Dating app company Bumble BMBL,
saw its rise on Wednesday, boosting its stake by 64% in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday before reaching a further 7% in trading.
Here are 5 things to know about Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, who created the dating app for women in 2014:
She is a former manager of Tinder
In 2012, Wolfe Herd started working for the Match Group MTCH,
dating app Tinder, known for its left and right swipes. She says she came up with the name “Tinder”.
She was vice president of marketing at Tinder during a period of great user growth for the platform among young people.
Wolfe Herd left the company in 2014 and later filed a case against Tinder for sexual harassment – she reportedly received more than $ 1 million plus stock.
Bumble IPO made her a billionaire on paper
Bumble’s market reception made Wolfe Herd’s 21.5 million shares worth more than $ 1 billion.
According to Bloomberg, less than 5% of the 500 richest people in the world are women.
Wolfe Herd was spotted with her baby in a video showing Bumble’s debut on the Nasdaq.
She became the youngest female CEO to announce a company
According to Business Insider, at 31, Wolfe Herd is the youngest female CEO ever to lead a business to a stock market.
In the past year, 560 companies have been announced, and Bumble is only third among them with a female founder and eighth with a female CEO. In addition, more than 70% of Bumble’s board members are according to the SEC filing.
“Hopefully this will not be a rare headline,” Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that Bumble is a female venture. “Hopefully this will be the norm. This is the right thing to do, it’s a priority for us, and it should be a priority for everyone. ”
She invested in another dating app called Chappy
In 2016, Bumble and Wolfe Herd invested in a dating app called Chappy. The app is designed for gay men in the UK
In 2020, the app was shut down and a merger with Bumble was announced.
She advocated legislation that made digital sexual harassment a crime
Wolfe Herd, who studies at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and is headquartered in Austin, was a driving force behind the legislation in Texas, which was signed in 2019 by the government, Greg Abbott.
The law made such an offense a Class C offense punishable by a fine of up to $ 500. Wolfe Herd testified before the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee on the subject.
“It’s time we reflected our laws in such a way that we lead double lives, in the physical and the digital,” Wolfe Herd said. ‘You’re currently looking at the government, it’s just protecting the physical world. But our youth spend much more time in the digital world than on the physical. “