60
BloombergBusinessweek January 27, 2020W
hitneyWolfe Herdremembered thedayshe
decidedtogoafterdickpics.
“Itstartedwithmebargingintoa meetingand
beinglike,‘Guys,we’regoingtomakea law,andwe’regoing
tomakedickpicsillegal!’” sherecalled.WolfeHerdfounded
andrunsBumble,thedatingandnetworkingappthatsays
it offerswomena safewaytomeetpeopleonline.Bumble
hadalreadybannedusersfrompostingsuchpicturestotheir
profilesandwasworkingonsoftwarethatcoulddetectthem
whensentina message.Yetaccordingtoa companyusersur-
vey,abouta thirdofBumblewomenhadreceivedlewdpho-
tosfrommen,whetherthroughtextorothersocialmedia
thatBumblecouldn’tcontrol.“Iwasjustlike,‘Thisis bull-
shit,’” Wolfe Herd said. If it were illegal to flash someone on
the street, she reasoned, there should also be a law against
flashing people online. Bumble is based in Austin, so Texas
seemed like a good place to start.
Wolfe Herd didn’t have many political connections in the
state, but her husband did. Michael Herd is president of his
family’s oil business, Herd Producing Co., and a family friend
of Gaylord Hughey, an oil and gas attorney who’s one of Texas’
top Republican fundraisers. Wolfe Herd called Hughey, Hughey
called a lobbyist, the lobbyist got Democrats and Republicans
to sponsor a bill, and in August, Governor Greg Abbott signed
it into law. Now, anyone sending photos of “intimate parts” to
someone in Texas without consent could be fined $500.
Journalists weren’t allowed at the closed-door bill sign-
ing, but Bumble wanted me to be there. I’d been working on
a story about the company’s pursuit of gender equality for
almost a year. I flew to Austin for what turned out to be a lot
of clapping, some polite laughter, and the ceremonial giv-
ing away of the governor’s signing pens. When it was over,
Wolfe Herd was ecstatic. “I have five other ideas of the next
laws I want to pass,” she told me, “basically extensions of
what you’ve seen today.” She wanted a law against online
harassment, another to end verbal abuse. “Catcalling,” she
added. “There’s got to be a digital counterpart to that.” She
wanted to make sure delivery apps conduct background
checks on their workers. “I want to take it to the federal level
next,” she said. “I can’t say we’re a mission-driven company
if we don’t put our money where our mouth is.”
This kind of attitude has distinguished Bumble from
its rivals. It’s also part of the company’s focus on women.
Everything about the brand—its bright honeycomb logo; its
pop-up parties at Coachella and in Aspen, Colo.; its embrace
of Lizzo memes on Instagram—is designed to attract young
women who live and work in cities and order everything from
wine to potential partners on their phones.
Men are on Bumble, too, of course. Most dating apps skew
disproportionately male, and the company has had no prob-
lem signing them up. But on Bumble they seem almost an
afterthought: If a man and woman both swipe right on each
other, the man can’t talk to the woman unless she contacts
him first. For that reason, and because Wolfe Herd and 81%
of her employees are female, articles about Bumble often
describe it as an app “by women, for women.” Nearly everyinterview Wolfe Herd does,
be it on a morning talk show
or a South by Southwest
panel, focuses on how the
app is designed to prevent
the harassment and verbal
abuse women face when
they try to date online—or
be on the internet at all.
“We want women to feel safe and empowered while using
Bumble,” Wolfe Herd told Teen Vogue in 2015. Two years
later, on CNBC, she said that making women message first
“reduces harassment, creates a kinder exchange between
two people,” a statement she’d later repeat to me. In 2019,
CBS This Morning said Bumble made online dating “safer,”
Inc. claimed Wolfe Herd was “on a mission to clean up the
internet,” and Fast Company reported that she was building
“thefemaleinternet.”Bumble’smessageofempowerment
hasgivenit analmostspotlessreputation.“It’screatedthis
kindofgroundswellof‘Wow,thiscompanyis doinggood,’”
Wolfe Herd said.
Over the years, Bumble’s name has become shorthand
for a company that takes equality seriously. Women who’ve
beenharassedordiscriminatedagainstinotherareasof
theirlifelamentonTwitterthatthere’snosuchthingas
“Bumble-ified rideshares,” “Bumble for gamers,” or even
Bumble “for people at bars so I screen out people who
step on my feet.” Several women told me they use Bumble
because they think it’s safer than other dating apps.
Today, Bumble is the second-most popular dating app
in the U.S., behind Tinder. The company says it has 81 mil-
lion users in 150 countries, though only 11 million of them
use the app at least once a month, according to mobile ana-
lytics company App Annie Inc. Still, a lot of those people
pay for extra features that, among other things, let them
see who liked their profiles ($24.99 monthly) or “spotlight”
their account so it shows up prominently in other people’s
feeds ($3.60 a month).
Bumble doesn’t share its financial information, but for-
mer employees say that such extras have made the company
profitable since at least 2017, and that at one point last year,
Bumble was pulling in about $10 million a month in revenue.
In November the private equity giant Blackstone Group Inc.
announced a majority stake in Bumble’s parent company,
MagicLab, at a valuation of $3 billion, and installed Wolfe
Herd as chief executive officer in place of its controversial
founder, Russian billionaire and tech entrepreneur Andrey
Andreev. In a statement, Wolfe Herd said she would “keep
working towards our goal of recalibrating gender norms and
empowering people,” bringing Bumble’s feminist mindset to
the rest of the company.
This is a pivotal moment for Wolfe Herd. It’s her chance to
affect the lives—and relationships—of millions of people. Online
dating is the most common way to find a romantic partner in
the U.S. According to a 2019 survey by researchers at Stanford
and the University of New Mexico, almost 40% of heterosexualWolfeHerdwith
Governor Abbott
