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New York Times
10-05-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Can Whitney Wolfe Herd Make Us Love Dating Apps Again?
It feels like a lifetime ago, but when Whitney Wolfe Herd co-founded her first company, the dating app Tinder, the overwhelming feeling about apps and screens and tech in general was optimism. This was 2012, Wolfe Herd was just out of college, and she, too, was optimistic — about being a woman in tech, about dating apps, about technology's ability to solve big problems. In the decade-plus since, Wolfe Herd and the culture have learned some lessons. Famously, Tinder gamified the search for love, introducing that addictive swipe feature to its target audience: millennials. It was a huge hit, but Wolfe Herd's time at the company was brief. In 2014, she left Tinder and sued, claiming that she experienced sexual harassment and discrimination from one of her co-founders, with whom she also had a relationship. The company denied responsibility, and the case was settled. Soon after that, at 25, she started the dating app Bumble, which billed itself as a safe space for women to find love. (The big innovation on Bumble: Women made the first move.) Wolfe Herd became a darling of the so-called 'girl-boss era' — making the Time 100, Forbes's 30 Under 30, all those women in tech lists — and got very rich in the process, becoming the youngest woman to take a company public and, briefly, a billionaire. But post-pandemic, with Gen-Z souring on dating apps and wanting IRL connection, Bumble's shares fell sharply, and last year Wolfe Herd decided to step down as chief executive. It felt like the end of an era and probably was one, except that the departure didn't last. After a little more than a year away, she is back at the company she founded with a plan to turn its fortunes around: It involves Silicon Valley's latest transformative technology, A.I., and some perspective on what technology can and can't do for us. It also involves a broader vision for the app beyond dating: Wolfe Herd told me that she would like Bumble to eventually help users find love by learning to love themselves via self-reflective quizzes the company is developing and also to point members to local social gatherings so they can get off the app and into the world. You can decide if all this leaves you feeling optimistic about Bumble, about female leaders in tech, about human connection, or not. Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App You've been in tech since your early 20s. What was it like to have time away? It was the first time I was faced with 'Who am I without one of these huge consumer brands attached to me?' and that's a very strange place to be. I was 22 when we were starting Tinder, and I became the Tinder girl. Then I became the Tinder lawsuit girl and then I became the Bumble girl. This became an extension of my identity. I am the type of founder-C.E.O. who is in every detail. I'm emailing members who are having bad experiences personally. And so to relinquish that level of involvement took maturity I didn't know I possessed and a release of control that I didn't know I was capable of. So it was very destabilizing at first when I stepped away because I was like, Who am I without all of this? And when I left Bumble, it was tough, because it didn't play out the way I'd hoped in terms of the narrative. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Telegraph
27-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
Reeves comes off worse in encounter with reality
In retrospect, it was probably an act of cruelty to let Rachel Reeves into the TV studios on Thursday morning. For all her desperate desire to project a #GirlBoss persona, even on a good day, the Chancellor of the Exchequer gives off the general sense of someone who would find herself logistically challenged by a Muller Fruit Corner. Having been so happy in the cloud cuckoo land of her spring statement, where all was fine and dandy in the UK economy, it would have been kinder to leave her there. Instead, Labour HQ sent her out on the media round. By the end, you almost felt sorry for her. All that hubristic crowing at the last Budget about being the first-ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer (while crippling entire industries at the flick of a pen). Now she stood in the sad reality of her position; broke, wet and disliked. Though Reeves was late for her interview with GB News, her appearance is perhaps a sign that knickers are becoming even more twisted in No 10 about the upcoming Runcorn and Helsby by-election. Like other government ministers, Playmobil Chancellor has sometimes dodged interviews with the channel. So for her first foray into the lions' den, Labour HQ had plonked her in front of a building site. Behind her, throughout the interview, a truck could be heard, reversing very slowly. The metaphor gods were feeling especially uncharitable today. Downing the pound and passing the buck 'Why do you blame everyone else but refuse to take responsibility yourself?' asked one of the GB News hosts. The Chancellor ignored this question completely and instead answered the one she'd wanted to hear, which was about how awful Liz Truss was. Her ride on Sky News proved a little easier. At one point she was allowed to launch into an extended monologue on the importance of her ever-changing rules to the nation's fiscal strength. She might as well have said that she was relying on a programme of mass leprechaun capture, torture and gold pot discovery to turbocharge economic growth. Perhaps the most agonising of the Chancellor's televised clashes with the hard forces of reality occurred on ITV's Good Morning Britain, where Richard Madeley had to lay down the absolute basic rules not just of politics but of existence to Reeves. He explained that accepting free concert tickets worth thousands of pounds looks bad when you're cutting welfare spending at the same time. The Chancellor blinked a lot before launching into her all too familiar brand of verbal flailing. 'I'm not able like I was in the past just to buy tickets for a concert,' she spluttered. Now on the grounds of pure competence, this felt believable enough. Some of those booking websites are very complicated. Yet as an excuse, it doesn't really wash. Co-host Kate Garraway stuck the knife in next; of course, she said, Reeves needed security, of course she was entitled to a private life, she was even allowed to have fun. At this point, Reeves stared back blankly, not even a twitch of recognition on her face as to what that might be happening. Surely, however, continued Garraway, this didn't mean you had to take freebies? Reeves promised not to take any free tickets again; unless, of course, it was related to her job. So, the campaign starts here, let's crowdfund a ticket for the Chancellor's travel back to the real world.
