In 2012, a plucky, headstrong young entrepreneur crashes a startup mixer in Los Angeles, desperately trying to get their big idea off the ground. Naive and ruthlessly ambitious, they brave the skeptics, the losers, the people too good to talk to them and the people who don’t take them seriously. Eventually, inevitably, their genius – obvious, unsinkable, perhaps diabolical – collides with opportunity. Voilà! An origin story is born.
Swap out the date and the city, and this would describe a pivotal scene in any number of recent movies and TV shows that take cinematic interest in the self-mythology of entrepreneurs. The dramatic logic and iconography of the origin story, basically true but always highly glossed, is by now so recognizable it almost writes itself: initial rejection, dogged persistence, chance meeting, lightbulb moment, big break. We’ve seen it in a wave of brand backstory movies – Flamin’ Hot, Air, BlackBerry and Tetris to name a few – as well as the recent boomlet of shows depicting 2010s hustle culture. The twist with Swiped, Hulu’s new film on the founding of online dating titans Tinder and Bumble, is that this founder is a woman.
