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I'm legally really not meant to comment on the Tinder Times. And I don't even know if I've told the story,
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but Whitney Wilpurd, the CEO and founder of Bumble. Whitney became one of the few
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women who can add billionaire to her title. The dating app that puts women in charge of making the first move. Making
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the first move can change your life, but you have to do it. No one can do it for you. Which would then become Bumble's
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entire mantra. I've seen all the things that Bumble have done over the years, and it's always seems to be original in
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its nature. It was a lot of these tiny hacking concepts that made no sense. No one had ever done these things before, but if
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you understand what moves and motivates people, then you have this opportunity
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to connect with them. And so that's been the superpower of ours over the years. As 31 years old, you're the youngest
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woman to take a company public. What's the personal toll on you in those moments?
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It's been pretty dark. It's been pretty heavy. Your departure from Tinder read to me
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like it was horrific and sexist. It was soul crashing. I was being
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described in all sorts of ways. I had reporters trying to go through my window and it was really violating. There's a
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whole persona that's been created about me out there in the world. How am I ever going to escape this? I was 24 years
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old. If I asked your teams, what would you like as a leader? What would they say to
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me? I don't know. We did ask them. Oh, so
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[Music]
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Whitney, what is the early context
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that I would have to understand about you and your life to understand you?
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I think probably broken gender dynamics.
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growing up. I So I grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. I don't know if you know much about Salt
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Lake City, Utah. Yep. So it's a very LDS is kind of the
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formal religious term um or better known as Mormon place.
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And my dad is Jewish and my mother is Catholic. So, I'm already total
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um anomaly in this place. And it's a very tough community to fit into when
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you don't look, act, behave like everybody else or have the exact same belief systems. And
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the Mormon faith and the LDS faith, not to generalize, but it's very much a
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community, or at least it was. I was born in 1989. So, growing up back in the 90s, it was very much um a man's world
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where the man is um the you know the bread winner, the man is out, mom is at
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home in an apron and everyone follows rules, lots of rules, uh very strict
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rules in fact. And I think I always grew up with a
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conflicting set of values to my community to this ecosystem I was placed in or was raised in rather and then that
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started to come out in relationships. So my first, you know, real boyfriend that
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I ever had, it was quite toxic. And these were kind of um these undertones
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of my entire life that would then set the stage for my entire career.
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Using that first relationship, that first sort of toxic relationship as an example of how your belief system at
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that point was causing problems. Um could you give me some color to to what you mean there? Yeah, it was a it was, you know, it was
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a new experience for me. I was a young young girl at the time and I think there
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was this set of behaviors I was expected to adhere to to be on his rules his his
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um you know what he believed was right and it was quite demoralizing frankly
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and I don't think at the time I fully recognized what was taking place until later in life but it set the stage for
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me about unhealthy relationships And I recognized just how unequal women were
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when it came to their romantic relationships. So if you were to fast forward, here I am running this business
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where women make the first move, which when I put that into the product in 2014
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was squawkked at and eyes were rolled and people couldn't understand why we
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would do such a thing because women aren't supposed to talk first. So if you look at that moment of a business being
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born, there's so much more than just a Eureka thought. It's really pent up
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years and years of confusion, passion, purpose brewing to essentially be born
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into this moment of bumble. Were you rebelling at all against that environment or that belief system? I
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think there was two sides of that coin. There was the
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side that wanted to fit in, desperate to be a part of my community, desperate to
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be a part of what was around me and to fit in and to fit the mold because
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that's humans. Humans want to fit into their environments. They want to be accepted. No one wants to be the child
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sitting alone at the lunch table. This is what devastates humans to be left out, right? So, there was a part of me
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that so desperately wanted validation and to fit. And then there was a part of
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me that said, "This is wrong. This doesn't feel right. This feels against my soul. This doesn't feel like how
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things should be." And I feel like that's been a theme of my life. There's been duality on on this topic in every
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every situation I've been in. And that's that's part of navigating it. How do we navigate that duality? Because
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we all we all experience those sort of conflicting needs at the same time. Often one of them is like an external
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one can colliding with an internal need that's going unmet. And it feels sometimes like we have to choose as you
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said like the external comfort of fitting in or validation versus like this doesn't feel good to me.
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Yeah. Inside. I think for me at least
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I have to live in a place of authenticity. And I've lived in chapters of my life
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that were not authentic. That I knew what I was participating in or what I
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was doing didn't feel authentic to what I really believed in or what I knew to
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be right. Um, and genuinely authenticity wins. That's my fundamental belief. And
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I think that when you follow and chase that authentic space,
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the world opens up for you. the world unlocks. Sometimes in the short term when we
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especially if we've had a prolonged period of being inauthentic, what we've done accidentally and inadvertently is
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created an environment and a community and a job and a and a and an environment where that's built on that
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inauthenticity. So to make the change to to one day be like, do you know what? Today I'm gonna be authentic requires it
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seems like quite a lot of short-term loss, espec disapproval. people going stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay
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stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay stay in line stay who we thought you were you know be the person that we resonated with even if that was your
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inauthentic self so that like I think I see so many people kind of contend with that they want they kind of might know
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who they are that voice inside but the apparent cost of pursuing it seems cir
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as mom and dad and my boyfriend and I'd have to leave the city and my job and my friendship you know of course you have to leave the tribe
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yeah that's terrifying terrifying It's almost
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unimaginable for people. And I've been there. I've felt that feeling
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before. And I think this is why so many people stay in whatever situation
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they're in, stay in a marriage, stay in a business, stay in a church, stay in a
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team, stay in a you name it. This is what perpetuates the cycle of of the
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quest to fit in versus just truly being who you really are. And
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so that age-old saying, be yourself, it's harder than it looks. It's really hard and it comes with a lot of risk and
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it's scary and it's dangerous and what if I fail and what if no one likes me and what if everyone judges me? These
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are real things, but at the end of the day, nothing could be worse than having
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a broken relationship with yourself, right? I personally think a broken relationship with yourself is more toxic
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than a pseudo phony good relationship with a hundred other people.
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But it's hard to give ourselves that love and compassion. We're hard on ourselves. The things we say to oursel
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is something we would never say to another ever. I mean, think about that rhetoric, the internal self-t talk. We
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would never say those things to other people, right? And the compliments we pay others, it's very hard to pay
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ourselves. So, when you think about that narrative, how can we expect people to have the confidence and courage to be
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authentic to themselves if they're not even willing to accept themselves? So, I think that's a big piece of it, right?
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And I've watched over the years women I grew up with in Salt Lake City just now in their 30s.
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They're coming out of their cage. They're quite literally coming alive and
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they're taking to Tik Tok and to social media and they're taking to all these platforms
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like a roaring lion saying I'm alive and I've been hiding and I've been living by
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standards and I've been living by rules and I've been living by X Y and Z and it's not authentic. So at some point it
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will burst open you know like that the truth is the truth does prevail.
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When you were when you were 18 what was acceptance or success to you? What if I asked you at 18 years old what you want
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to be post uni when you grow up? What would the answer have been at that point?
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Well the answer of what I really wanted to be was not what I would have said because I would have said something to
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fit in. Right? That's standard. So, I think the young women when I was in college all wanted to go work for a
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fashion brand or get a job at a bank or be successful and they wanted to get married and they wanted to find someone
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that they could marry, settle down with, have kids with eventually, maybe not next year, but that was part of the
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program, right? This dating game exists as college students. And
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this is where the undertones of Bumble started to really form because I
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remember being in college and being completely judged and made fun of
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by girlfriends of mine if I texted a guy first. I remember I went on a date which was so out of my character. I really,
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believe it or not, being so ingrained in the dating world. I think I've been on maybe three dates in my life. That
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sounds weird, but I went on a date and then I texted the guy afterwards. And
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they were like, "Oh no, you have committed a sin. A sin. Like you should
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be ashamed of yourself." It made me cry. I felt so embarrassed. I felt so ashamed. And I remember thinking, "This
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is wrong. What is wrong with you? Why why can we not text? Who wrote these
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rules? What are these rules? These ru rules are ridiculous." So this this
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desire to break the rules, change the rules, rewrite the rules was something I inherently felt deep down. But
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everybody's felt that, you felt that, everybody has felt that it's just who chooses to go and actually act on it is
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the difference. Do you I was I was thinking then when you when you talked about um being 18 and having this kind
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of sort of social expectation of what success would look like and then having a family was the orientation of a lot of young women at that point. Do you think
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there are any gender differences that are innate to us that have
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a bearing on the path or the way that we show up that are innate? I not social
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constructs, but do you think there's anything in us as as men and women that makes us want different things from
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birth innately? You know, it's a good question. And I have two little boys right now. And I
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think a lot of this is imposed on us as a society. I really do. I think the toys
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we buy our children and the clothes we put on our children and the shows we show our children, you have to really
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ask yourself, is this not truly forming what they're interested in and what they
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care about and what their ambitions are. I do believe that
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there may be something, and I see this in men too,
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to folks that genuinely want to have a family and have children and be part of
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that type of a life. And then folks that just genuinely don't. But I don't really see it with I don't think it's a gender
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thing. I really think that these are just a personal soul level thing. But I think society
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comes in and puts bows on it or puts trucks on it and says, "Here's your path." So, it's
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it's interesting now raising kids seeing if I really believe this nature versus nurture thing. And I think there's
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components to it, but I think it's definitely more
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imposed upon us by others around. This morning, I was watching my son read a book at breakfast. I don't know where he
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found the book. I think it was something he found at the restaurant. But I opened it and it was a picture of a pig family
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in a little house and you could see everything in all the different rooms. And daddy was upstairs in the bathroom
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combing his hair in a suit and the pig mom was in the it's like the pig family.
