‘The Interview’: Can Whitney Wolfe Herd Make Us Love Dating Apps Again?

That was Andrey Andreev, who was the head of Badoo and was a co-creator of Bumble. And then you faced another workplace scandal after Bumble started, involving him. In 2019 Forbes published an investigation, and he was accused of creating a toxic and sexist work environment at Badoo’s London headquarters. He denied these allegations but ended up selling his majority stake not long after the article was published. It’s striking that you had to deal with a second high-profile case of alleged male bad behavior in your professional life at the same time you were building a company whose brand was about empowering women. What do you make of that now? I mean, horrible. Absolutely the worst-case scenario. I obviously felt sick for anybody that felt the way they felt, and I did not know about any of these allegations, which to a lot of people, they’re like: “Whitney’s a liar. Of course she knew all these things, and she’s covering up for this guy.” The frank truth is I was in Austin running Bumble very much as a stand-alone business. It’s not like I was sitting in [Badoo’s London] office all day and intersecting with those people, and so it was gutting to me. When Forbes called me and told me this, I was speechless. I was shocked. It was really important to Andrey that I be honest about my personal interactions with him, which, the frank truth is, I had never seen anything to that degree. However, I would never question a woman or another person in their experience, and I said that. And I believe those allegations were stemming from several years prior. They were not active.

There was a range of allegations from different times. Right. But I think the bulk of the article was covering things that had been earlier days. I’m not trying to recuse myself from anything. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m trying to say if you look at the early 2010s, we’ve all seen the movies. The WeWorks and the Ubers. When you close your eyes and think about a tech company in 2012, you see beer pong and all the men together. I don’t think you close your eyes and think back on a progressive office space. What do you take away from this? I don’t know. Maybe I just found myself in two of the only situations, or was this painting a bigger theme of what was pervasive in tech culture at the time?

The other thing about that period is that it’s such a moment of tech optimism. All these apps were coming out, they were backed by incomprehensible amounts of money. They promised to solve so many of the world’s problems. Did you believe that back then? I did. To be able to get on an app, see who’s around you, instantly connect with them and all of a sudden end up on a date with someone that you never would have met if it had not been for this interface, that felt really transformational. So did being able to order a black car on Uber. We were just at this moment — gosh, if any Gen Z people are listening to us right now, they are going to be like: “These people, what? Did they live in the dark ages?” [Laughs]

Hey, listen, I remember the time before cellphones. So you know where I’m going with this. That was a huge leap in terms of efficiency and ease. I couldn’t believe we were in the center of this, and then — and I don’t say this in a self-promotional way at all — it’s really hard to do it twice. So many people over the years have been like, “Gosh, she’s just lucky, she wore a lot of yellow, she’s blond.” I’m not entirely sure people realize just how hard it is to get critical mass on an app twice.

The next era of Bumble, you had a lot of growth during the pandemic when everyone was stuck on their apps. It was a huge moment. You go public in 2021, ring the bell, baby on your hip, and the very next year user growth starts to slow down. What do you think was happening? My opinion is that I ran this company for the first several years as a quality over quantity approach. A telephone provider came to us early on. They said, “We love your brand, we want to put your app preprogrammed on all of our phones and when people buy our phones, your app will be on the home screen, and you’re going to get millions of free downloads.” I said, “Thank you so much but no thank you.” Nobody could understand what in the world I was doing, and I said it’s the wrong way to grow. This is not a social network, this is a double-sided marketplace. One person gets on and they have to see someone that is relevant to them. If you flood the system just endlessly — you’re not going to walk down the streets of New York City and want to meet every single person you pass. Why would you assume that someone would want to do that on an app? This is not a content platform where you can just scroll and scroll and scroll and scale drives results. What happened was, in the pandemic and throughout other chapters, growth was king. It was hailed as the end all be all.