Bumble's Whitney Wolfe: 'I'm worried we're alienating the good guys'

“You’re reading about yourself, but you feel like you’re reading about a horrible stranger,” says Whitney Wolfe, founder and CEO of dating app Bumble. “It was a very perplexing and sad time.”

She’s talking of the online reaction to the lawsuit she filed against Tinder alleging that she was sexually harassed and discriminated against while working for the company. Wolfe brought the case after leaving her role as co-founder and vice president of marketing at the now rival dating app. The case was settled for an undisclosed sum, but the experience initially turned Wolfe off the dating app business.

Having left Tinder, she began seeking new opportunities. The online abuse she’d faced sparked an idea. “It got me thinking about what was broken on the internet, and how free commentary on these platforms, that are built to allow people to express themselves, can have a negative implication.”

Wolfe considered how she would feel as a teenager today where socialising revolves around the internet. “It would be terrifying.” she says. “What I saw as the immediate solution was this female-only social network that was there [for women] to build one another up.”

She was still in the early stages of this idea when she got back in touch with a former contact, Andrey Andreev, founder and CEO of Badoo, a social network focusing on dating. Wolfe told him that if it was anything to do with the dating space, she wasn’t interested – she was very much focused on her women-only app.

However, Andreev eventually persuaded Wolfe that her idea would fit on a dating site, leading to the founding of Bumble. The app now has 18 million users. The way in which it works is influenced by Wolfe’s own dating experiences. “I just looked at what it felt like to be a young woman dating and realised how broken it was. And how painful it was. How many days and nights I agonised over a guy not responding to me.”

Go to any bar and it’s still unusual to see a woman approaching a man; it can’t have been easy convincing people the app would be successful early on? “A lot of people outside [the business] said this will never work, this is stupid, it’s against nature, women don’t make the first move, it’s counter intuitive to everything.” Wolfe argued that was why it would work: the time was ripe for disrupting the status quo. And the idea that men have to make the first move “spans way beyond dating,” she says. “Walking into a business meeting, oftentimes [women are] well-educated, smart, talented, capable and you put a bunch of men in the room and for some reason we lose a bit of our confidence, it can be this disempowering experience.”

Given her own early experience of working in the tech industry, was she ever tempted to pursue a career in another sector? No, she says, tech is the future. “Why should I, as a young woman of 24/25, have to give up my career because of a setback, because someone on the internet said something ... If I were to have done that, what kind of example would that have set to my little sister, my friends, my small cousins?”

Wolfe sees education system as the route to the tech world’s poor treatment of women – namely, that maths and science programmes are dominated by male students. “It’s not that a company necessarily forbids women from joining. The company is looking for the opportunity for the skilled employee and the one that shows up for this job is a man. There’s not a lot of women applying ... The problem doesn’t really start in the office, it starts in the classroom,” she says.

Bumble’s workforce is 80% female and it has shown a zero-tolerance approach to sexist comments on the app. A story surfaced last year of Bumble banning a male user after he sent a series of messages suggesting a female user was only interested in his money. The company published an open letter to the banned user on its blog. “We’re going to continue to build a world that makes small-minded, misogynist boys like you outdated,” it said.

While Wolfe’s business might be setting an example for female empowerment, it’s dating app can’t function without men. And Wolfe clearly also considers men to have been important in her career progression. She names Andreev as her biggest mentor. “I’m so tired of this notion that women only need to support women, why can’t we all support each other?” she says. “I’ve run into women who can be highly problematic, detrimental and mean, just like I’ve seen that in men.”

She adds: “We as women, [with] this modern feminism, I’m worried we’re alienating the good guys. It’s not really living up to true feminism, which is really equality for everyone, right?”

A soon-to-launch offshoot of Bumble, Bumble Bizz, which is going live in September, is another tool aiming to give women a more equal proportion of control – this time in their careers. The professional networking app allows people to create a profile that includes details of their past jobs, their skills and what opportunities they are looking for, but that doesn’t include age. Users can search their surrounding area for potential business contacts. Like Bumble, women have to make the first move. Wolfe hopes it will open up more opportunities for women.

Just turned 28, Wolfe is already a luminary in the tech world. For budding entrepreneurs who want to replicate her success, she has this advice: “The hard part is making the difference and the difference starts from within, wanting to change something you’ve personally experienced that you don’t like. And that’s Bumble, I didn’t want to wait around, I didn’t like the fact that that was how women are expected to live their lives – how do we fix it?”

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