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The piggy mom was in the kitchen in a pink dress with an apron cooking eggs. And I was just thinking to myself, here
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is a almost three-year-old and these are the books they're reading and it says, "Where's daddy and where's mommy?" So,
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we have to imagine that we we do some of this to the to the kids around us.
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Did you burn the book? I I took a picture of it and raved about it. I raged about it at work for about 3 hours and we will not be reading the
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book again. Okay, good. What was your what was your formal education per se? What was your in terms
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of university or anything like that? What did you study? Yeah. So, um I went to a college in Texas and I really
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wanted to go into marketing and I wanted to go into advertising and marketing, which is funny because now somehow I've
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ended up there a little bit. Um and I sat down for the test and completely failed it. I could not answer any of the
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questions. It was so confusing to me. It was all about, you know, return on investment and
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television views and it was super, not to be disrespectful, but super boring. I
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was like, this is probably not for me. But anyway, I did not get it accepted. So I studied um international studies
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and that was just this huge mix of big people problems you know
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globalization anthropology women's studies gender studies um international relations I
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mean it was really fascinating and that was the best marketing degree I could
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have ever gotten because it's the study of people why do people do what they do and if you look at the business I'm in
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I'm quite literally immersed all day long into why do people date who they date? Why do they want what they want?
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How do they behave? Why do they get aggressive? What causes aggression? What causes online abuse? Where is this
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stemming from? And this stuff is really interesting. So, I'd say my education really did help me connect those dots.
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And as you leave that that degree, that gap between like the working world
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and leaving university, college, what was that gap and how how what were you
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thinking in that moment? Where were you heading? What were you applying for? Where were you um seeking the next chapter of your life?
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So I really wanted to be a travel photographer, like a photojournalist,
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and I had no training in that obviously, but I was just obsessed with the idea. And it's actually funny at the Bumble
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office right now, we have this photo of this incredible woman that I met in uh Burma
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and she is holding a Bumble lighter and it's my never made it to Nat Geo moment.
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But that was my dream. I wanted to be a Nat Geo photographer. And so I went traveling through Southeast Asia.
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Mhm. And took a lot of photos. And I remember on my travels thinking, gosh, there's
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such a disconnect for someone trying to explore a new country place. It's only
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Trip Adviser. And if you follow Trip Adviser, you end up eating a hamburger in Laos at some version of a hard rock,
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right? And this is not really the experience. I thought, why can't I get to know a local? I want to ride around on the back of a moped in Laos, and I
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want to go understand what do they do here? Like, where do the 18-year-olds go? What what what was their life like?
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like what what does their day look like? And I thought, why is there not an app that does this? Why is there not
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something on my phone that can put me in touch with these people? But then of course that idea fell by the wayside,
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went into, you know, the back of my brain somewhere and by chance one day
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would end up in this wild world of connecting people on the internet. So,
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some of these things were already brewing and already starting to bubble up in ways that wouldn't totally expose
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themselves yet. By chance, you ended up in this weird world of connecting people. What was
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that chance? So, the chance was
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that I went to a dinner in Los Angeles one night with one of my very dear
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friends and she had been friendly with um a couple of these these guys in LA
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and we all ended up at dinner because um I didn't end up driving back to my mom's house that night. It got too dark and it
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was quite a long drive. So, we all had dinner and I was staying at her house and one of the guys at dinner was um the
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general manager of this incubator and was telling me all about this incubator and here I was a 22year-old just barely
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22 if that even 2-year-old woman that needed a job. I needed to make money. I
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needed to find my way in the world. And I had just been kind of adventuring and, you know, seeing the world and exploring
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and taking this very, you know, risky path of not going straight into a
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career and going to travel and going to see the world and find my passion. And he said, "Well, maybe you could take a
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marketing job." And I said, "Okay, I'll try. I mean, I'll call you tomorrow." And he's like, "Okay." Probably thought I'd never call. And I did. Long story
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short, that incubator would be the incubator where we ended up launching Tinder. So, it was um by happen stance
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that that connection happened. But I think it was about taking advantage of an opportunity, right? Seeing an
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opportunity. And it didn't feel perfect. And I think this is a good lesson for people is the way it was described to me
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at that dinner. People think, "Oh, well, she got so lucky. She, you know, she met the so- and so of so and so. That's not
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what it was like. This that concept of Tinder was never mentioned. It was never called Tinder at the time. And it was a
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totally different opportunity, but it was putting my foot in the door of something that would then turn into
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something else and something else. And I think so many people wait around for the
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most perfect headline when it comes to an opportunity that they can't really
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see or read between the lines. And everybody has that potential. Everybody can do that. They just have to be
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willing to say, "Well, this is a stepping stone or this is a door that I could bust open, right?" And I think
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that's kind of how I've tried to approach most things in my career. It's so so true. It's, you know, that
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moment there, there's so many other outcomes that could have happened from a dinner. Um, namely one of them is you just don't
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call the person back. I mean, the amount of times in my life someone's given me their number and said, "Call me." And I just haven't called back most of the time. 99%. It's like all of us do that.
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Yeah. Yeah. But there's a philosophy of like leaning into stuff, especially when you're young, just like leaning in
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regardless of certainty as you've described. Yeah. And people have a I I see this in people, I'm sure you have as well, where
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people have a tendency to be like lean-in people or kind of just lean out people. Even when the world is changing,
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crypto, Bitcoin, blockchain, all these things, meta, all the typically people
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lean in or lean out. And um I think people that lean in are the ones that end up creating opportunity, which looks
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like luck in hindsight. Yeah, I agree with you. And being brave enough to just say even if it doesn't work out, at
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least I explored it, right? I think people what I've seen and it's something that
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I'm guilty of as well in my life is it's a risk and we have to be willing to
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get excited about risk instead of being afraid of it. It's the uncertainty though, isn't it?
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How good are you at dealing with uncertainty without how how how guaranteed do you need the outcome to be
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before you take a step right and for me not very guaranteed personally because it's like what do you
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have to lose right are is are you creating risk for yourself not really but I do think that it's scary to pick
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up the phone and make that first move right which would then become Bumble's entire mantra and tagline and product
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and everything but making the first move and taking that first step can change your life, but you have to do it. No one
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no one can do it for you. And I learned that the hard way. I I had very little support along the way in terms of
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advocates or community. You know, I had a handful of people I could call upon, but candidly, even when I was starting
00:22:57
Bumble, all of my confidants, with the exception of a couple, were like, "No, don't do this. Why? Why would you expose
00:23:05
yourself to this? What's the point? that won't work. There's already dating apps.
00:23:11
They're going to eat you alive and you can get bogged down in that. You
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know, it's really it's easy to drown in that noise. In those in those early years of Tinder,
00:23:22
I I remember being told the story maybe 10 years ago in San Francisco when I was working there with um a guy called
00:23:27
Michael Burch who was the old Bibo founder. You'll know Bibbo. Bibo the old social. Oh, no. It didn't
00:23:33
go to the US. It was just I remember that it was like Facebook here before before Facebook.
00:23:38
Okay, cool. Um and he in his little sort of incubator that I was in when I was 20, they were telling me the bump the Tinder
00:23:44
story of how you went to a fraternity. Mhm.
00:23:49
For people that don't know what a fraternity is, what's a fraternity? Uh so I guess in the UK it would be like
00:23:55
college clubs maybe. Do they have like members clubs or something like that? So basically sorities and fraternities and
00:24:02
sororities are a house of women and fraternities are a house of men and there's different names. So they all
00:24:09
have these Greek names, right? So for example, the one I joined was Cappa Capagama.
00:24:14
You could have um Trid Delta. There's all sorts of them. And essentially a lot
00:24:20
of college students, they do something called rush where they rush and they go house to house and they meet all the
00:24:26
women or all the men and then they basically prep. They put in the name of the one they would really love to be a
00:24:32
part of and then they see who accepted them back. It's been criticized up and down and there's a lot of things that
00:24:38
are not, you know, spectacular about it, but this is a way a lot of people find friendship and community. It's it's a
00:24:44
community gathering for their college campus. So with Tinder, I essentially went back to my alma mater at SMU. I had
00:24:52
just graduated. So, a lot of my best friends were still in school. So, I got access to the campus and I would start
00:24:59
at the sororities and then go to the fraternity. So, I'd essentially have all the young women download it and then run
00:25:05
to the fraternity and then they would download it and then everyone would start connecting. So, you know, is that
00:25:10
good? Is that bad? How do you want to chop that up 10 years later? Who knows?
