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Big tech companies usually like to settle their disputes in private, over meetings and emails, or through arbitrations and takedown notices. But occasionally, when a company is really fed up, it takes a fight public. That's what seemed to be happening in the summer of 2018, when the founder and CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolf Hurd, came out swinging against Match Group on CNBC.
Match was unable to acquire us successfully, and they then filed a baseless lawsuit on our company. Bumble is the second most downloaded dating app in the U.S. It's behind Tinder, though it kind of feels just like Tinder. On both apps, you swipe left or right through a stack of people to make connections. That was the basis of Match Group's lawsuit against Bumble, that the competing app stole Tinder's patented precious swipe.
But to Wolfherd, this lawsuit wasn't about product design. It was about retribution. Because Match had reportedly tried to buy Bumble — twice — and failed. We are a high risk to any of our competitors right now. Our growth is exceeding everyone's expectations, even our own growth goals. Bumble was in just its fourth year and, frankly, killing it.
So we've been a profitable business since year two. We don't even have an ad model yet. This is strictly on a freemium subscription model. And so you can imagine we're just scraping the tip of the iceberg for our growth opportunity and for our revenue opportunity. It looked like Wolfherd was holding back a full-fledged grin throughout the interview. Match's lawsuit had handed her a delicious opportunity —
To gloat about the success of her company, but also to cast Bumble as an underdog up against a bully. This is Wolf Hurd at her finest, a marketing genius with a sharp instinct for powerful brand building. All along, she pitched Bumble as the feminist dating app. Be the CEO your parents always wanted you to marry. That's an early Bumble billboard. The way Wolf Hurd would have you see it, other dating apps rewarded men.
Bumble was for the ambitious, independent woman who took no shit. This is land of the giants. Today, how Wolf Herd built a company to rival Tinder and Match Group by harnessing feminism as a branding tool. The rise of Bumble, it's a parable. A parable about the wrongs technology maybe can't completely fix. And the challenges that come with seeking power as a woman in the tech industry.
When Wolf Hurd appeared on CNBC to skewer Match Group's lawsuit against Bumble, something else hung over the story. Her own work history. Before Bumble, Wolf Hurd was the co-founder of none other than Tinder.
She left the company in early 2014. I got the call from Whitney after she had left Tinder, and she was distraught. She was like, what am I going to do? I don't know what's going to happen. Chris Skulzinski is also a co-founder of Tinder. He worked on product design. Wolf Hurd was the app's vice president of marketing and key to its early success. She personally visited college campuses around the country to recruit users. She
She went to sorority houses, knowing that if women signed up, men would follow. But then, after two years of helping build Tinder, she said she was pushed out. I won't elaborate on what she went through, but she went through her own personal journey.
Wolf Hurd laid out this personal journey in a lawsuit. In June 2014, she sued the company for sexual harassment. At the center of it all, another Tinder co-founder, Justin Mateen. In 2013, Wolf Hurd and Mateen dated. When they broke up, she said he became, quote, "'verbally controlling and abusive.'" She provided some texts as evidence in her lawsuit. They seemed pretty bad.
One reads, That's allegedly Mateen reacting to Wolf Hurd dating someone new. Another says, Wolf Hurd also claims that Mateen tried to take away her co-founder title.
Allegedly, he told her that being a co-founder of a hookup app was, quote, slutty. She said she complained to Tinder co-founder Sean Rad and Match CEO Sam Yagan, but neither of the men addressed the alleged harassment. And then she said the situation got so bad, she had to resign. She was 24. Tinder, meanwhile, was the fastest-growing app on the market.
Later that year, the New York Times reported that Tinder had close to 50 million active users. Not a great moment to be pushed out. Wolfherd and her former company settled the lawsuit out of court, reportedly for about a million dollars. So that was Wolfherd's origin story. And perhaps the reason that in 2014, right after she left Tinder and called Golzinski, she actually had no intention of building another dating app.
