Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd steps down

Bumble Inc.’s Whitney Wolfe Herd is stepping down as chief executive of the company known for the female-focused dating app she founded nearly a decade ago.

She will be succeeded by Lidiane Jones, who became the chief executive of Slack Technologies in January. Jones starts as CEO of Bumble on Jan. 2. Wolfe Herd will remain at the company as executive chair.

The leadership change comes at a challenging time for the dating-app industry. Last week, Match Group, the dating app behemoth that owns platforms like Match.com, OKCupid, Hinge and Tinder—which Wolfe Herd co-founded before Bumble—saw its stock fall after it reported its earnings for the third quarter. The company projected lower-than-expected revenue for the final quarter of the year and reported losing paying customers at Tinder, the crown jewel in its portfolio. 

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Bumble, which went public in February 2021, saw its stock trading at more than $70 per share on opening day. It has since fallen below $14. Bumble reports its third-quarter earnings on Tuesday.

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"I want to be the person who is able to look around the corner and innovate for the future of Bumble Inc., and to take us 10 years ahead," Wolfe Herd, 34, said in an interview. 

In 2014, at 24, Wolfe Herd launched the dating app Bumble on the idea that having women initiate conversations with dating prospects would help weed out unwanted messages and put them in control of their romantic lives. 

Bumble Inc. comprises a handful of dating and relationship apps including Bumble, Bumble for Friends, Badoo, Fruitz (for Gen Z) and Official, a newly acquired app that aims to help couples strengthen their relationships. Wolfe Herd said she and the board had been thinking about a succession plan informally for years, and that a formal search effort had yet to turn up the right candidate. Then she came across a CNBC interview from May featuring Slack’s Jones. She asked a mutual contact to make an introduction. The board then brought her into its executive-search process.

Jones, 44, is a tech-industry veteran who worked for Microsoft for more than a decade. She later became an executive at Salesforce, which acquired Slack in 2021. Earlier this year, she succeeded another founder-CEO, Slack’s Stewart Butterfield, in the top job at the workplace-communications company. Jones said she would be based in Cambridge, Mass. Bumble’s headquarters is in Austin, Texas.  

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A native of Brazil, Jones said she was excited about how artificial intelligence could be used to bolster Bumble’s mission of facilitating positive connections. "We really want to embark big on AI," she said. "AI and generative AI can play such a big role in accelerating people finding the right person, finding the right friends and the right community. There’s more that we think we can do." 

Under Wolfe Herd, Bumble became known for adding features and policies geared toward female users, including banning body shaming and detecting and blurring unsolicited lewd photos in private messages. It also championed legislation to outlaw sending such photos.

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In 2019, Blackstone took a majority stake in Bumble’s parent company, which was called MagicLab at the time. Blackstone is the largest institutional shareholder in Bumble Inc. Wolfe Herd remains the company’s single largest individual shareholder.

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