00:25:16
But that's the reality and you know, can't escape the truth. But so, so you heard about this way back when? I heard
00:25:21
about this 10 years ago because we were building communitycentric apps. We're building something called Blab, which resembles what Clubhouse is now. Um, and
00:25:28
when we were talking about the marketing strategy, Tinder kept coming up. And Sean Puri, who's now who we the company
00:25:33
got acquired by Amazon in the end, Twitch, um, who own Amazon, who other way around, Amazon own Twitch. Um,
00:25:39
but yeah, that was the that was the thesis. It was like should we go to fraternities and go get you know and to
00:25:45
to try and build that sort of isolated tight community to try and get product market fit.
00:25:51
Yeah. Because network effects really really m especially in the dating game. The most important that's why there's
00:25:57
only a handful of dating apps that have ever survived. I mean at least during my time doing this which is almost a decade
00:26:03
now. But what's interesting is there's such a and not to not to say only I
00:26:09
could do this or only somebody else could do this, but there was a superpower in the timing of it all
00:26:15
because I had just graduated and I I knew all of these people. So if some
00:26:22
random startup founder knocks on a sorority door, the police are coming, you know, like you can't you can't do
00:26:28
that. So I felt like I had this insider hook, right? because I was technically
00:26:35
an extension of that by proxy because I had just been on the college campus and
00:26:40
all of my girlfriends were still there. So, they were part of these sororities and all my guy friendss were there. They were part of these fraternities. So,
00:26:46
I'll never forget I took the photo of one of my guy friends back then who was, you know, all
00:26:52
the young women had mega crush on on him. And then I took the photo of my
00:26:58
best friend, um, Danielle, who was very well-liked on campus. And I
00:27:05
went into Danny's journalism class because she was still a student. And I basically snuck into her journalism
00:27:12
class and used Photoshop. And I took the Tinder screens and I put the guy's face
00:27:17
on one and her face on the other and I said, "Find out who likes you on campus." And then I saved it to a file
00:27:22
because this is the olden days at this point. And I went to FedEx, which is like the office supply store across the
00:27:28
street. And I printed a thousand copies. And I quite literally handed different
00:27:34
students on campus $20 to go distribute them under dorm doors and to put them on
00:27:39
windshields and to put them, you know, in their different social clubs and to essentially distribute these flyers
00:27:45
everywhere. So this entire campus, and now in hindsight, it's probably not great. It's littering. There's all sorts
00:27:51
of bad things involved with it, but like I'm just telling you a story. So, um,
00:27:57
yeah, basically that was that was just one of the tactics I I used to go and
00:28:03
put it all over campus. And then I had a few t-shirts printed up that said, "Don't ask for my number, find me on
00:28:08
Tinder and I had my girlfriends wear the t-shirts and we went to the bar and so I gave them, you know, a couple hundred
00:28:14
bucks and they would go around and buy drinks and then when people would ask for their number, they'd essentially
00:28:20
say, "You have to download Tinder." So, it was a lot of these tiny hacking concepts that made no sense. No one had
00:28:26
ever done these things before. I had no playbook. It wasn't like, you know, I was reading some manual to marketing. It
00:28:33
was just what felt around me. It was it was just bringing the real life dating experience to life
00:28:40
through through an app. Um, marketing. There's like so many important messages of of marketing there. I mean, the first
00:28:45
one that you said was was that you were the customer. You were so close to the customer that you understood them. I
00:28:50
mean even you said um about how if another startup had come and knocked on the soriety well they wouldn't even know which door to knock on for a start they
00:28:57
would have knocked on the wrong door got the wrong people um and they wouldn't have understood those people their motivation so like really you being the
00:29:03
customer I think is such a key thing and then the second thing you said about like if I had read a marketing book um
00:29:08
and you were kind of just doing it based on intuition I've I've seen over and over again from speaking to really successful CEOs and
00:29:15
founders how important naivity was like not knowing so important just following your gut
00:29:20
Yeah, cuz then you that's like first PR that's creating something from first principles as opposed to convention.
00:29:25
That's real innovation, right? Like and it creates solutions that are more suited for today and for the challenge that you're solving which no one has
00:29:31
ever had the the challenge of solving, right, on that date ever, right? Um but naivity, you know, this is this
00:29:38
is sometimes why I think some of the best founders don't come from like business school or from marketing school. The best marketeteers aren't
00:29:43
marketing graduates because naivity is such a superpower. It's a superpower and
00:29:49
following your instinct. And if you understand
00:29:57
what moves people and what motivates people, then you have this opportunity
00:30:02
to connect with them on a real level. I mean, we've done things that are ridiculous. So, I remember we would make
00:30:09
these signs that said um they had the big X's like no, you know, like you're
00:30:14
not allowed to. and they said no Facebook, no Instagram, no Snapchat, no Bumble.
00:30:20
This was like week three of Bumble or something, some ridiculous early maybe first year, I can't remember at this
00:30:26
point. And we would post those all over the universities. So there was this association where it was like, wait, I
00:30:33
can't do the things I really want to do. I want to sit in class and Snapchat. I want to sit in class and Instagram. What
00:30:38
the hell is Bumble? And so we were essentially seating this psychological
00:30:44
curiosity curiosity. And then we were actually sending
00:30:49
young women wearing Bumble shirts into classes 10 or 15 minutes late
00:30:55
interrupting a class of 300 people and saying, "Oh, sorry, wrong room." But everyone's looking at this young woman
00:31:01
and or young man, whoever it was, wearing a Bumble t-shirt. So, we were seeding curiosity in this like why is
00:31:07
Bumble everywhere type of thing. And so, you know, a lot of people think,
00:31:12
oh, well, I can just go start a an app and I'll just buy some, you know, Instagram ads and I'll just be
00:31:19
successful. But if people only knew the fraction of the insane everyday little
00:31:27
hacks that, you know, I did and our team did to bring this to life. We were the
00:31:33
first people, certainly the first tech brand to do
00:31:38
humor accounts to pay for the humor memes. Do you remember the humor memes? Well, we we ran out of 100 million
00:31:43
followers on hum meme accounts. So, yeah. So, you know all about this, but like we were way back years and years
00:31:50
ago. I remember reaching out to I can't remember what it was, one of these meme accounts and they're like, "Wait, you
00:31:55
want to pay us to I'm confused. How does that work?" And we're like, "Okay, here's the deal. we give you a hundred bucks or whatever it was, we turn around
00:32:03
a year later, that same account is charging $100,000 a post. So we there's
00:32:08
also something about luck and timing being just right before something,
00:32:15
you know, and if you look at Bumble, we were also beating the woman drum, the
00:32:20
the this this drum of we need to advocate for women, beating this drum of
00:32:27
let's put women first. Let's let's elevate women. Women are not equal in
00:32:32
their relationships. Women are not being treated respectfully. Women are being abused on the internet. Women are not
00:32:37
being treated right. We were saying this in 2014 and then me too would come a
00:32:42
couple years later. So I think we've we've been lucky as a business to
00:32:49
basically be right before the wave and then we've been able to be a part of
00:32:55
that wave versus chasing a wave. And so many people chase a wave. So many people
00:33:00
chase a wave. They look around them like, "Well, what's cool? How do I chase that?" And I feel like we've always had
00:33:05
the good fortune or whatever you want to call it, conviction,
00:33:11
inspiration to go first. And so that's been um maybe a superpower of ours over the years
00:33:17
because you're making those decisions. It's so clear to me that you're making those decisions from original thought
00:33:23
and from like what I think Elon calls like first principles as in what do we know is true and create a solution from
00:33:30
that versus how's it done? how's it been done before and that like and even you
00:33:35
being early to the meme account things just for context. Um we were probably
00:33:41
like probably probably maybe one of the first companies in the world I'd say to to do the meme thing. That's really like
00:33:47
how my business began. We had like 100 million followers on these meme accounts. That became this big social media business, this big media company
00:33:53
and it kind of ecom and then it went public. But it started with meme accounts. It's amazing. It's how I met
00:33:59
I think your original investor. It's how I met Boo. It's I remember speaking to having these long conversations with them in London about we'll make you
00:34:05
trend number one on Twitter, we'll do a Thunderclap. All the accounts say the same like but for you to have been one of the brands that was leaning into
00:34:11
that. No other brands had no and to your point yes the meme accounts were there. You were pioneering all of that but I don't
00:34:18
know if you experienced this brands did not see their place there and the brands that did that I had seen had been like
00:34:26
buy my bracelet or buy my fashion. You know, it was something very consumercentric, which made sense,
00:34:33
but it wasn't the download my app and that was such a different
00:34:39
way of promoting something even for the app world. It was it was so out of bounds for the app space because the app
00:34:46
space used traditional app space Yeah. acquisition strategies. You're right. It wasn't it wasn't say
00:34:52
and the reason why we managed to get so many followers was because um people didn't value those accounts. I remember
00:34:58
buying Beef Fit Motivation which had about 10 million I'll say followers. Um Love Food which had about 7 million
00:35:04
followers and Beef at Fit Motivation on Twitter which had 2 million followers on Twitter. Um just those just that 20
00:35:10
million followers cost me about 10 grand. Oh god. And then the other imagine it's like really good real estate. It's like
00:35:16
buying a house in some crazy part of London a thousand years ago. Yes.