But then, someone else convinced Wolfher to stay in the business.
Andrei Andreev is a Russian billionaire and an engineer. Angel Aoyang is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal's Finance Bureau. She used to report for Forbes, where it was part of her job to keep tabs on Russian oligarch types. But Andrei Andreev was just different from the rest of the oligarchs that I was looking into. He was a lot younger. His net worth was not from oligarchs.
or aluminum or all of these state-owned assets that then were privatized when the USSR fell apart. His net worth came from online dating apps. Specifically, a company called Badoo, which functions as both a dating app and social network with over 300 million users. It's popular in European and Latin American countries. So while Andre was building Badoo, Tinder in America was...
And that North American market, it was a market Andreev hadn't been able to tap into. Yet. When Wolf Hurd left Tinder, Andreev reached out to her. He said,
I want you to do the same thing with me. I want us to build a dating app together and you bring your marketing and your branding prowess. I'll bring in my engineering infrastructure, my capital, and let's build something great together.
Andreev was convincing enough. It was around this time that Chris Golzinski, who'd worked with Wolfherd at Tinder, heard from her again about an opportunity. I actually got a call from Whitney Wolf to come out to London for a new idea that she wanted to pitch, which turned into a surprise getaway to Mykonos on a private jet. I'm sorry. I guess this is what it's like to be wooed by a billionaire.
Can you tell us about Mykonos and the private jet? Oh, man. It was crazy. It was crazy. So, like, I come from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, very blue collar. Like, I was raised by a single mom on, like, food stamps. So going to Mykonos on a private jet with a billionaire and 20 of his closest friends was about the most shocking experience I think I've ever had in my life.
And that's kind of where we made the handshake deal that we're going to make something that fixes some of the wrongs, I think, that we were seeing with other dating products. The big wrong Wolfherd and her Mykonos crew set out to right was that online dating seemed to disproportionately suck for women. Aggressive messages, inappropriate photos without consent, harassment after rejecting men. Wolfherd had her own ideas as to why communication could go off the rails so quickly on dating apps.
Here she is describing one at the Washington Ideas Forum in 2016. When men are on these platforms, generally speaking, not everybody, there's this sense of, "I have to make the first move. I have to go hunting. I have to make sure that I go after her."
And that puts a lot of pressure on the man. It also, you know, opens up a stream of bad behavior because if the woman doesn't respond, it's taken as rejection. Therefore, you get this, you know, harassment taking place. She had an idea for how to upend this dynamic.
What if on Bumble, women made the first move? So when the woman is the one making the first move, he's complimented. He feels flattered on the other end versus in this state of, how do I get her to respond? Appease that toxic masculinity away. Or, as Wolf Hurd put it, empower women in dating. This became the core distinguishing feature of Bumble.
Women messaged their matches first. Otherwise, the app was basically one-to-one with Tinder. You still swiped through that stack of cards to create matches. We've been talking to people from the early days of Tinder and it seems like...
Part of the impetus for making Tinder was like these young sort of engineer guys in L.A. having trouble meeting women and Tinder was a way for them to sort of break the ice. And I wonder, it sort of sounds to me like Whitney, Whitney's own experiences in dating as sort of like a frustrated professional woman helped inform her founding vision. And does that resonate with what you know?
Press coverage around Bumble's launch turned Wolfherd into the face of the app. Take this New York Post article from 2015. Its opening line was,
Wolf Hurd kinda leaned into it. She told the Post, "Women run the world right now. Why can a girl not make a first move with a man, but she can go out and conquer her career?" This is all to say, the Bumble brand right out of the gate was girl power. Wolf Hurd wouldn't say this directly, but Bumble was the anti-Tinder.
Bloomberg called Bumble a less creepy dating app. Bustle dubbed it feminist Tinder. Harper's Bazaar wrote, say goodbye to your Tinder dating woes. This new app is putting women in charge of the game. Wolf Hurd told the New York Post that Bumble already had hundreds of thousands of users barely three months in, and it was growing fast.
