The latest buzz at Austin-based dating app Bumble: Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd is stepping down from the chief executive role she’s held since the company’s 2014 launch.
Slack CEO Lidiane Jones, who became the messaging platform’s CEO earlier this year, will succeed Wolfe Herd as Bumble’s CEO in January, the Wall Street Journal reported. Jones will leave her position at Slack to take on the new role.
Bumble — the parent company of relationship-focused apps Bumble, Badoo, Fruitz, and Official — went public in 2021 with a $2.2 billion IPO, which made Wolfe Herd the youngest woman to take a company public at age 31. Now 34, the serial entrepreneur will transition to an executive chair role at the company.
Wolfe Herd, who landed on Inc.‘s Female Founders list in 2019, founded Bumble as a “feminist dating app” after leaving Tinder, the dating app she previously co-founded, and receiving more than $1 million as a part of a settlement for a sexual harassment lawsuit she filed against the company. Bumble’s point of differentiation: Only women could initiate messages, as an attempt to limit harassment on the platform. Since its launch, Bumble has expanded its offerings to include networking services, Bumble BFF, and Bumble Bizz.
Bumble landed on Inc.‘s Best-Led companies list in 2021 and made headlines that year for its generous paid leave policies, which include two weeks of companywide time off.
In the years ahead, analysts from Morgan Stanley anticipate volatility in the dating-app industry as user growth slows, leading companies to look for increased monetization opportunities, according to an April 2023 report. And not all brands have been successful in convincing consumers to pay. Match Group, which owns the dating apps Tinder, Hinge, Match, and OkCupid, among others, posted its third-quarter earnings last week, showing a 5 percent decrease in paid subscribers across its brands and a 6 percent decrease in paid subscribers of Tinder, the company’s largest brand. Bumble will announce its third-quarter earnings on November 7 but showed a record 28 percent increase in paying users in its second-quarter earnings.
Jones, who spent more than a decade at Microsoft and more recently rose in the ranks at Salesforce before stepping into Slack’s chief executive position, is expected to bring a greater tech focus to the app, telling the WSJ that the company plans to “embark big on A.I.,” and that she believes that generative A.I. can play “such a big role in accelerating people finding the right person, finding the right friends and the right community.”
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