Bumble

“The secret of online dating, assuming straight dating only for a second, is high value women get inundated by messages from guys. And so if they have a bad experience, they churn and your app fails. And so every successful dating website is on some level away …”

“And they've dramatically under invested in the user experience which is, I think why they're suffering so much. And it's not just Tinder. It's also Bumble, but basically happened. I think with those products is they had a hit, right? Like I had a thing that wo…”

“Bumble. Is elitist. Why, you know, women go first. Women have all the control. Why? Who are, you know, like that, that is a, I actually, I'm not even sure that's good for women.”

“I think the next horizon is going online to get offline. So in the near future, it will not be unimaginable to get on Bumble, and instead of, you know, swiping yes and no on a bunch of people, you might be swiping yes or no on things that sound compelling to y…”

“My big focus is to never, ever, ever replace a real human dynamic emotion, want, or need with a computer, with a system, with a model, with a bot, right? And so what I would like to do is help humans connect better.”

“So we have been hard at work exploring ways to have coaches or matchmakers or friends in your pocket, whatever you want to call it. You know, basically be that wing woman, wing man, wing person in your pocket to really show you that you've got this and to have…”

“Everything we are working on from a product prioritization standpoint right now is to shorten the duration that you're using our product on any given time because we want you to go online and get offline.”

“50 success stories is worth more than thousands of failed dates, because those failed dates turn into the reverse flywheel of negative feedback, and so we're actually absolutely aligned with the customer finding success, because their success is our success”

“After leaving Tinder, she founded another dating app, Bumble, which has grown to fifty million users and two hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“This tweak doesn't just change how dating apps work. It aims to change how dating works. Period. It rewrites our cultural assumptions about how people connect.”

“When I was being bullied online, I just couldn't understand why this was the place that young girls and women were meant to be all day long, and I think that was really what started to shape the next thing for me.”

“Had I sat in a room with any other entrepreneur, particularly any other male entrepreneur, I just don't know if they would have seen what I was trying to say, and he understood so clearly because he'd been dealing with data and insights of user behavior for a …”

“So I said women must make the first move. This is going to reduce harassment. This is going to reduce bad behavior. Women are not going to be spammed. And women will be empowered and encouraged to actually be in the driver's seat.”

“We have to really reshape behavior because women are taught not to make the first move. Women are taught not to speak first. They're taught never to send that first message, never to initiate. And men are taught to be very aggressive and really beat down that …”

“It was all about the way you position this. So you could say to a group of guys, hey, download this platform. You have to behave. If you are disrespectful, you're going to have consequences, and women are the bosses, they're in control, and you have no power. …”

“Initially, Bumble gave women 24 hours to send the initial message to men they had matched with. If they didn't, then the chance was gone. However, men could take as long as they wanted to respond.”

“Well, what we realized was by giving women this time restraint, but letting men respond at their own free will, this was actually going backwards, and this was not doing anyone any favors, and so we needed to hold both parties accountable.”

“Our users were basically hijacking our product to use it in a different way. We were hearing success stories. We would meet people, and they'd say, I just found my roommate on Bumble. You found your roommate on Bumble? And so we built Bumble BFF, and that was …”

“We've only been live there for a couple short months, and I think in the first few weeks we had a 1,000,001st moves.”

“Taking these features that we had otherwise considered duds, if you will, right? Voice calling, FaceTime calling. Videos, like these features that nobody wanted to use. They were like the lowest on the interest pole”

“There is no argument that, that dating apps have become, you know, the front runner In how, you know, people between a certain age group meet. And that number is only expected to grow because of a few things.”

“I had my first child, took Blackstone on as a shareholder, all within the same few weeks.”

“When you're a publicly traded company, you need to see 90 days ahead at the same time. So using your brain to look 10 years ahead and 90 days ahead all in the same breath while you're cleaning baby drool and trying to deal with a myriad of new responsibilities…”

“What my long-term vision is for this platform is this, in the coming years, should not be a platform that people say is a dating app that you compare to this, or you compare to that app over there. My long-term goal for Bumble is to be The digital coffee shop …”

“If something, even if political, is in threat of that, is in violation of that, then we just simply cannot be silent. So when you look at empowering women's relationships, Yet our country is saying that women don't even have a right to their own bodies. How co…”

“AI is how we are going to meet people.”

“In fact, everything we are working on from a product prioritization standpoint right now is to shorten the duration that you're using our product on any given time because we want you to go online and get offline.”

“So, 50 success stories is worth more than thousands of failed dates, because those failed dates turn into the reverse flywheel of negative feedback, and so we're actually absolutely aligned with the customer finding success, because their success is our succes…”

“No, not under my leadership, at least. Listen, I, that's not what we are here to do. We are definitely not in the business of trying to wipe out humanity and trying to get people to fall in love with, you know, fake iterations of humans. I don't want to use AI…”

“I am absolutely fascinated committed to, and on the track of integrating AI into love and connection and friendship and relationships. That is my obsession at the moment.”