Wolfherd and her Bumble team were based in Austin, Texas. But the tech side of the app was handled elsewhere, London. Because that's where Badoo was located, Andrei Andreev's business. I mean, the code of Bumble is based on the code of Badoo. They're intertwined. Angel Aoyang again, tracking Mr. Russian billionaire in all this. What Andrei...
brought to the table was A, investment, and also his engineering infrastructure. Andreev owned the majority of Bumble, reportedly 79% of the company.
And to ensure its success, he let Bumble in on Badoo's technical infrastructure. So essentially, Whitney was the marketing arm and Andre was everything else. It was a great arrangement. And according to Chris Golzinski, Wolfherd knew that Bumble's marketing would be key to setting it apart. Very often products take on a life of their own, you know, agnostic of whatever the founders want. So
I think Whitney had the forethought to think through that intentionality of what the branding should be to influence, I think, that perception and that behavior. Wolfherd had used branding to shape the culture of an app before. At Tinder, she reached out to Instagram influencers to make the app seem cool, hot, and fun.
At Bumble, Wolfhard seemed to go for a different vibe. There is this like girl bossification of dating through Bumble, right? It's like everything I do in my life, I control. I girl boss my diet. I girl boss my exercise regimen. I girl boss my outfits every week. And now I'm girl bossing dating because I can control the outcome.
Samira Mukhopadhyay is a former executive editor of Teen Vote. I'm working on a book right now about the kind of end of girlboss culture or girlboss quote feminism and kind of what comes next for women and ambition in the workplace. The term girlboss was coined in 2014 by Sofia Amoruso, founder of the fast fashion retailer Nasty Gal. Girlboss as the millennial mentee of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.
It's a feminist identity built around corporate success. A girl boss is a VP, a founder, a Forbes 30 under 30. She works out in a futures female tank top. And she was the symbol of a moment that started in 2014 and went on for a few years after that. A moment when feminism became highly marketable.
Remember 2014? Beyoncé performed at the VMAs with feminists projected behind her. Emily Weiss started Glossier. Taylor Swift promoted her 1989 album with her Girl Squad and talked about feminist lessons she'd learned from Lena Dunham.
The year Bumble was born, mainstream feminism was trending, and Wolf Heard was nothing if not on trend.
Their whole visual aesthetic is based on bees and hives, right? So I guess the queen bee. Literally, the company's brand ambassadors were called queen bees. Bumble's identity was built around the matriarchal bumblebee. The Austin office had bookshelves shaped like honeycombs. Wolf heard, as the face of the brand, often wore yellow for public appearances. Find your honey was another of the company's billboard slogans.
Bumble tweeted a picture of one with the hashtag, Girl Boss Moves. Take a seat, Connor, because this concept may blow your mind. Women, nowadays, work. This is a Bumble campaign voiced by our producer, and I think it's a campaign that encapsulates Bumble's identity as a company.
So what happened was, in June 2016, Bumble posted screenshots of a conversation between two actual users. One was named Connor. Connor matched with a woman on Bumble. She asked him what he did for work, and he freaked out. Huh? Is that always your first question? This is our producer reading Connor's texts here. So anyway, she'd only asked him about work because they were already talking about her day at work.
It was not out of left field. And yet, Conner continued to spiral. I don't have time for entitled gold-digging whores. I don't fall victim nor prescribe to this neoliberal Beyonce feminist cancer which plagues society. Just a coincidence worth mentioning, Justin Mateen also allegedly called Wolf Heard a gold digger back at Tinder.
Bumble blocked Connor from the app, and it wrote Connor an open letter, which came with its own hashtag. Later, Connor. You heard part of that letter a second ago. It goes, "'Take a seat, because this concept may blow your mind. Women nowadays work. It's happened gradually, we know, but the majority of women from our generation have jobs.'"