00:35:22
And then all the other accounts were free because I I offered the people jobs that ran them. You'll have a proper job.
00:35:27
You get paid loads. I know your mom doesn't think it's a job. I think it's a job. I think I see you. I validate you.
00:35:33
People like, "Oh, you're exploiting." Well, no, nobody valued it back then. And then they eventually did value those social media accounts. And what you're
00:35:40
talking about the whole, you know, it it was attention. It was it was attention. It was eyeballs. And from a first
00:35:45
principal perspective, you go, "Well, we want attention and eyeballs. They are here. I don't care if it's safe, cool, or the done thing. That's where we're
00:35:51
going to go." I saw Bumble doing that and and I've seen all the things that Bumble have done over the years and it's
00:35:56
always seems to be original in its nature. It feels that way. Feels like someone has had an original thought
00:36:03
today about how to solve a problem and not just they're not just focused on showing what Bumble is. That they're
00:36:11
communicating how you should feel about Bumble. That was always the goal. Yeah.
00:36:16
And I think there was a lot of people that thought it was ridiculous early on. They're like, "Why are you doing a
00:36:22
campaign that has nothing to do with dating?" You know, we did this huge campaign where our team put together
00:36:28
this, you know, huge push on be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry.
00:36:34
And then in parenthesis, it said, "And then find someone you actually like or want to date." And I remember a lot of
00:36:42
people being like, "We're not going to do this. This there's no ROI here. What's the ROI? There's no call to
00:36:47
action. And there's no download in the app store. And what was fascinating was
00:36:52
it built this wild following of our brand. So people that would never have
00:36:58
downloaded a dating app are now wearing our hat. Now their mother is carrying
00:37:04
around a Bumble tote because they're proud of the brand and they are, you know, it created this
00:37:11
untangible feeling, right? This magic. And there was a sentiment that was more
00:37:17
powerful than any, you know, ROI campaign you could do on any other channel. And so I feel like for me, I
00:37:25
always wanted Bumble to be more than just an app in your pocket. I wanted it
00:37:30
to be something that gave you a feeling and a good feeling, not a bad one.
00:37:37
Because so many of these products give us bad feelings and they make us feel
00:37:42
uninspired and they make us feel lonely. They make us feel broken. They make us
00:37:48
feel exhausted. And I wanted us to do something different and our team wanted
00:37:53
us to do something different. We had such a passionate team. We still have an incredibly passionate team. But that
00:38:00
early community of our team is really what made this company so magical, right? It was that genuine purpose and
00:38:08
buy in and candidly naive. Our team was young. Our team was separated from a lot
00:38:14
of our infrastructure, meaning like a lot of the more technical stuff was isolated from the marketing stuff. And
00:38:22
I've been criticized over the years by the, you know, the tech publications and the tech this and the tech that and
00:38:27
whatever. I don't really care. The point is, it's been like, well, this isn't this isn't how Silicon Valley does it.
00:38:32
where are the engineers and why are this and why aren't you sitting with the engineers and why and there was a method to the madness.
00:38:39
It was, let's let this team go out and
00:38:45
paint the town yellow and do it with no interruption, no distraction. And then
00:38:51
let's let our fantastic infrastructure team really solve big problems through
00:38:57
tech while these two heart and brain can operate together, right? And it had
00:39:03
never really been done before in this like traditional Silicon Valley world. My first startup experience is not like
00:39:10
my second startup experience. You learn all the lessons. You learn well hopefully you learn the lessons. I think I've learned hopefully learned some of
00:39:16
them. Um but your first startup experience at Tinder. This is when you know cuz especially when it's moving at
00:39:22
the speed of light light you know I mean my startup didn't move at the speed of light quite like Tinder
00:39:29
did but still absolutely the speed of light Tinder moved at. And there's that
00:39:35
culture out in San Francisco about, you know, move fast and break things, which is I think Facebook popularized. I think
00:39:40
that was their slogan, but everyone kind of has adopted that mindset of just go [ __ ] lightning fast and figure it out
00:39:46
later. Fix it while it's fix it while we're falling kind of thing. Um, talk to me about that. Talk to me about the the
00:39:53
cost of that, what it taught you and and really give me a picture of what it was like in those early rocket ship days.
00:40:01
Well, you know, I think it was so new to everyone involved. No
00:40:08
one no one really understood
00:40:15
what the next day held. Um, this was such a different time also, you know,
00:40:21
Instagram had just had its big sale. Now, in retrospect, not such a big sale, but at the time, remarkable, right?
00:40:29
um still remarkable regardless and it was just such a new environment. Tech
00:40:34
was still relatively niche. Mobile was very niche, right? It was not super
00:40:41
mainstream. Apps were kind of hitting the scene, but not like where we are today. There's an app for this or app
00:40:46
for that. And we were this tight tribe of people that
00:40:54
really probably had not much to do with each other outside of this. But it became this 24/7
00:41:01
unit and we were just fighting every day to keep it going. I mean our blood,
00:41:08
sweat, and tears went into this business, right? So when I left
00:41:14
it was completely devastating because I wasn't just leaving this rocket ship of
00:41:20
a business. That's one thing. But I've just been essentially, you know,
00:41:28
one day in a 24/7 environment with the same people for more than 2 years to the
00:41:34
next day never seeing any of them ever again. and in the middle of that ending up on
00:41:42
the front page of all sorts of magazines and newspapers because of the
00:41:47
narrative of the ending, right? And it was it was extremely traumatic,
00:41:53
extremely. I was I think I was stuck in fight orflight mode for years. um
00:41:59
because you know that was all I knew for years and it had been such a 0 to 100
00:42:06
experience as you know when you're in these startups it's they're almost their own I'm definitely not accusing the
00:42:13
company of being this but they become their own little cult and it's really hard to
00:42:21
go from that one day to not that the next day and then to go end up launching
00:42:28
ing a woman version to some degree within 6 months of leaving. So, if you
00:42:34
can just try to imagine what every day looked like to both mourn and grieve my
00:42:41
exit from Tinder and deal with all the logistical pieces of it and the media
00:42:49
pieces of it which were coming at me, I had reporters trying to go through my window at my little apartment in Beverly
00:42:56
Hills from some rag magazine. I mean, this is just crazy for me. I was a nobody. I mean, I'm still technically a
00:43:02
nobody, but it's not like I was on some reality show and I became popular overnight. Like, this was traumatizing
00:43:09
to me. And, you know, it's funny like the land of
00:43:15
everyone trying to be famous. I was probably maybe one of the only people not at that point, right? So it was very
00:43:22
crazy to just all of a sudden in a very scandalous way by the way I was described in the media.
00:43:29
I was literally painted as this like scandalous gone girl of the tech world.
00:43:35
And it was soul crushing cuz it's not who I was. It's not who I am. So I was
00:43:40
watching this narrative unfold about me and I was in these Twitter discussions with all the most important people in
00:43:45
the tech world and it was just crazy. It was just watching this narrative unfold about this person that wasn't me. And
00:43:52
then I'm turning around in the same breath,
00:43:57
meeting up with Andre, and then I'm, you know, even before that trying to start
00:44:04
Marci, this complimentsoriented, kinder social network, which then I meet up with Andre and one thing leads to
00:44:10
another. And now Bumble is my new path. And now we're starting Bumble and this
00:44:16
is all going on. It was a whirlwind. A whirlwind.
00:44:22
What is What is the the context you're able to share about why they were writing those headlines about you and
00:44:28
why you are ostracized from your as you've described it something that felt
00:44:33
a little bit like a cult, which is actually a good description of how all my companies have pretty much started. It feels like a 24/7.
00:44:40
Come on, we're going to take over the world. It's that kind of it's I mean it's crazy. I mean like the way people speak about what you're going
00:44:45
to do. I mean there's such big ideas and they're such like passionate ideas and then you go from
00:44:51
real world which is so mundane right it's like quite boring out there in the real world to this like super like high energy you
00:44:59
know the there's you know going to be a disaster if we don't do this in the next 5 minutes this is crashing that's
00:45:06
crashing this metric's up this metric's off one day you're booming the next day you're cr I mean the adrenaline you know
00:45:12
what I'm talking about the ups and the downs and the hard work that goes into it and the
00:45:17
skipping meals and the no sleep and everything feels potentially fatal as well at that point, doesn't it?
