Whitney Wolfe Herd was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on July 1, 1989. Since she was young, she was aware of social issues. She started with a social venture when she was studying at the Southern Methodist University. She sold bamboo tote bags to benefit areas affected by the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. She partnered with the celebrity stylist Patrick Aufdenkamp. The venture scaled up after some celebrities were captured wearing the tote bags.
After that experience, she founded Tender Heart, a clothing line dedicated to raising awareness around human trafficking and fair trade. She also traveled to South Asia for working with orphanages.
In 2012, Wolfe Herd was involved with the startup Cardify at Hatch Labs. However, the project was abandoned but the team joined to the development team of the dating app Tinder. Wolfe became vice president of marketing for Tinder. She is credited for being behind the name, and the flame logo. She fueled Tinder’s popularity on college campuses and grew up its user base.
In 2014, Wolfe Herd resigned from Tinder due to tensions with other executives. She filed a lawsuit against the company for sexual harassment. In consequence, she was bullied on social platforms. For that reason, she sketched a female-only social network centered around compliments called Merci.
She received US$1 Million as part of a settlement with Tinder in 2014. That same year, she founded Bumble, a female-focused dating app, partnering with Badoo’s founder Andrey Andreev who contact her. The company remained majority-owned by Badoo. She repeated the previous success with Bumble, now as Chief Executive Officer.
Wolfe realized that most of the smarter women around her were waiting that men take the initiative in a relationship. For that reason, she decided to change the dynamic of dating. In Bumble, only women can start a conversation and send the first message.
Bumble grew up fast-paced since then. In November 2017, the app had 22 million registered users. In September 2019, Bumble was the second most popular dating app in the US, with 5 million users. In 2020, Bumble reached 100 million subscribers worldwide.
In February 2021, Wolfe Herd the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire after taking Bumble public.
Whitney Wolfe Herd is committed to several social causes, such as gender equality and the Black Lives Matter movement. Bumble supported with donations to BLM for fighting against racism in the United States.