While you may view this as a neoliberal Beyonce feminist cancer, blah, blah, blah. It goes on. It's like literally an AI wrote it, like a feminist AI. I just want to get your take on this. What do you think of these? Oh my God. I mean, they're brilliant marketing. Yeah, they're like everything I hate about the internet. And I can also understand why they did it.
To me, there is something hollow and pretty bullshitty in feminism as brand identity. Especially since girl boss brands like Glossier, Thinx, and The Wing, brands built on feminism and so-called equality, have since been accused by former employees of racism, misconduct, and inequity.
The performance of feminism does not guarantee a company is run by those values. It feels performative. All of these things, they might feel empowering in the moment, but they don't fundamentally change how men see women. If anything, it probably makes it worse. As Wolfherd said herself, men like Conard don't take rejection well.
But I want to take a second to challenge my own skepticism towards Bumble here. As ridiculous as this campaign seemed to me, it was also an example of pretty radical content moderation. In 2016, other social network giants like Facebook and Twitter were paralyzed when it came to moderating harassment. Instead, they were all delivering little odes to free speech. I mean, if Conor had tweeted his rant, chances are no one would have stopped him.
Yet here was Bumble holding a high bar for its users. Connor was aggressive, but in the kind of way women are more likely to understand as dangerous, in a way that often goes unchecked in online spaces. But Bumble checked him. So this wasn't just a marketing campaign. It was the enforcement of a policy that maybe wouldn't have been made in a room full of men.
Maybe it was the branding or the app design or the fact that there was finally an alternative to Tinder, but something unlocked impressive growth for Bumble. In 2016, just two years after the app launched, it reported it had 11.5 million users, which made it the second most popular dating app in the U.S.,
Though Tinder was still much bigger, Bumble users reported spending an average of 100 minutes on the app each day. That was higher engagement than Tinder reported for its second year. Reports of Match Group trying to buy Bumble wouldn't come out until the summer of 2017. But you can imagine that Match executives were already taking notice of the buzz. Bumble's growth? It suggested that something actually felt different about the so-called feminist dating app.
that it might actually be getting somewhere in crafting a less sexist and more empowering space for women to date. I tried Bumble out because I think I'm forward. I'm a little more direct. I thought it would be nice to like get to be the person who reaches out. Sarah Pico Spicer is 30, living and dating in Chicago, in part on Bumble. And I thought there was like an interesting mix in my experience of men who are,
were like excited or drawn to women who might be a little more assertive and that felt nice. But Pico Spicer also noticed another kind of straight man on Bumble who wasn't necessarily drawn to the app in the name of feminism. I also found that Bumble was home to like a lot of men that I would describe as like not willing to put in the effort to do much of anything. And that was frustrating.
I liked it because I no longer had to initiate conversation. — Edison Wilkinson, a middle school teacher based in D.C., used Bumble in 2018 and had two relationships with people he met on the app. He's also a delight and does not strike me as the kind of lazy dater Pico Spicer was frustrated by.
But he did say that as a straight dude, Bumble felt like an immediate relief. Woohoo! That's a load off of me. I got tired of trying to figure out, like, clever things to start a conversation with. The labor of dating whisked right off his plate. This is one of the most common things you hear talking to straight men about Bumble. Even a reporter for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson, mentioned this to Whitney Wolfe Hurd in a 2016 interview.
I'm more than happy to make the first move typically, but you have to send all of these incredibly clever first messages with perfect grammar over and over every single week. And it's lovely to be able to sit back and say, once the match is made and there's enough interest there. Well, you know what's really great about that as well? You feel relieved and the women feel empowered and confident and they also get to drive the conversation.
