For 14 months, Whitney Wolfe Herd was not Bumble’s CEO. The founder launched the dating app a decade ago, right after she turned 25, and although she flashily brought in new CEO Lidiane Jones in 2023 to herald the public company’s next era, she now says she was essentially burnt-out by then. “I had been going for about 10 years straight,” she says. “I’d been in this long-term relationship with Bumble, and it was time for a break.”
Wolfe Herd instead served as the company’s board chair while it encountered a challenging market: Its share price nose-dived—down more than 90% from its 2021 IPO high—Gen Z broke up with dating apps, and for the users who weren’t lucky enough to find love, its app gained a reputation as, essentially, hellish. While Jones, a Microsoft alum and the former CEO of Slack under Salesforce, oversaw some core tech improvements, other changes during her tenure weren’t as well received. The ability for men to send the first message on the app, changing Bumble’s longtime “women make the first move” product feature, was in the works before Jones took over and received mixed reviews; there was also an ill-received ad campaign that some women felt shamed them for choosing celibacy.
