Bumble’s Founder Whitney Wolfe-Herd Becomes the Youngest Self-Made Female CEO-Turned-Billionaire
The dating app founder has been striving since 2014 to create a product-centered around women which will now make her a billionaire as it goes onto the public market.
Whitney Wolfe Herd’s story has been in the making for less than a decade. Wolfe Herd started at Tinder which she helped to build before her male coworkers turned on her. She sued the company for sexual harassment and the alleged notion that they had stripped her of the co-founder title. She’d already had the idea forming in her head of what she wanted Bumble to look like; now she had the spark that motivated her to turn it into a reality.
Bumble was founded with the groundbreaking philosophy that women should make the first move–something that is still considered controversial in the dating world. As of 2020, the app had 100 million users. The dating service is not solely used for the purpose of finding love because it expanded its use to networking for potential business relationships and friendships for women as well.
Today, @Bumble becomes a public company. This is only possible thanks to the more than 1.7 billion first moves made by brave women on our app — and the pioneering women who paved the way for us in the business world. To everyone who made today possible: Thank you. #BumbleIPO 💛🐝 pic.twitter.com/OMLNGNvECB
— Whitney Wolfe Herd (@WhitWolfeHerd) February 11, 2021
In a bold move in 2018, the CEO decided to take Bumble to India in the hopes of helping women upend the extremely patriarchal dating system as well as the sexual harassment and violence these women face. She told CNN, “We need to go where we’re needed the most. The most traditional, the most misogynistic mindsets globally — those markets for us are completely wide-open prairies. Just because something is not as progressive as another place in the world doesn’t mean there’s not a desire for that.”
While Bumble loves breaking the glass ceiling everywhere it goes, its historic accomplishments will forever put Wolfe Herd in the limelight as she makes history as CEO. Putting Bumble on the stock market made her the youngest woman to ever do so, and she did it with her one-year-old son in her arms.
Wow, the outpouring of love and support for @Bumble, our team, and our IPO is so overwhelming and appreciated. I can’t wait to tell my son one day. Hopefully by the time he can understand, women and mothers leading public companies will be the norm, not the exception. #BumbleIPO pic.twitter.com/M5EVEqqaXL
— Whitney Wolfe Herd (@WhitWolfeHerd) February 12, 2021
Whitney Wolfe Herd shared her thoughts about Bumble in a letter to her potential investors, “The importance of a woman making the first move is not exclusive to the world of dating, romance, or love. It is a powerful shift, giving women confidence and control. It ignites healthier connections, which lead to relationships rooted in kindness, accountability, and equality.’
We can not wait to see what else Wolfe Herd accomplishes and love seeing her pave the way for younger generations of women.
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