The Story Behind Whitney Wolfe Herd Becoming A Billionaire At 31

Whitney Wolfe-Herd, founder and CEO of Bumble, has become a billionaire at just 31-years-old after the dating app was publicly listed on the Nasdaq stock market this week. Shares in 'bmbl' debuted at $43 apiece, but jumped to $76 when trading opened yesterday instantly making the firm worth more than $13bn (£9.4bn).

Wolfe-Herd is not only one of very few female billionaires, but is now the youngest woman to take a company public in the US - which she did all while holding her one-year-old son, Bobby, on her hip as she rang the opening bell for the American stock exchange from her firms headquarters.

‘This is what leadership looks like,’ Bumble stated on Instagram posting a picture of Wolfe-Herd under a banner of balloons. ‘This is only possible thanks to the more than 1.7 billion first moves made by brave women on our app and the pioneering women who paved the way for us in the business world,’ Wolf-Herd added on Twitter. ‘To everyone who made today possible: Thank you.’

Gracious in her success, no one would’ve blamed Wolfe-Herd for taking all the credit herself – after all, her rise the top has been littered with sexism. While she clearly came from a privileged background - raised in Salt Lake City, Utah while spending sabbaticals in Paris as a teen before attending Southern Methodist University – she hit obstacles many women are familiar with when she entered the tech world.

At just 22, Wolfe Herd became involved with a company called Hatch Labs where she met Sean Rad and Chris Gulczynski who later became the development team for Tinder. She’s reported to have come up with the name and logo – inspired by the real-life tinder, which is an easily combustible material to start a fire – and has been credited with fuelling its popularity among college-age people. However, she left Tinder under ominous circumstances in 2014, soon after filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company.

While she’s legally unable to talk about what she went through at Tinder, the lawsuit was settled for over $1million without an admission of wrongdoing. Sean Rad stepped down as Tinder CEO shortly after. Wolfe-Herd opened up about the experience in 2015 in an interview with Business Insider, saying 'I don’t wish for anyone to go through that, especially right as you’re turning 25.'

‘Whitney’s lawsuit against Tinder has been resolved (without admission of wrongdoing),’ John Mullan, a partner at Rudy, Exelrod, Zieff & Lowe, LLP, the firm representing Wolfe, said in an email to BuzzFeed in September 2014. ‘She is proud of her role as a cofounder of Tinder and of the role she played in the app’s success. She is now pleased to be able to focus her energy, talents, and ideas on exciting new opportunities.’

Those new ideas were certainly fruitful, as Wolfe-Herd launched Bumble just two months later. A female-focused app dedicated to women making the first move, Bumble had more than 15million conversations and 8million matches under its belt within the first year. As of 2020, it has over 100million subscribers worldwide.

In the meantime, Wolfe-Herd married Texan oil heir and restauranteur Michael Herd in 2017. After announcing the birth of their first child in 2019, she made Bumble a stellar example of parental rights, declaring bonuses, paid leave and flexible start times for new parents.

Workers already received four months of paid leave and $1,000 bonuses to offset childcare costs while at work, with flexible start times and reimbursement for using breast-milk delivery services. After Wolfe-Herd’s announcement though, she stated she wanted to do more.

‘Now that I myself am pregnant, I understand, just from the basic demands of needing to go to a doctor’s appointment on a certain week, that I can’t imagine the stress that someone might feel who can’t make their own hours,’ Herd told Fast Company in 2019. ‘So many CEOs think about parenting within the context of maternity-paternity leave, but that’s kind of where it stops. But there are nine months of pre-paternity or pre-maternity. Then there’s everything that comes after. So I’m really starting to think about the white space on the beforehand and after-hand of that actual leave. And making sure that once a parent does come back to work, how do we do that in a flexible way?’

Her commitment to a healthy work environment is telling, having seemingly dealt with so much toxicity before founding Bumble. And clearly, that dedication to putting women first has proven a fruitful path to success for her, with Bumble now a billion pound company, her estimated net worth has jumped to $1.6billion.

'Bumble is the outcome of a fiercely dedicated team who’ve worked tremendously hard to show that women can, should, and will make the first move,' Wolfe-Herd wrote on Instagram today. 'When relationships are better for women, they’re better for everyone. To all the first movers, whether on our platforms, in business, or in life: you’re what today is about. Never take no for an answer, believe in yourselves, and turn your pain into purpose.'

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