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hitney Wolfe was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on July 5th 1989. Her parents are of mixed religion; her mother is a Catholic, her father Jewish. She attended Southern Methodist University in New Mexico, where she majored in International Studies.

She has considered herself a feminist from an early age, telling e Times that she disliked how Utah’s dating culture was dominated by men — women were expected to wait for them to make the rst move.

Early Business

She started life in commerce at a fairly early age. At the age of 20, she started a business selling bamboo tote bags to bene t areas a ected by the 2010 Deepwater BP oil spill which had ravaged the ecology in the Gulf of Mexico and its adjacent shorelines.

Wolfe Herd also partnered with celebrity stylist Patrick Aufdenkamp to launch the non-pro t organisation called the “Help Us Project”. ese bags received national press after in uential celebrities were photographed with them. Soon after, she introduced a second business with Aufdenkamp called Tender Heart, a clothing line dedicated to raising awareness around human tra cking and fair trade. After graduating, Wolfe Herd traveled to Southeast Asia where she worked with orphanages.

A Tech Career Starts

In 2012, aged 22, Wolfe - as she still was then – joined the startup Cardify in West Hollywood, California, a project led by Sean Rad. e project was later abandoned, but she co-founded, along with Rad and Justin Mateen, the development team for the dating app Tinder (previously known as MatchBox) with Rad and Chris Gulczynski.

Wolfe became vice president of marketing for Tinder.

e name of the app was her idea, inspired by the notion of tinder, when lit, sparks into a ame – the appropriate allegory for a new relationship.

However, despite the company’s growth and success, Wolfe resigned from Tinder in April 2014 due to growing tensions with other company executives. In short, sexual harassment. She had had an on-o relationship with Justin Mateen, the president of marketing at Tinder – e ectively, her boss.

On June 30th 2014, she led a lawsuit alleged that Rad and Mateen had engaged in discrimination, sexual harassment, and retaliation against her, while Tinder’s corporate supervisor, Sam Yagan, did nothing.

e abuse - verbal and emotional – she received from Mateen after the relationship went sour, combined with lack of support made her feel she had no place in the company. She reportedly settled for over $1m as well as stock later that year.

Her run-ins with the Match Group, parent company of Tinder, had not nished yet.

Life After Tinder

Having received online hate, Wolfe started putting together her ideas for a female-only social network centered around compliments which was to be called Merci. Even though she didn’t want to go back to the dating industry initially, Andrey Andreev, founder of Badoo, contacted her about creating a dating platform and partnered with her.

In late 2014, Wolfe moved to Austin, Texas, and founded Bumble, a female-focused, female-friendly dating app. She had planned to name the app Moxie, but this name was already taken.

It was Andreev who suggested she get back into the dating space, and the pair eventually formed a partnership in which Andreev would receive 79% ownership in the company following an initial investment of $10 million along with additional investments and Wolfe Herd would serve as founder, CEO and 20% owner.

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March 2019:

• Named in Forbes ‘30 Under 30’ list... 2018

• ...And again the following year

• Testified before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence committee about the prevalence of unsolicited explicit photos sent to female users on dating applications.

November 2019

• Made CEO of MagicLabs, later to rename itself as Bumble (a more commonly recognised brand name)

As part of the agreement, the new company would also utilise Badoo’s infrastructure and Andreev’s consulting. After the partnership was established, the pair recruited fellow Tinder departees Chris Gulczynski and Sarah Mick to design the interface and help launch Bumble. It was launched in December 2014.

Along the way, Bumble had to settle with Tinder following accusations of plagiarism in the user interface experience. It has also had to settle in regard to its payment and subscriptions policies. As with most corporate stories, it’s only ever the lawyers who win.

In November 2019, Bumble’s parent company MagicLab was sold to the private equity rm e Blackstone Group, with co-founder Andreev relinquishing his entire stake in both Bumble and Badoo. Wolfe Herd became CEO of the newly acquired MagicLab (later renamed Bumble, in a nomenclature swap-around), valued at $3 billion, and received an ownership stake of approximately 19% of the company.

2021