoo, was keen to invest in the idea, but suggested its ethos could work in the dating arena. ‘I was reluctant,’ Whitney says. ‘I didn’t want to put myself back in the line of fire with media exposure. But Andrey believed it could be truly game-changing for dating and help a lot of people.’
To that end, Bumble is based on a mission of spreading kindness as well as female empowerment. A work contact suggested the name for the app. ‘Women are in control in the bee society – the queen bees – and it encapsulates what we’re trying to do,’ explains Whitney.
On the 31st floor of a swish, gleaming residential building in Austin, Bumble’s ‘offices’ are, in fact, a bijou two-bedroom apartment. Though the company will soon be moving to more spacious, purpose-built commercial premises in downtown Austin – which has in recent years become something of a tech hub; a smaller, cooler alternative to Silicon Valley – for now, ten employees work out of the cosy space, which is crammed full of bright yellow Bumble-branded merchandise, including T-shirts, champagne, mugs and lip balms carrying bee logos. Jack, Whitney’s giant golden labrador, is sporting a Bumble neckerchief.
The hub of the hive is the living area, where staff congregate around the kitchen island, discussing ideas and debating when they should order lunchtime tacos. Nobody is over 30 years old, and 90 per cent of Bumble’s employees – which include three more staff in New York, four in Los Angeles and 15 in London, where the development team is based – are female. ‘Having women at the helm means our staff think about every user’s experiences and how even a small change might help someone feel a certain way,’ says Whitney.
For example, the team is working on making the reporting procedure for bad behaviour ‘more robust’. Bumble is already a zero-tolerance zone for the sort of harassment and aggression many women report on other apps and sites. Shirtless selfies are banned, as are pictures of genitals (a man sending a picture of his penis, unbidden and unwanted, is an alarmingly widespread practice on dating apps).
In the kitchen, Alex Williamson, Bumble’s vice president of brand content, a beautiful brunette in flared high-waisted jeans, is studying a map of Missouri. A couple who met on Bumble are getting married soon, ‘and their dream is to have a Bumble team member officiate the wedding, so I’m going to get ordained,’ she says. ‘But I don’t know if there’s an airport anywhere nearby, so I’m looking into it.’
In a little over two years, Bumble reports that it has had more than 5,000 engagements and weddings. ‘That’s the best part of the job – helping people meet the loves of their lives,’ says Alex. ‘When this woman messaged about her wedding, thanking us, I told her: “We’re the platform, but this was all you. You’re the one who made the first move and look where it’s taken you.”’
Both male and female friends in the UK and the US report that they find the ‘quality’ of potential dates higher on Bumble than other apps. It learns your preferences – which, Whitney explains, could include men with a certain hair colour, men who mention a love of the outdoors or dogs – so over time it presents you with the options that best fit those preferences first. ‘The
algorithm can’t gauge attractiveness, but it knows the sort of people you are saying yes to. We are giving you the people you’ve told the system you most want to see.’
Women, says Whitney, are generally much pickier than men. I tell her that I’ve witnessed several of my male friends blithely swiping right on everyone, then ‘sifting’ once they are inundated with matches. Bumble registers that, says Whitney, and takes it into account when offering matches. ‘We don’t encourage that behaviour; we want you to find thoughtful, meaningful interactions.’
My friend Alison, who has used both Bumble and Tinder extensively, still prefers the latter, as she feels that the nature of Bumble’s setup relies on women doing all the work and rewards passivity in men. She has found this can cause problems down the line, with men not taking the initiative in arranging dates.
Whitney ponders this for a moment, then excuses herself and dashes to the room next door. ‘Did you hear that?’ she asks the team earnestly. ‘There’s a feeling out there that Bumble rewards passivity. Can we think about what we can do about that? Let’s come up with some ideas.’
Bumble should, on paper, be perfect for me: I’m conversational and I’ve often chatted men up in bars and given my number unbidden to others. But during the few months I dabbled in app dating, I found myself feeling less empowered rather than more so – even with Bumble. While some matches led to conversations, most fizzled out quickly, and the rate of non-response was high. I received replies so crude and aggressively sexual I would never dream of repeating them here, and on several occasions I was ‘ghosted’ a matter of hours before I was supposed to meet up with a match. Ghosting – where a person cuts off contact, disappearing completely with no explanation – has become an epidemic in dating, but Whitney is shocked to hear it’s happened to me on Bumble.
‘We are trying to fix it. We’re running a big campaign soon called Ghostbusters,’ she says. ‘This behaviour has become acceptable and we’re trying to break that. We have to keep pushing our message and keep doing what we’re doing, and hopefully it will make a dent in a positive way.’
And that dent, they hope, will extend far beyond the dating game. ‘We’re looking to empower women to make the first move in every area of their lives – in friendship and business as well as in dating,’ says Whitney. This spring sees the launch of Bumble Bizz, which will offer potential professional contacts locally in the same way the app offers dates in one’s area, while Bumble has also become known for Bumble BFF, an add-on to the app to help women find friends in their local area. Will women really look to an app to find friends?
‘Yes’, says Whitney. ‘They’re moving cities, they don’t know their neighbours and maybe they don’t talk to their friends from school any more, because everyone’s busy,’ she says. ‘BFF is like meeting all the nice girls in the bathrooms at a club.’
Not that Bumble is abandoning its matchmaking mission – the team is currently working on a dating handbook. ‘Books such as The Rules and He’s Just Not That Into You need to go out of the window,’ says Whitney. ‘Ours is, like, the queen bee rules. How does a queen bee behave? However she wants to.
‘But please don’t wait for someone to hold the door open for you when your own arms work perfectly fine – do it yourself.’
Bumble is free to download from the App Store and Android Market Place. Follow Bumble on Instagram @bumble
We’re serious about putting women in the driver’s seat