00:45:22
Fatal. And the other thing that is interesting is you can't connect with everybody else the
00:45:29
way you used to because they're they can't quote unquote get it. They don't get it, you know? So, it's like trying
00:45:35
to like have a Sunday afternoon meal with your family or your friends during that. you're like, I can't like we don't
00:45:41
even speak the same language anymore. So, I'll just avoid them. That's a waste of time. You have no idea what's going on. So,
00:45:49
which in hindsight, I think I lived in that mindset for years between Tinder and Bumble. I mean, kind of coming up
00:45:56
for air now and having time to breathe and think like that's a I'm sure a lot of people that have built
00:46:03
companies feel this way though. I'm sure you feel this way where you're like, "Wo, I isolated myself from a lot of
00:46:08
important relationships that there's regret to that at some
00:46:13
point." Do you ever feel that way? 100%. I was incredibly lonely. I didn't speak to my family. Didn't really see
00:46:18
them for many, many years. And I thought that I thought that something mattered
00:46:25
much more. And you eventually, even if I used to think I was immune, but eventually your body will remind you that you are a human too and you have
00:46:32
needs and your needs are being unmet. The signal will come in many ways. I hear this signal sometimes come for
00:46:37
people. They'll have panic attacks. They'll they'll feel growing sense of loneliness. Their health will give out. I've had certain examples where the body
00:46:43
has just shut down. Yeah. And it's I've gone through that. Yeah. As you know, Intel are now one of the
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you already drive a Mercedes EQ, let me know how you find it. I read that your
00:48:48
departure from Tinder was um ominous to say the least. In fact, that's actually the word that's written in my notes in
00:48:53
2014. And in the early days of the foundation, the founding of Tinder,
00:48:59
you'd had a relationship with somebody. That relationship had ended. You were then treated in a pretty horrendous way from everything that I read online. um
00:49:06
threatened multiple times, people saying that they would they would fire you for things that they didn't have a
00:49:12
justification to fire you for. Um sort of patronizing, condescending behavior
00:49:17
to the fact that you were um a young female co-founder and and how they would take that co-founder title from you. Um
00:49:24
it's actually really hard for me to to read actually just from it kind of makes me a bit feel a sense of injustice in my
00:49:30
core. um you were called annoying and dramatic at certain times when you
00:49:35
raised certain concerns and as a result um you you know you were you ended up
00:49:44
leaving the company, you were fired. I read you fired from the company uh which is even worse when you raise certain
00:49:50
concerns. You then filed a lawsuit um which went on um and there was certain
00:49:56
actions taken and there was a reported settlement reached at one point. But
00:50:01
overall your treatment while you were at Tinder specifically from men read to me
00:50:09
like it was allegedly horrific and unfair and sexist. Um, and then upon
00:50:17
leaving Tinder, Tinder, there's this huge wave of press who are mischaracterizing you, what happened,
00:50:25
and you fall into this situation where you've been in this cult. We'll call it a cult cuz that's how it often feels to
00:50:31
both of us for so long. You come out of that and you're greeted with this wall of like mischaracterization, attacks,
00:50:38
um, from all sides and you're kind of out on your own. That's the moment where you're ostracized from the tribe um and
00:50:44
you're dealing with this wave of negativity. Yeah. So, you know, I'm legally really
00:50:52
not meant to comment on the Tinder Times, but what I will say is
00:51:00
I was literally broken
00:51:07
during that chapter where I was waking up to headlines about myself. Like you said, I was being described in all sorts
00:51:14
of ways and people were calling my, you know, my uncle and my ex-boyfriend. I
00:51:21
mean, it was this digging weird investigation into my life and all I
00:51:26
wanted was to just do my job, right? And so it was a very dark, toxic moment. And
00:51:35
I felt so alone. Um, and I felt so unsupported
00:51:41
because this was before me, too. This is before Times Up. Any woman that said
00:51:46
anything out of line was called names. And this was still during a chapter,
00:51:53
even in modern land, that was
00:51:59
not really pro- women. And so no matter what I said or did, I wasn't going to be
00:52:06
able to get through. There was judgment. I had friends from college didn't want
00:52:11
to talk to me anymore. They were like, "Oh, this this feels this feels icky. I don't this isn't that cool." You know,
00:52:18
like all of I was ostracized. I was just I had a scarlet letter. And that was such a devastating feeling because let's
00:52:25
just remember I was just a young professional. I was 24 years old and I've been working my tail off for two
00:52:33
plus years. I had obviously teamwork makes the dream work. I still
00:52:38
fundamentally believe that. But I had played my role and an important one, right, to get the company to where it was. So to be called all of these names
00:52:45
and to be basically just written off by Twitter and the random media and the
00:52:52
random everyone and I have big respect for media and I'm not criticizing them. I'm just saying
00:52:58
this was the narrative at the time. So it was really hard. I was super depressed. I was paranoid.
00:53:07
I was actually don't think I left the house for like a three weeks at one
00:53:12
point. I'll never forget actually. I don't even know if I've told the story. Maybe I have, but when I was launching
00:53:18
Bumble again, because you have to remember Bumble launched within 6 months of my departure. So, not the departure
00:53:25
itself, but 6 months from kind of when the legal pieces were put to bed.
00:53:33
That was August. I want to say August 3rd. December 1st, Bumble is live in the
00:53:38
app store. You know how much work goes into launching something. It's a 24-hour
00:53:44
job. I had another 24-hour job of grieving and being in fight orflight
00:53:49
defense mode of whatever Twitter was coming after me with. And it was really hard. So, I think there was a chapter
00:53:55
where I didn't leave the house for several weeks. And when I was launching Bumble, um I think it was Business
00:54:01
Insider, I can't remember who, they were doing a piece on Bumble and they needed a picture of me and I was like, "Well,
00:54:06
I'm not taking any pictures. There's no way I'm in sweatpants and Uggs. I'm not leaving this house." So, I went outside
00:54:12
in my front yard in sweatpants and Uggs with a sweater on and did like a half fake smile and had someone take a
00:54:18
picture on some camera I had at home that I had, you know, used way back when when I wanted to be a travel journalist
00:54:25
and use that. And I just had to peel myself back up. I just had to peel myself off the ground. And I was lucky
00:54:32
to have a couple really strong people in my life that had my back, like my now
00:54:39
husband, like Andre. Um, there were a couple people that were like, "I don't care what people say about you. I don't
00:54:46
care. We believe in you. We know that you're capable. We know you're smart. We know that you can do this again. So, you
00:54:53
need to go chase your dreams. You're not done." And you know, I very soon after
00:54:58
leaving Tinder in this moment of despair and drinking too much, not like
00:55:04
socially, like at home, like very depressed, trying to numb myself in any way I could. Um, I had this moment where
00:55:13
I was like, I have to solve this. Part of my psyche is find a problem and solve it. It could be anything, micro,
00:55:19
anything. It's it's just part of the way my brain works. And the being attacked on the internet felt like such a big
00:55:25
problem to me. And I felt like this was something so many people were going through. So many young girls in
00:55:32
particular were going through being bullied. And I thought to myself, I'm an adult. Like I can get in a car and I can
00:55:38
drive to a grocery store and I can do all these things. These young women are trapped at home after school, often in
00:55:43
bad circumstances at home and they're being abused by people they actually know. How horrible would that be? I'm
00:55:49
getting attacked by strangers. They're getting attacked by friends at school and strangers not really in the sense of
00:55:56
stranger to us, like proxy strangers, right? Friends of friends. And I was like, I have to fix this. I have to fix
00:56:03
this. It's my duty on earth to fix this. So, I started quite literally with a pencil and a pen. I still have the early
00:56:09
drawings. Sketching out a new social network. It was called Marci. And the
00:56:16
only currency and the only way to communicate was compliments. So instead of saying, you know, you're stupid or
00:56:23
you don't look good or you're this or body shaming or that or even, hey, you're so skinny, something that is
00:56:28
negative, even though it feels positive, I wanted it just to be compliments. And
00:56:33
so it was essentially supposed to be the girl's dressing room, the girl's bathroom. When when young women go out
00:56:38
to nightclubs, there's this saying that young women are so nice to each other in the bathroom at a nightclub. And I wanted to bring that to life. So I
00:56:44
started sketching that out to basically rebuild myself. And long story short, um
00:56:51
eventually Bumble would become what it was. You know, I met Andre and then I mean I had known him but reconnected
00:56:57
with Andre. One thing led to the next and Bumble was born. So I think what people don't
00:57:04
realize they've I've had a lot of people that maybe I went to college with. They're like, "Oh my god, you've had such a good career. You're so lucky.
00:57:09
You're so successful." I'm like, "It's been pretty dark. It's been pretty heavy." Dark.
