On Whitney Wolfe: Excerpt from Guy Raz's How I Built This

Whitney Wolfe, Excerpt from Guy Raz's How I Built This

Whitney Wolfe has a story. She knows it well. To hear her tell it is to get to know her and the story of her dating app, Bumble. It is to know what she is trying to do with it, why we should all care about it, and how it has managed to succeed despite the fact that by the end of 2014, when Bumble was launched, if there was one thing the world didn’t need any more of, it was yet another dating app. There was already Match.com, Plenty of Fish, OK Cupid, eHarmony, Hinge, along with all the niche sites like J Date, Black Planet, Christian Mingle and, way on the other end of the spectrum, Ashley Madison.

And then there was Tinder, the behemoth, which Whitney co-founded in 2012 and had recently left under some of the worst possible circumstances not just for a co-founder, but for a woman and a human being. There was both a professional and a romantic split with one of her co-founders, there was a very public sexual harassment lawsuit, and there was an avalanche of despicably hurtful online vitriol aimed directly at her. By the time she left Tinder in early 2014, Whitney wasn’t just done with the dating business, she was done, period.

“I was at the very bottom of my barrel,” Whitney told me in our 2017 interview. “There were days where I didn't want to live. I didn't want to get out of bed. I wanted to die.” Whitney wasn’t even twenty-five-years old at the time, and the internet had utterly broken her.

All this begs the questions: why another online business, then? Why another dating app? And why so soon?

Well, part of the agony that Whitney was feeling was this nagging sense that her story wasn’t unique. It was much bigger than herself, bigger than Tinder, bigger even than dating as an industry. There was a real problem out there with a lack of online accountability, and whatever she may have gone through -- however horrible it might have been -- what was even worse to her was that thirteen-year-old girls were seeing all of this on their phones all day, every day.

“And it scared me,” she said. “So I sat down and said I can start something right now. And I can change what I hate that I see in the world.”

Originally, her new idea had nothing to do with dating. It was a female-only social network that she called Merci, where women could only use compliments to respond to one another’s posts and messages. “I really wanted to build this platform that was rooted in kindness and positive behavior,” she said. “The antidote to what I experienced online.”

She’d gotten as far as a fully fleshed out marketing plan--marketing was Whitney’s expertise--when in July 2014 she was approached by Andrey Andreev, the London-based entrepreneur who had built a number of successful companies by this time, including Badoo, the world’s most popular dating site outside of the United States. Andrey wanted to hire Whitney to be Badoo’s Chief Marketing Officer, which was a non-starter as far as Whitney was concerned.

“That’s just off the table,” she told him. “I don’t want to touch a dating app. That’s not going to be my future. I'm going to start my own business, and I want it to be mission driven, and I want it to be impactful, and I don't want it to be in dating.”

So she pitched him her idea instead. She laid out the whole vision for Merci and answered each of the tough questions you’d expect from a successful entrepreneur and startup investor like Andrey Andreev. Whitney remembered that with each answer she gave, it was clear Andreev could sense her passion for her idea and her commitment to its mission, which was heartening.

“You need to build this,” he said, “but you need to do it in dating. This has to happen. What you're trying to do needs to be done in dating.”

I can only imagine how Whitney felt in that moment. She was mere months removed from having her life turned upside down, in part by her very public departure from one dating app, and now the founder of another wants to hire her, but doesn’t seem to want to hear her. To Whitney’s immense credit, though, she took a beat and really considered what Andrey was trying to say.

“I thought to myself maybe he's got a point. Maybe dating is broken,” Whitney recounted of her initial meeting with Andrey. “Maybe connecting is broken beyond just being a young woman talking to a young woman in junior high. Maybe this is something that affects us at all ages.”

By the end of that first encounter, Whitney and Andrey had a handshake deal.

(Whitney Wolfe Herd is an American entrepreneur. She is founder and CEO of Bumble, a social and dating app, launched in 2014.)

Excerpted with permission from How I Built This by Guy Raz.

Whitney Wolfe