I'd call it ironic that Bumble, the feminist dating app, shifts the work of dating onto women. I lose the thread on what's supposed to be empowering about women repeatedly initiating. If men are so relieved to give that up, what's so great about it? Wolfherd would say that one benefit of women messaging first is that it mitigates harassment. You heard her mention this earlier.
men can react aggressively to rejection, especially when they initiate. So the idea is if women control the first message, women set the tone for the conversation. Though that can't always work. Think of Conor. And speaking of Conor, safety is a big part of the Bumble brand. It called him out. And it does other things like it has a policy team pushing for state laws that would ban cyber flashing. You know, unsolicited dick pics.
And we did hear from women on Bumble. They had this feeling that it was less creepy than specifically Tinder. I think that there is the veneer of like, oh, the person I'm going to meet on Bumble might be like less sexist or something because they like are comfortable with this. Bumble's feminist branding may act as a sort of self-selection. Men at least have to be comfortable with the idea that sexism exists.
But for Samira Mukhopadhyay, that still didn't translate into a good dating experience. Yeah, I hated it. Like, it completely did not work for me. Like, I remember the first time I joined it, I got a bunch of matches and a friend of mine, I was like going through this phase where I was just like, I hate online dating as one does.
And I was just like, just try this out for me. And I remember she messaged 17 different people and not one of them responded. And I was like, oh my God, this is the worst feeling in the world. This wasn't her experience on other apps. So something was different about Bumble. Mukhopaday had a theory. It had to do with that Girlboss brand.
She felt that, unintentionally, Bumble's marketing, plus Wolfherd as the face of the app, might have set Bumble up to reward a certain kind of woman. The Bumble user centering this thin, white subject as the expected user on Bumble doesn't give a lot of space for a fat woman of color to successfully use a platform like that.
There is a photo of the Bumble staff that ran in the New York Times in 2017. It was part of a flattering profile of the company, headlined, "With her dating app, women are in control." The photo is of Whitney Wolf-Herd sitting on a couch with six other women. They're looking studiously at their phones, wearing Bumble merch. The wall behind them is honey yellow. Most are blonde and all present as white.
Bumble is exactly like I think it's Whitney if I met her. You know what I mean? Like it's like it's like Whitney in an app form, like girl boss, like white women, all of that encapsulated in an app. Jerry Lim is a comedian. They co-host the podcast Politically Asian and have strong feelings about Bumble. Lim used the app briefly to date and like Mukhopadhyay, they noticed a particular kind of user tended to thrive there.
I don't know if an app can really help this, but I don't really love the demographic that skews towards using Bumble. It's a lot of girl boss types is what I call it. People who are really focused on their careers. I'm like, you know, that's cool if that's your thing. It's not really what I'm looking for. I'm looking for queer, trans, people of color, community and friends.
We shared Lim and Mukhopadhyay's experiences with Bumble. A spokesperson responded that the companies made a, quote, meaningful effort to be more inclusive. They cited an example, Bumble's ban on fetishization. So what that means is, if you get a message that feels gross, maybe an opener like, my last girlfriend was Asian as well, you can report that to Bumble. The company counts it as sexual harassment.
A user may be warned or banned from the platform altogether. But Jerry Lim brought up another point about their experience on Bumble. They didn't feel like queer users were reflected in the design of the app. After all, the official tagline was, women make the first move. Bumble kind of admitted, that's true. Quote, when the app was designed back in 2014, it was being built on our founders' lived experience.
The focus was on changing the power dynamics in dating relationships between men and women. But the company says it's making its app more inclusive. It partnered with GLAAD to expand its gender identity options.
But despite Bumble's efforts, Sumita Mukhopadhyay told us she still has a better rate of success on Tinder. Tinder is just bigger, you know, there's just like a bigger pool to kind of match with. And because of that, like I do think like when you think about people that are dating on the margins of this kind of like white hetero normative idea of what dating looks like.
An app that has more people on it, you're going to have more success on because there's more likely to be people on there that have a different sense of what they find attractive. Mukhopadhyay says Tinder doesn't seem to hold its users to a standard of behavior like Bumble does, but the sheer volume of people on Tinder is worth the tradeoff. We're going to take a quick break.