00:57:17
Is there a because I reflect on my darkest times and I can typic typically remember a worse day
00:57:23
a day when you know I just couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel. What was your
00:57:29
darkest day throughout that period? I have se several that are pretty visceral and memorable,
00:57:37
but one that I think maybe is something people can actually tangibly like put themselves into this moment. Um, I mean
00:57:45
you can imagine there's lots of tough moments along the way, but one was we
00:57:51
had worked so hard to build Bumble in stealth mode starting from about
00:57:58
August through call it November. So head down four or five months of just like 24
00:58:05
hours a day back into the, you know, the grind. And it was really important to me not to
00:58:12
attach my name to it. I was so scared of putting my name on it. I didn't want to muddy it. I was like, you know, I'm in
00:58:18
the media as this like scandalous person right now and I don't I don't want to be
00:58:24
known for I don't want I don't want this to be about me. I want this to be about what the product is and what the mission
00:58:29
is. I want women to go first in their relationships. I want women to be empowered. And I remember we had worked
00:58:35
so hard to keep my name out of it. I had like a a pseudo email that I was using
00:58:40
to reach out to certain people that I thought could, you know, maybe leak that this was happening. And we were going to
00:58:47
launch in mid December. They had gone on this investigative uh adventure of sorts
00:58:53
of following all my early employees and ambassadors and they were going through all the images and piecing together this
00:59:00
story about this new product that was launching. And the headline said
00:59:06
something along the lines, maybe not verbatim, but it was really hurtful. It was like basically I'm summarizing how I
00:59:12
internalized it. Surprise, surprise. Like the scorned woman from Tinder launches her own dating app, but women
00:59:20
go first. And oh, I hear she really likes bees. She's called it Bumble. Like, it was so hurtful. And I just
00:59:27
sobbed. And I sobbed because there had been so much work that went into coming
00:59:32
back, rising from the ashes, and pulling myself back up. And to keep it in this
00:59:38
kind of self position away from me and not make it about that, not make it about that. You know, I women have a and
00:59:46
everyone, every gender, we all have an opportunity and a I believe a human right to start over. We all have the
00:59:55
right to start over. None of us should be held hostage to a certain chapter in
01:00:01
our lives or a certain thing in our lives. Like we should all be able to get back up, right? If we're still breathing, you have that right. And that
01:00:08
felt like my right to starting over on my own terms was taken from me and it was really violating. So, in my typical
01:00:15
fashion, I cried about it for a while and then I pivoted. So, I called my early team. I said, "We have a we have a
01:00:21
problem. whoever it was has basically um leaked this information,
01:00:29
which is their job. I, you know, I don't hold them against. It's not their fault, but they basically have have told
01:00:36
everybody that we're doing this app and that it's coming out and that I'm behind it, but they're kind of missing the
01:00:42
point of what the product really is. Um, I think they're misunderstanding why
01:00:48
we're starting this. I think for them it read more of like in a a revenge novel, right? Which was not the case. It was
01:00:55
about Marci then evolving into a positive dating space. So I said, "Okay,
01:01:00
um, you're all jumping out of an airplane tomorrow." And they're like, "What do you mean I'm jumping out of an airplane tomorrow?" And I said, "You
01:01:07
have to explain that it's just not that scary to talk first on an app as a woman. Like if if women can jump out of
01:01:13
an airplane, they can certainly send the first message." And so we just pivoted and we went and filmed this little
01:01:19
launch video of literally my first three employees jumping out of an airplane. And the whole tagline was um it was
01:01:27
something along the lines of like if we can jump out of an airplane you can send the first text and that was kind of how
01:01:32
we reframed the discussion and took you know took control of the narrative. That point about your right to kind of
01:01:40
reinvent yourself or not be defined by a previous chapter I think is so important. It's also why, you know, I've
01:01:45
got to be honest, like I don't like I don't love talking about it like the Tinder stuff because it it's it's a it's
01:01:52
a step in your journey. It's an important contextual step. Yeah, of course. You know, it's it's inspired you in in
01:01:58
many ways in terms of your mission and your vision and your and all of those things. But, um I'm glad we could we
01:02:04
could fill that context. I when I asked the um the question about your your hardest your hardest moment in the darkest times, I was reflecting on some
01:02:11
of the quotes I'd read about when you were in that moment feeling like maybe life wasn't worth living anymore.
01:02:17
Yeah. And that kind of thing. And it's hard it's hard to um I think for a lot of people I hope it's hard for them to
01:02:23
understand that mindset like getting to that place. I hope it's hard for them to understand. I hope they've never had to experience it. But for someone that has
01:02:31
what what is that like? Are those are those words real? That that that that prospect of like maybe maybe life would
01:02:37
be better without me in it. I most certainly felt that way at times for sure. Leaving when I was going
01:02:45
through that chapter, I most certainly had moments where I thought, well, this
01:02:51
is it. I mean, what what now? I there's a whole persona that's been
01:02:57
created about me out there in the world. How am I ever going to escape this? I'm going to be suffocated by
01:03:06
a definition a group of strangers have assigned to me and my tribe is gone.
01:03:14
I'm gone. I everything I can identify with this,
01:03:21
you know, this startup world can feel like a cult at times, right? And so that
01:03:26
all felt gone. And I told you earlier, you disassociate from a a lot of the
01:03:31
life you once had, friends, family, you lose connection with them when you're
01:03:38
trying to build something, right? And so when you leave that thing you're building, it's not like, okay, well, let
01:03:43
me just go home to grandma's house, that doesn't feel like an option. You don't feel like you can relate to anyone
01:03:49
anymore. And I just did not understand what the point was anymore. But it was
01:03:56
right in that moment literally I want to say like that was the same same piece of
01:04:02
the same storm of feeling such a deep pain
01:04:09
in such a deep problem which the problem to me was toxic internet and how toxic
01:04:14
it could be and how detrimental it could be for your mental health that a solution came and so I really channeled
01:04:23
that dark dark dark loathing and pain
01:04:28
and instead of drowning in it, I kind of started swimming as fast as I could
01:04:36
for for air. And my air was go rebuild yourself, right? And so
01:04:44
I think that that that's ultimately the way I was able to reframe that. And
01:04:52
I think the internet can make you feel very alone and very isolated and very lonely and we start believing it as our
01:04:58
reality. Right? What the internet says is not really what's in the park across the street.
01:05:04
And I think that's important for people to hear is that whatever you're feeling based on what people are saying on the
01:05:10
internet or whatever you've read, turn off the phone for a little bit and go outside, right? Because I didn't do that
01:05:17
in that moment. And I think we have to realize that it's not always our reality.
01:05:24
Very powerful. This leads to to Bumble, which is um which was a game changer in
01:05:29
its industry. It was the first of its kind. It was the first of its kind in many respects, including just the the look and feel and messaging. That's
01:05:36
really, you know, as a marketeer, that's the thing I I always respected. I mean, I really respected the um the point of
01:05:42
women getting to go first because I'd never seen that before. I've never seen that done in the way that it's done on Bumble. But from a marketing marketeers
01:05:49
mindset, I really respected how bold, how clear, how much Bumble were um
01:05:55
willing to position themselves as the antithesis, the the the opposite of everything else that existed. It was
01:06:00
really willing to take to bring a new concept and a new idea to the market. Um, when you look back at the earliest
01:06:07
days of Bumble, like the first year, two years of Bumble, now with the hindsight of knowing how things all how the dots
01:06:14
connected, why did you win? I'm not sure. Did we win? I still feel
01:06:20
like Listen, how many customers did you have over the years? Like, we have a lot. A lot.
01:06:25
We have a lot. I know. And that's an interesting point that it doesn't feel like you've won. Oh, no. I Okay, so this is crazy. I in
01:06:32
my head still feel like we're tiny. Genuinely, I'm not even just
01:06:40
saying that to you. Like the concept of going public and all of these things in my mind. I go to the office every day
01:06:46
and I'm like, "Okay, how are we going to get off the ground?" Like literally, I don't think you understand. I'm
01:06:51
genuinely locked in a place of we have so much more to do and we have so much more
01:06:58
growth to be had that I feel like it's a reset every day. So I will say how is it possible to be happy when
01:07:04
you're you're never there. But it's not that I'm never there in a
01:07:09
personal sense. It's not like I'm like oh I don't feel like
01:07:15
validate. It's it's not that anymore. It's that there are still billions of people
01:07:21
around the world that have never heard about Bumble. And there are still millions and millions and millions of women around the world right now in bad
01:07:28
relationships. toxic relationships where they don't understand that they should,
01:07:34
can, and eventually will go first in their life. They can leave a bad relationship. They
01:07:40
can go into a good relationship. There are women as we speak, you know, we're
01:07:45
all watching this unfold. It's absolutely heartbreaking just advocating to be able to have
01:07:51
simple freedoms, just wanting to have the freedom to
01:07:56
exist in their society as an equal. So when I go to the office every day and saying, "Okay, how are we going to
01:08:02
launch?" We're 132 years away from gender parody, maybe 136. Okay? Either way, it's not
01:08:10
great. And so that's where I feel like I don't have enough time in this lifetime
01:08:16
to achieve what I want to achieve. Forget the personal accolades and I don't care about that stuff. I am I am
01:08:22
personally on a personal level now. Thank God. It's required a lot of, you
01:08:27
know, self-care, therapy, wonderful husband, beautiful to healthy children. Thank you, God. I am happy now, but I'm
01:08:35
not happy about where women are globally. And that I feel unfulfilled because until we really look around us
01:08:43
and say, women are not in these toxic, terrible relationships and living in an
01:08:49
unequal playing field. I have got to go to work. I got to like get back to the
01:08:55
office. And that's how I feel. Pursuing that goal comes somewhat at the
01:09:01
expense of yourself in some in some degree, right? Whether that's your, you know, cuz life could be easier if you just decided not to pursue that goal. It
01:09:08
could be easier. Yeah. I could probably be drinking pin coladas on the beach somewhere, right? So, and I always I always think about
01:09:14
this, you know, the the pursuit of this of a goal versus like, you know,
01:09:19
self-preservation and and taking care of yourself. And you seem like someone that
01:09:25
is somewhat willing to sacrifice themsself to a degree, sacrifice something to fulfill a goal that might
01:09:32
even hurt yourself in your own life in a sense of like psychological harm or balance or you know, it's definitely
01:09:39
sleep. Yeah. No, this is this is probably the biggest uh this is the this is the
01:09:45
balancing act we all talk about, right? But
01:09:50
you can't do it all every single day. Why not go to the beach, you know? Why not go and have a pinina colada? And
01:09:56
you want to go have a pan on the beach? If we ask you the same, okay?