“Bumble is already starting to do this, by the way. So props to Whitney. Bumble. Whitney over there is Is starting to.”

“Not a winner-take-all market. There's tons of dating apps. I mean, who's the winner that took all? Tinder? No. Bumble? No. Batch? EHarmony? No. OkCupid? No.”

“It's primarily done by private equity firms in the context of their portfolio companies, and it runs the gamut of industries from the likes of Bumble to GoDaddy all the way to Shake Shack, my personal favorite.”

“Usually the most vocal people are not the masses. So you get like the Twitter people who are like, you screwed this up and you have to do this way and you need to do it that way. But then when you actually run the deeper analysis, there's like three people tha…”

“What it did was it actually said, Hey, you've got nothing left to lose. Go run as fast as you can. And who gives a whatever about what you do next? Like it's okay. You've got this because your greatest fear of being completely Villainized or laughed at or abus…”

“When you have children, you're forced to shift gears. When you get back into work gear, you're actually driving a lot smoother and you're driving a lot faster, and it's actually a much better ride.”

“I'm burnt on a lot of the digital content right now, which I would say is actually inspiring a lot of interesting things that we can do in the future at Bumble Inc. I think content has become somewhat corrosive, and that's problematic in my mind.”

“I joined Bumble in 2017. It was about 30 people in a two bedroom apartment at that point.”

“Build the foundation of trust. Otherwise you're not, you can't go back and re-engineer that, right? You get one shot at the beginning of really getting people to trust you and how you're going to layer in your vision to the growth of the company.”

“So in May of I was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer. I didn't have a family history. I had no reason to suspect that I would have it, and so it was very blindsiding, and this was shortly after Bumble had been acquired by Blackstone.”

“We constructed this narrower, deeper role as chief strategy officer that would enable me to go from a team of like a 150 to four or five, and that would take on transformative strategic projects across the business, and the first one would be the IPO”

“If all of the hard skills are there, but someone doesn't actually believe in what you're trying to do, That's a deal breaker, right? That there needs to be this belief in what you're trying to build.”

“You know, Whitney talked a lot about that in her origin story of Bumble, and how the experience that she lived with on the things that were said to her online, like, really shaped her vision for what Bumble could be,”

“We've always been about putting the power into the women's hand, not to make women above men, but to equalize this kind of broken system. We felt that women were historically a bit below men in this like totem pole of relationships and who should go first and …”

“That was a feature that historically had moderate to low use, and we always wondered, why are people not using this more?”

“So we're seeing a decrease in this casual culture of dating where you might go out with someone for a night and then you don't see them again. That has decreased significantly, but remarkably more meaningful relationships are coming out of this.”

“So what we're really focused on right now is how do we connect you to more than just one person? How can we bring you together on shared interests? For example, how do we build the digital dinner party and the equivalent of that so that you don't lose access t…”

“And we formed an incredible partnership where I was founder and CEO. I could build my own team, my own vision, my own brand, but we would have access to his resources beyond just money.”

“Men are raised from very early age to be the go-getter in a heterosexual relationship. Go get her. Go, go make the move, right? And women, on the flip side, are trained to play hard to get. So here you're telling men to be overtly aggressive, and here you're t…”

“When you put women in control, you completely reverse the rules. So she now has the confidence to go after what she's interested in. And the man on the other end doesn't feel rejected. He feels flattered. And then all of a sudden you've balanced the behavior.”

“Even, even split.”

“If somebody is in a conversation and someone says something inappropriate, we have very easy reporting tools, and once something is reported, we do review it, And if there was bad behavior, that user is banned for life. There are no second chances.”

“Twenty million registrations, nearly.”

“Anybody can copy a product. Anyone. I'm at the UT campus speaking to you right now. I could go to the engineering school, probably find five really talented young engineers, and they could build Bumble. With the right support, somebody could rebuild any piece …”

“What I had realized was you can't kill ambition. You can kill confidence, but you can't kill drive.”

“When you put women in control, you completely reverse the rules. So she now has the confidence to go after what she's interested in. And the man on the other end doesn't feel rejected. He feels flattered. And then all of a sudden you've balanced the behavior.”

“Even, even split.”

“We have hundreds and hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions at this point, of active BFF users, which are, you know, young women matching with other young women, kind of in that merci capacity I spoke about earlier.”

“If somebody is in a conversation and someone says something inappropriate, we have very easy reporting tools, and once something is reported, we do review it, And if there was bad behavior, that user is banned for life. There are no second chances.”

“Just last week, we became under attack from this website called the Daily Stormer. It's a neo-Nazi site, and we had upwards of a hundred men sending us threats. We actually had to have police at our office all week.”