When we come back, a story that wrenched Bumble's values into question. A story uncovered by Angel Au-Young. It didn't take very long for former board members and former investors to be like, what story are you actually writing? Are you writing another puff piece or are you going to write the real story of what's happening with Baidu and Bumble? ♪
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March, 2018. If you got the New York Times in print, you'd cozy in, crinkle it open, and maybe land on a page that read, Bumble swipes left on Match Group slash Tinder allegations. This was not an article, but a full-page ad Bumble ran after Match's lawsuit against the company. The lawsuit that claimed Bumble stole the swipe from Tinder.
The ad was an open letter, a favorite genre for Bumble, apparently. It went, quote,
But this letter was also a sharp marketing move. The girl boss voice wielded with expertise. This ad spun the same narrative Wolf Heard would imply on CNBC.
Bumble was the feminist David and Match Group was a Goliath of the patriarchy. Bumble's letter proclaimed, be kind or leave. That's be with two E's. Match wouldn't back down. In fact, it would be a couple of years before the two companies would settle the suit. A couple of years and one scandal. Things changed.
quickly started becoming clear to me that there was a really big mismatch between the cultures of Badu and Bumble, and that this was a big problem that Bumble had to address. In 2019, Angel Aoyang planned to report a simple story for Forbes about Andrei Andreev, Russian billionaire and co-founder of Bumble.
He was going to start a $100 million fund to discover the next big social network. So that's what Aoyang first approached employees to chat about. But they had something else to share. It was from those conversations that I realized that for a long time, Andre has been running a company in London that was very sexist and misogynist to his female employees.
He had made racist comments before in meetings. In one of the marketing campaigns, there was a person that looked like they were of Latinx origin. And Andrei had said something to the tune of, having brown people in our marketing campaigns is going to cheapen the brand. Jessica Powell was Badoo's chief marketing officer. She told Aoyang that women who raised concerns about the environment were ignored. And if you disagreed with Andreev, you were called a bitch in Russian.
Powell went on to write a satirical novel about misogyny and tech called The Big Disruption. You can imagine the inspiration Badu might have given her. At one point, they named software updates after porn stars, and they put an end to that. I think it was 2019, but that is an example of the culture of the engineering team in London. This was Badu's software, to be clear. But it was the same office where Bumble's engineering team worked.
And when this reporting came out, Andreev was still the majority owner of the feminist dating app. Aoyang reported that Andreev seemed to be trying to change his company culture. He sent a letter to his employees saying discrimination was not tolerated. Badu set up more diversity training and upped maternity leave. But still, it was clear the toxic culture had been left to rot for a while. It was an open secret at Badu. I mean, there were reviews on Glassdoor.
even before this story came out. So it's hard for me to believe that Whitney had no clue about this behavior that was happening across the pond in the London office. I mean, there's so many parts of this story that I don't want to say the word hypocritical, but it was almost like once you looked under the hood, there were just a lot of things that just didn't align.
And Wolf Hurd had made Bumble a reputation for sticking up to bullies. I think Whitney...
It was a hard balancing act, right? Whitney's official comment on everything is that she did not witness any bad behaviors. She did not witness any of the toxic behaviors that a lot of the other women in the London office experienced. And I have no doubt that Andre was very kind to her, but he was kind to her because she was very important to his business. And she understood the role that he had to play in her life as well.
Andreev gave Wolf-Herd autonomy as a founder. His engineering and financial support gave her the space to build Bumble the way she wanted to build it, as a feminist app. I believe that what Andreev gave to Whitney was a fair amount of control. Andreev still owned a majority stake in Bumble. That's a fact. And whatever success Bumble had, Andreev would get a huge slice of it. But I think what Andreev
gave Whitney that was invaluable was the fact that he was giving Whitney the ability to operate at an arm's length. I think it says a lot about how difficult it can be to be a female founder in the tech space. When Whitney was trying to get Bumble off the ground, the options were very limited for female founders.