01:10:03
There's got to be like a a group therapy for like why why why won't we go have a peanut colada on the beach? Um,
01:10:13
I don't know. I just I feel very passionate about what I'm doing. And
01:10:18
when I stop feeling passionate, I'll go have a pinina colada and then I'll go do something different. But this is
01:10:25
it feels like my life's work. And I I try to be a good mom and I try to be a good wife and I try to be a good to
01:10:31
myself and take those times. And I think anyone that sits around and tells you like, "Oh, it's all about balance." I
01:10:38
mean, maybe they're right. Maybe they've got some secret that I don't know about, but my god, I don't I don't I don't
01:10:45
think any day is fully balanced, right? I don't think any of us go to sleep every night feeling like, "Wow, I just
01:10:51
got a 10 out of 10 on every single category today." I think you just do your best. And for me, I get joy out of
01:11:02
pushing this brand forward. I get joy out of the women that come up to me and
01:11:08
tell me that they were in an abusive marriage for 20 years and read a story about Bumble and left their spouse and
01:11:16
got on Bumble and are happy in healthy relationships. Like that's what this is all about for me.
01:11:22
It looked like that question made you a bit emotional. Yeah, I am emotional about it because
01:11:27
I'm kind of doing this for my 17-year-old self also, right? I don't want another generation of
01:11:35
me at 17. I don't want another generation of that. I don't want another generation of young women that felt
01:11:42
unworthy and felt lesser than and felt like they needed a man to tell them what to do. And I just
01:11:50
don't I don't want to see that as this next wave of 17-year-olds. So,
01:11:57
I also don't want to see all these women suffering from domestic and emotional
01:12:02
abuse across the world. So, you know, there's lots of ways and a lot of people around the world that are doing a lot to
01:12:08
fix this, but I don't have those skill sets. I don't have, you know, maybe I don't know how to do what they know how
01:12:14
to do, and I know how to do this. So, I feel like I better just lean in while I can. And plus, I I'm definitely old for
01:12:21
the Gen Z people out there, but I'm 33, so I feel like, you know, I might have a
01:12:27
little bit more in me somewhere. If you're old, I'm old. So, I thought we're I just turned 30.
01:12:34
So, wait, you're three years younger than me? That's like Yeah, I just turned 30. It's like five decades younger than me. No, it's not. We're in the same We're in
01:12:40
the same school. Well, happy birthday whenever it was. Yeah, it was about a couple of weeks ago. Well, happy birthday.
01:12:45
You want to tissue? No, I'm okay. You sure? Yeah. That for me that answer really answers a lot of questions because it shows where
01:12:53
the driver is coming from and that's the reason why the pin coladas seem like a
01:12:58
lower priority than the mission. Going back to the question which I kind of took us off on a tangent away from um
01:13:05
about why you think Bumble won um or was successful was able to break
01:13:10
through into that very small category of dating apps or dating sites where
01:13:16
there's really only like a handful of real players. Why? Why? Because I know you know I have
01:13:22
to say something. I know that the other dating apps because I was sometimes in the room tried to launch dating apps of
01:13:29
themselves. So they they took their existing network, they tried to launch a new dating app into it and it didn't work.
01:13:35
I've seen it happen over and over again. I know Michelle Yeah. from Peanut. She's one of the people I used to work with when we were doing the
01:13:41
marketing at Purdue. Oh, really? Yeah. She's I I think what she's done is awesome. Yeah. I love Peanut. It's It's great.
01:13:48
But but I but I know it's not easy and I know it's not chance and I
01:13:53
know it's not luck because I've seen I can't tell you at Social Chain how many times we had dating apps come to us and
01:13:58
say, "Can you do our marketing?" maybe 200 times. There's 5,000 dating apps in the app
01:14:03
store. It's impossible. It's impossible. It's impossible to start a new one because of the network effects and all of those
01:14:08
things. It's impossible. Impossible. So why you how you? How
01:14:18
every other dating product until Bumble had been solving for the wrong side of the coin. They've been thinking about
01:14:25
men. That's all. They woke up in the morning and thought about how to make a dating app good for guys and they had it
01:14:32
backwards. Why are you solving for men when this is all about what women need and what women
01:14:40
want? No one was asking women, you think women want to get abused on the internet? Think again. Like, find me a
01:14:47
woman that enjoys being harassed on a dating app. Not one. But for some reason, that problem didn't
01:14:54
strike anyone as a problem. So, it's not that hard to say, "Wait a
01:15:01
second. This is a double-sided marketplace. This product can't survive without
01:15:06
women. Yet, we're exploiting and degrading women on a lot of these products, not naming any names."
01:15:13
What? And so, for me, it was all about taking that original
01:15:18
concept of Mercy, a kind space for women, a safe space for women.
01:15:24
And to Andre's push, got to give him got to give him some credit for being so
01:15:30
interested in dating, right? I was so turned off of dating. I wanted nothing to do with dating. When Andre was like, "Oh, let's do a dating, you know, come
01:15:37
be my CMO." So, first of all, I'm not for hire. I'm starting my own company. I must be founder and CEO of whatever I do
01:15:43
next. I cannot work for someone. I just I have to be my own boss. And um you
01:15:48
know I got to give him a lot of credit because he trusted that and he said okay do whatever you want to do but it just
01:15:54
my one stipulation is it has to be in dating cuz I know dating and I want to get behind a dating product. So
01:16:02
when I was sitting there you know we were we had kind of agreed to okay we're
01:16:07
going to do this dating app. What's it going to be? What about Mercy? I want it to be Mercy. I want it to be about women
01:16:13
and I want to be women only. I want safety and kindness and accountability. There's no internet spaces for women.
01:16:18
Nothing's been built for women. We have to do this for women. And then it kind of just all clicked. And I sat there and
01:16:26
within literally minutes, it all just wrote itself. I said, "Wait a second.
01:16:34
I know the problem. Women don't go first. Men do. Men
01:16:41
message as many women as they can. Women are getting inundated. they never respond. The lack of response is causing
01:16:48
a rejection and the rejection is triggering an aggression. And that aggression is now translating into
01:16:55
harassment. And this is why women are being abused on the dating apps because if only they would go first. The man
01:17:01
wouldn't feel rejected. They'd feel empowered. It would totally calibrate this whole experience. And I said,
01:17:06
"Okay, great. I know what we're going to do. Women have to talk first on this product, and they only have 24 hours to
01:17:12
do it. I knew nobody else could conceptualize the way I would explain it. So I was like, "Thank Cinderella,
01:17:17
the pumpkin and the carriage." And men can send one extend on time a day to
01:17:24
capture their attention if they want to. Now we have to also call out something. This was back in 2014 in a very
01:17:30
heterosexual oriented dating app experience. The landscape has evolved. We have to be
01:17:37
inclusive to all. And so of course we are and of course we are currently as we
01:17:42
speak spending countless time and putting all of our heart and soul into
01:17:47
how to make the experience better for non-binary, for the trans community, for
01:17:52
anybody that identifies as a woman as well, right? And so that's a big portion of the future. But that was really how I
01:18:01
would say we became successful because of two things. women, making sure that
01:18:06
we were solving for women's real problems on the internet,
01:18:11
marketing to women. So, when I went back to those sororities and fraternities, instead of going in with, you know,
01:18:18
whatever we had gone in at Tinder, I went in with things for women. I went in with items women wanted, cute yellow
01:18:25
cookies. Like, I understood that we are going to build a cute brand, not a sexy brand. And that's what set us apart. I
01:18:32
wanted it to feel warm and cozy and inviting and soft and feminine and safe
01:18:40
and that's the beginning and still the current through line of
01:18:45
Bumble. What do you like as a leader? Because leadership has evolved, you know, over
01:18:52
the last 10 20 years from like the Steve Jobs days where you've got this kind of tyrant that from what I've heard so so
01:18:59
hard to deal with that they put him in his own building and only people could could work in that building if they were really resilient. I heard all these
01:19:05
stories. I spoke to was didn't tell me that was um was is the closest I've ever got to Steve to Steve Jobs. leadership
01:19:12
and that the concept of what a leader looks like and how they behave and how they treat people. In a post internet
01:19:18
world where we have the ability to speak up because we can tweet and glass door
01:19:23
and all of these things leadership leadership has changed uh our
01:19:28
perceptions of it how they behave in a post-pandemic world leaders are much more vulnerable because I think a lot of
01:19:34
them had to be really vulnerable during the pandemic to to guide their teams through what what if I asked your teams
01:19:39
if I said you know what what's like as a leader what would they say to me Um,
01:19:48
I feel like I try I try and so, you know, I'm sure I could be told
01:19:54
otherwise. I try to be empathetic and I try to think about
01:20:02
everyone around me, probably to my detriment, honestly. Um, I think it's
01:20:07
probably done me more harm than good over the years because I'm trying to solve for every single person in the room that maybe it doesn't solve
01:20:14
anything sometimes. Um, but I really I try to just be the brand we are externally internally. Um, it's hard,
01:20:23
you know, there's so many conflicting needs as a business. You have a
01:20:28
marketing and brand team that want to do one thing. You have a technical team that needs to do another. you have IPO
01:20:34
um teams that have to do another and so you end up being this conductor of a
01:20:39
very um loud orchestra and I try to create
01:20:45
harmony with people but um I don't know I I guess I wouldn't say I follow any I
01:20:51
don't read leadership books I don't like take leadership courses maybe that's something I should do I don't know but I
01:20:57
just lead with my gut I I just do what feels right I try to do the right thing.
