Queen Bee
ABOUT FOUR HOURS AFTER SHE BECAME the youngest woman ever to take a company public, two hours after Bumble’s soaring stock price made her a billionaire, and 45 minutes after cutting into a honeycomb-shaped cake and kicking off her yellow heels, Whitney Wolfe Herd sat on her pink velvet couch in her canary-colored office and blinked back tears. Here she was, one of the top female CEOs in tech, a founder who had created one of the largest dating apps in the world out of the ashes of her own humiliation. Yet none of it felt like she thought it would.
Part of it was the stress of the initial public offering (IPO), a moment she had imagined for so long that it felt almost as surreal as her wedding day. But Wolfe Herd, 31, was also annoyed at the way her story was being told. Her success at Bumble, billed as the dating app where women “make the first move,” had cast her as the Kill Bill of the tech world: a yellow-clad woman seeking vengeance after men tried to bury her. Much of the coverage focused on her experience years ago as a co-founder at the dating app Tinder, where Wolfe Herd was allegedly harassed by an executive who was also her boyfriend, got dumped and ousted from the company, and went on to sue for sexual harassment. On the day she was supposed to be talking about her empire, Wolfe Herd found herself describing the men she had endured before building it.
“I don’t need to justify myself anymore. I’m f-cking done,” she says, leaning back against a cardboard placard of the company’s brand-new stock listing, BMBL, which had just jumped 63% to $70 a share within hours of the Feb. 11 IPO. “Why am I cleaning up somebody else’s drama? Women are always cleaning up somebody else’s mess.”
Except that mess—her history of toxic relationships, the misogyny of tech—is exactly why Bumble exists. It’s why Wolfe Herd designed the app so only women can send the first message when users match on the platform. In an online dating landscape where women—and particularly women of color—are routinely bullied and harassed, Wolfe Herd set out to build the closest thing to a safe space for digital romance. “Honestly, my ambition comes from abusive relationships,” Wolfe Herd told me the night before the IPO, in her suite at Austin’s Commodore Perry Estate. “I’ve never had this healthy male relationship until I created it. I engineered an