And now, Wolf Hurd was 30. And for the second time in her career, a business she built would be marked by a man's bad behavior. TechCrunch posts a story about the Forbes story. And in the TechCrunch piece, there is a lengthy statement from Whitney Wolf Hurd.
It was a very carefully crafted statement. She didn't want to disregard the perspectives and the feelings of the women that have been interviewed for the story. And she very much acknowledged their position and their stories. But at the same time, she couldn't completely abandon this man that had supported her and her company for years.
In her statement, Wolfhard said her experiences with Andreev had been positive. She said, quote, As a woman who has been through dark times, please know that I am deeply sorry for anything that could have taken place that made anyone feel uncomfortable before my time building Bumble.
Four months later, a rescue came. Of sorts. It was announced that Blackstone, the huge private equity firm, was going to buy out Andre Andreev's stake in all of the online dating apps, including Badoo and Bumble, in a transaction that valued the entire holding at $3 billion. And where does that put Whitney? Whitney was named the CEO of the entire operation as a result of the transaction.
Entire operation as in Bumble and Badu. So Whitney won in this situation, right? I'm sure that Whitney...
And Andre had a true friendship. And I wouldn't be surprised if Whitney had some kind of sadness about the fact that her friend, her collaborator was now gone. But at the end of the day, she became the head of one of the biggest online dating app conglomerates in the world.
In June 2020, a few months after Blackstone bought Andreev out, Bumble and Match Group settled their lawsuit. The amount was not disclosed. In hindsight, all of it, from Andreev's mismanagement and the lawsuit from Match, it was barely a blip for Bumble.
Bumble's public debut is expected in just a moment. Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolf-Herd joins us now. Whitney, congratulations. At 31 years old, you're the youngest woman to take a company public in an IPO. CNBC, February 2021. Whitney Wolf-Herd watched her company go public from her office in Austin. She was asked briefly about Andreev and Badu.
We're very grateful to, you know, the technology and the team that came before us. But we are looking forward and we're really excited about building an inclusive, not only user-based and technology platform, but a culture where all of our team members can thrive. Moments later, Wolfherd opened the market via livestream in a crisp yellow suit, her baby on her hip.
Over the next few hours, Bumble blew expectations out of the water. By the end of the day, Wolf Heard was the youngest self-made billionaire in the world. One of the analysts we spoke to as we reported this episode called Bumble and Match the duopoly power in dating. That feels fitting. After all, Bumble is a giant in its own right.
It is now essentially the owner of Badoo, the company that first helped fund it. But Bumble hasn't necessarily changed online dating. In all that early press around the company, there was a sense that the feminist dating app would be a real alternative to the sometimes creepy slog of dating on an app like Tinder. But instead of leaving Tinder behind, Bumble is just the other app you're likely to join at the same time.
The last great tectonic shift in the culture of online dating is still, ironically, the very thing that links Bumble and Wolf heard to the past. Tinder's swipe. But what would you find if you tried to leave the mainstream dating apps? What are the possibilities beyond Tinder, Bumble, Hinge? Next week on Land of the Giants, niche apps, the businesses working around the giants trying to offer something new.
Land of the Giants Dating Games is a production of The Cut at New York Magazine, The Verge, and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Megan Cunane produced this episode. Oluwakemi Alidesuyi is the show's producer. Cynthia Betubiza is our production assistant. Charlotte Silver fact-checked this episode. Jolie Myers is our editor. Randall
Brandon McFarlane composed the show's theme and engineered this episode. Nicole Hill is our showrunner. Additional support from Art Chung. Jake Kasternakis is deputy editor of The Verge. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. I'm Sangeeta Sinkerts. And I am Lakshmi Rangarajan. If you liked this episode, please share it and follow the show by clicking the plus sign in your podcast app.