Whitney Wolfe Herd

Whitney Wolfe Herd
Born	Whitney Wolfe 1 7, 1989
Birthplace	Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Entrepreneur, business executive
Known for	Founder of Bumble, co-founder of Tinder
Education	Southern Methodist University (BA)
Children	2
Awards	Time 100 Most Influential People (2018)

Whitney Wolfe Herd (née Wolfe; born July 1, 1989) is an American entrepreneur and business executive who founded the dating application Bumble and serves as its executive chair and chief executive officer. Before creating Bumble, Wolfe Herd was a co-founder of the dating app Tinder, where she served as vice president of marketing and is credited with helping drive the platform's early growth, particularly among college-age users. After a contentious departure from Tinder that included a sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuit, Wolfe Herd launched Bumble in 2014 with a central design principle: women must initiate conversation in heterosexual matches. The app grew rapidly, and Wolfe Herd took the company public in February 2021, becoming one of the youngest women to take a company to an initial public offering on a major U.S. stock exchange. She was named to the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world in 2018.

Early Life

Whitney Wolfe was born on July 1, 1989, in Salt Lake City, Utah. She grew up in Salt Lake City before attending college in Texas. During her undergraduate years at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Wolfe demonstrated early entrepreneurial interests. While still a student at SMU, she launched a clothing line called Tender Heart, which sold bamboo tote bags with proceeds directed toward areas affected by the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The venture attracted the attention of celebrity supporters and demonstrated Wolfe's ability to blend commerce with social causes, an approach that would later characterize her work at Bumble.

After graduating from Southern Methodist University with a bachelor's degree, Wolfe moved into the technology sector. Her early career trajectory brought her into contact with the founding team behind what would become Tinder, one of the most consequential mobile applications of the 2010s.

Education

Wolfe Herd attended Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree. While at SMU, she was involved in entrepreneurial projects, including the Tender Heart clothing line, which combined a social-impact mission with a consumer product. Her time at SMU also provided her entry into the Los Angeles technology scene, where she would join the incubation of Tinder at Hatch Labs, a startup incubator backed by IAC.

Career

Tinder

Wolfe Herd was one of the earliest members of the team that developed Tinder, the location-based dating application that popularized the "swipe" mechanic for online dating. She held the title of vice president of marketing at the company. In that role, she is credited with helping to popularize the app among college students, a demographic that proved essential to Tinder's exponential early growth. According to a 2015 report in The Guardian, Wolfe traveled to college campuses promoting the app and building its user base among young people.

Wolfe Herd's co-founder title at Tinder later became a matter of dispute. Her role in the founding team and the nature of her contributions were debated publicly in the context of subsequent legal proceedings. A 2012 co-founding of the dating app revolution was later documented by Biography.com, which noted that Wolfe Herd "helped launched the dating app revolution with Tinder" before going on to build a competitor.

Departure from Tinder and Lawsuit

In 2014, Wolfe Herd departed Tinder under acrimonious circumstances. She filed a lawsuit against Tinder and its parent company alleging sexual harassment and discrimination, naming co-founder and chief marketing officer Justin Mateen among the defendants. The lawsuit alleged that Mateen had sent her harassing text messages and that her co-founder title had been stripped because her role as a young female co-founder made the company "look like a joke," according to reporting by Heavy.com and other outlets. The case drew significant media attention and brought questions of workplace gender dynamics in the technology industry into public discourse.

The lawsuit was settled in September 2014 for a reported sum of just over $1 million, with neither party admitting wrongdoing. As The Washington Post reported in 2015, the terms of the settlement limited Wolfe Herd's ability to discuss certain aspects of her time at Tinder publicly. Despite the constraints imposed by the settlement, the experience at Tinder informed much of Wolfe Herd's subsequent philosophy around Bumble and the idea of creating safer, more equitable digital spaces for women.

Founding of Bumble

Following her departure from Tinder, Wolfe Herd initially considered stepping away from the dating app industry entirely. However, she was approached by Andrey Andreev (now known as Andrey Andreev), the Russian-British entrepreneur behind the social networking platform Badoo, who proposed a collaboration. With Andreev's backing and technology infrastructure, Wolfe Herd launched Bumble in December 2014.

The central innovation of Bumble was a structural one: in heterosexual matches, only the woman could send the first message, a design choice that Wolfe Herd described as intended to reduce the volume of unwanted or harassing messages that women commonly received on other dating platforms. As Wolfe Herd stated at SXSW in 2018, "What I originally wanted to do with Bumble is rewrite the Internet," attributing the company's success to its fundamental belief that women should be able to make the "first move" in romantic connections.

The app attracted users rapidly. Forbes reported in 2017 that Bumble had become "America's fastest-growing dating app," with the platform expanding its reach well beyond the dating vertical. Bumble subsequently launched Bumble BFF, a feature for platonic friendships, and Bumble Bizz, a professional networking tool, positioning the platform as more than a dating service. Vanity Fair profiled Wolfe Herd and the app in August 2015, exploring how the women-first messaging model represented a shift in the dynamics of online dating.