01:21:02
I try to listen and hear what people are saying and I try to listen to other people too. So if one person calls me and says
01:21:09
X Y or Z, I try to call the other person and say, "What's your version of this?" before I jump to a conclusion. Um I
01:21:19
really try to have compassion for where everybody's coming from, but it's tough.
01:21:25
And then I also have to put my head down and say, "Okay, no, sometimes this is just how it's going to go, right?"
01:21:31
Because I feel like I can see certain things that maybe aren't present to everyone in the dating
01:21:39
space because I've been in this thing for a decade now and I feel like I understand the nuances of it very well.
01:21:45
So, I don't know. I don't know what they would say. You talked about creating harmony amongst the orchestra, which I feel like is the perfect example of the
01:21:51
role of a CEO, but a role of the CEO of a public company becomes even more difficult because then you have even
01:21:58
more conflicting um expectations when you're that person that's trying to create a harmony in all
01:22:05
of this orchestra. Keep everybody happy, meet all the needs. How do you create
01:22:12
harmony within yourself? So, I personally
01:22:19
have beliefs that, you know, there's something bigger than what we're dealing
01:22:24
with every day, right? Like, I try to zoom out, zoom out into something that we can't even see, right? There's
01:22:30
obviously influences of the universe that none of us know about. You and I cannot sit here and say that we know
01:22:36
every corner of why we exist and what what's going to happen tomorrow. And so, I try to just trust the process. I try
01:22:44
to laugh. Andre was always really good at that. He would just laugh in really stressful situations and I learned that
01:22:49
from him. It was just like have a laugh, you'll be okay. And also to realize that we are just a blip on the radar. Like
01:22:56
this is going to be like if we're lucky like Bumble will be like
01:23:03
a half page in a book one day, hundreds of years from now. Like it's just not that big of a deal the daily dramas and
01:23:09
the nuances of everything. And so I try to just zoom out like is this really going to still matter? This one moment
01:23:16
in interpersonal dynamics or this one moment in um a a failed launch or
01:23:22
whatever it might be. Is this really going to matter in 5 years? Is this going to matter in 5 months? And I
01:23:27
really try to do that exercise of like how big of a deal is this before
01:23:33
I allow it to disrupt my harmony. Does that make sense? I don't know if that made any sense.
01:23:39
It does make sense. It does make sense. Um, I was reading things about your your
01:23:44
sort of sleep work routine and you sounded a lot like me. I'm the type of person that has an a fairly unhealthy
01:23:51
relationship with my phone throughout through throughout the early hours of the morning especially um especially when I was running the company,
01:23:57
especially when I was at social chain still. Um, I'd wake up in the middle of the night. I was pro I was worried too
01:24:02
too often when we couldn't make payroll and I knew it was payday in a week. I'd be riddled with little sort of slithers
01:24:09
of anxiety. When we spoke to um I think it's Robbie Oh yeah, he's great.
01:24:15
Robbie in your team. Robbie said she makes no pretense of being always strong and is openly vulnerable with the team
01:24:22
where you might walk into the office one day and let them know that you've been struggling with something. might you
01:24:28
might be anxious or struggling with anxiety that day and encourage your other team members if they're feeling the same way to take the time that they
01:24:34
need. Well, that's really nice of him. But yeah, I mean vulnerability is
01:24:40
it has to be authentic. I've watched so many people the last few years ride this vulnerability trend and I'm like that's
01:24:48
not real vulnerable. Like vulnerability can't be a scapegoat or an exit or a
01:24:53
crutch for me. I don't know. I just I just tell the
01:24:58
truth. If I'm having postpartum depression back when after my first baby, I would just say that to my all
01:25:05
hands because that was the truth. And why would I be anything other than truthful? If I want to lead a company
01:25:11
that tells the truth and I want to run a business that instills behaviors that
01:25:16
are truthful and and healthy and and better, like why would I want to operate
01:25:22
in any way that's disingenuous to that? So I just get up and just try to tell the truth. Um
01:25:27
convention would say, well that's not you leaders are strong and then that they don't they don't have any problems
01:25:33
and they they're always tough and they you know they you know so what if and this is honestly what I used to worry
01:25:40
about. I used to think well if I if I'm truly honest that that things affect me too my team are going to think I'm weak
01:25:45
and then I can't lead them. And that's the kind of narrative that ran out in my head. Yeah. But, and I get that, but the
01:25:54
reality is everyone's everyone's feeling something and I'm in a connection business. How can I run a connection
01:26:01
company if I can't connect? And the only way you can connect is through vulnerability. It's the only way to
01:26:08
connect with anyone. I'm being very vulnerable with you right now because we're sitting here connecting. So, I
01:26:14
might as well, you know, I could sit here and be like, well, some business book I read, you know, there's this theory of like, you know, this many
01:26:20
hours a day do this and like that's just not my vibe. If we sit here in 10 years time and we say
01:26:28
that that was a really successful 10 years for Bumble, what would have happened in those 10 years? We would have built worldclass features
01:26:36
that were industry changing for safety and trust on the internet. we would have
01:26:42
become the safest platform for women not only to date but to find any trusted
01:26:47
contact that they need. A mentor, a mentee, uh a babysitter, um a friend, uh
01:26:53
somebody that has the same illness as them, as rare as it might be, somebody who is struggling with any type of
01:27:01
mental health crisis, the platform to find anyone on a trusted safe
01:27:07
wavelength. And we would have also gone and created a suite of laws to actually build real legislature around the gaps
01:27:14
that exist for physical and digital accountability as it pertains to women's
01:27:20
well-being. Um, and we would have scaled globally to every corner of the earth
01:27:25
where women need us the most. And we would be a trusted product for them to
01:27:31
find their innate strength to quite literally make the first move out of something bad and into something good.
01:27:38
And we would have built a brand that showed everybody that you can have mission and profit live under the same
01:27:45
roof and you can be a kinder connected company um irrespective of how everybody
01:27:52
else has done it before. So that's what I would hope for. Thank you.
01:27:58
Understanding your understanding you and understanding what's driving you. I would certainly bet on that becoming a
01:28:04
reality. Um, and I think that's the most that's really, you know, of all the the the business success, the marketing
01:28:10
brilliance and all of the things that you've done and the resilience and the getting back up and all of those things that in and of themselves, you kind of
01:28:16
we describe them in a couple of minutes, but I but any human that's struggled and been rejected and had, you know, been
01:28:22
mischaracterized knows that those aren't small things. So for many people, even one of those things is entirely fatal.
01:28:28
But there's clearly this unbelievable resilience in you because he said well where does that you know I think I think you said it where I think you said it on
01:28:34
a podcast one time where you said it doesn't matter if you lose your confidence you still have your drive and I really pondered that when you said
01:28:40
that I thought is that true cuz I was thinking lose your confidence you still well you do you still have the drive
01:28:45
whether you have the the the the belief that comes from confidence that you can have it but you still have that drive and that's exactly what I've I've
01:28:52
learned from you today which is that unshakable bigger than myself am a mission bigger
01:28:57
than me drive which is driving you and your company and that's why I think you're an unbelievable inspiration but
01:29:04
Bumble is an unbelievable bet on the future a future which I think is inevitable and a future that is necessary so thank you for your time
01:29:10
today it's a huge honestly when I say it's a huge honor I mean it's a huge honor I feel the same way about you thank you
01:29:15
for having me um today we have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest they don't
01:29:20
know who they're leaving it for so they just leave it in the diary I open it and I get to read it now Um the question
01:29:27
they left for you not knowing it was you was what is the last belief you would relinquish?
01:29:35
It's an interesting question like what would I let go of? What belief do I have? Like what is there a belief I
01:29:40
have that I would let go of? Yeah. So I he mean shouldn't shouldn't
01:29:45
give away who it is. He means like what's the it's basically what's the most important belief to you? What's the
01:29:51
last belief that you would give up? Oh. Um, the last belief that I would
01:29:56
give up is that people are inherently good somewhere deep down
01:30:03
that rejection and insecurity and lack of communication drive cruelty. And that
01:30:11
I'm not going to give up on a world where we can actually connect good people together because I think there's
01:30:16
a lot of lot of good people out there that just need a kinder way to connect.
01:30:22
Amen. Thank you, Whitney. Thank you. Quick one. Some of you may know we've
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01:31:43
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01:31:48
because as you get older you can start to feel the things you're putting into your body more and more and more. Um and
01:31:54
if I if I put something into my body especially things like gluten if I put those things in my body I feel them tremendously the next day. My energy
01:32:00
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Heat. Heat. N. [Music]
01:32:44
[Music]