Bumble IPO and Growth

On February 11, 2021, Bumble Inc. went public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. The IPO was a landmark event: Wolfe Herd, at age 31, became one of the youngest women to take a company public in the United States. Shares opened significantly above their initial pricing, and the market debut valued Bumble at several billion dollars. Management Today reported that the IPO made Wolfe Herd the world's youngest female self-made billionaire at the time.

Wolfe Herd owns approximately 23 million shares of Bumble Inc. Her stake in the company has represented a significant portion of her personal wealth, though the value has fluctuated with the company's share price in the years following the IPO.

Stepping Down and Return as CEO

After leading Bumble through its IPO and early period as a public company, Wolfe Herd transitioned from the CEO role to the position of executive chair. However, by 2025, she returned to the chief executive position. The New York Times reported in May 2025 that "The Bumble CEO has returned to run the struggling company she founded, and says she has a plan for getting Gen Z back." In the same interview, Wolfe Herd reflected on how the technology landscape had shifted since she co-founded Tinder, noting that the original era was marked by widespread optimism about apps and screens that had since given way to more ambivalent public attitudes.

Her return to the CEO role coincided with a broader strategic rethinking of the Bumble product. In an August 2025 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Wolfe Herd outlined new ideas for the platform, including the integration of artificial intelligence into the matchmaking process. She made the personal disclosure that she "would never have swiped right on her husband," an anecdote she used to illustrate the limitations of the swipe-based model and the potential for AI-driven alternatives.

In a Time interview, Wolfe Herd discussed her broader vision for technology as a means to address social isolation, stating that she wants "technology to cure loneliness."

Legislative Advocacy

Beyond her work at Bumble, Wolfe Herd has been involved in legislative efforts related to online harassment. She was part of advocacy efforts in Texas to criminalize the sending of unsolicited sexually explicit images, commonly referred to as "cyberflashing." Texas Monthly covered these efforts, exploring whether outlawing unsolicited sexual images would be enforceable and examining the broader implications of such legislation. Texas did pass such a law, making it one of the first states to specifically address the issue, and Wolfe Herd's advocacy was cited as a contributing factor in bringing the legislation to fruition.

Personal Life

Whitney Wolfe Herd is based in Austin, Texas. She has two children.

In The Wall Street Journal interview in August 2025, Wolfe Herd referenced her husband in discussing the limitations of swipe-based dating, noting that traditional matching algorithms may not have connected them.

Wolfe Herd has spoken publicly about the personal toll of her experience at Tinder, including the lawsuit and the intense media scrutiny that followed. The Washington Post noted in 2015 that despite having had "quite the year," she was unable to discuss significant portions of it due to the terms of her legal settlement.

Recognition

In 2018, Time named Wolfe Herd to its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. The honor placed her alongside world leaders, artists, and scientists as one of the year's most consequential figures, and it recognized both her business accomplishments with Bumble and her broader cultural impact in reshaping how people interact online.

Business Insider included Wolfe Herd in its 2014 list of the "30 Most Important Women Under 30 in Tech," recognizing her contributions at Tinder and her emerging role as a technology entrepreneur in her own right.

Forbes profiled Wolfe Herd in a 2017 feature titled "Billion-Dollar Bumble," documenting how she built what the magazine described as "America's fastest-growing dating app."

NPR's How I Built This podcast featured Wolfe Herd in an extended interview about her entrepreneurial journey, including the founding of both Tinder and Bumble.

Paper Magazine profiled Wolfe Herd as part of its coverage of figures shaping digital culture, and Grazia explored her transition from Tinder to Bumble and the philosophy underpinning her approach to technology and dating.

In September 2025, a Hulu film titled Swiped dramatized portions of Wolfe Herd's career, particularly her time at Tinder. Time magazine examined the true story behind the film, while Fortune noted that the movie focused primarily on Wolfe Herd's experiences at Tinder rather than her subsequent founding of Bumble.

Legacy

Whitney Wolfe Herd's impact on the technology and dating industries can be observed in several areas. The "women message first" design of Bumble introduced a structural mechanic that shifted the power dynamics of online dating interactions and influenced how subsequent platforms approached the problem of unwanted messages and harassment. Bumble's model demonstrated that placing constraints on user behavior could be commercially viable while also addressing gendered patterns of online interaction.

Her career trajectory — from co-founding Tinder, to filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company, to building a competitor that emphasized women's agency — became a prominent narrative in discussions about gender and Silicon Valley culture. The Washington Post in 2015 noted the unusual nature of her story in the tech industry: a woman who had publicly challenged a former employer over workplace harassment and then built an alternative platform grounded in different values.

Wolfe Herd's legislative advocacy, particularly around laws targeting unsolicited sexually explicit images, represented an extension of her platform work into the public policy arena. The passage of Texas legislation addressing cyberflashing was among the first such laws in the United States and contributed to a broader national conversation about regulating online harassment.

The Bumble IPO in 2021 also held symbolic significance: Wolfe Herd became one of the youngest women to take a company public in the United States, an event that received extensive media coverage and was noted as a milestone for women in the technology sector.

References

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